Perfect Order. Just about everywhere, Kraar found, the killing had followed a typical pattern: government troops would try to “liberate” a rebel-held town in a deliberately provoking manner. The Bengali townspeople would wreak revenge on the non-Bengalis (in the process killing perhaps 20,000, or about 10% of the total dead), and then the army would pounce with everything it had. At Mymensingh, a town north of Dacca, that meant an air strike by Pakistani jets and a five hour shelling by two American-made M-34 tanks. Many of Mymensingh's Bengali sectors are in ruins, and about 90% of its pre-civil war population has fled or been killed. That is evidently the kind of record that pleases Tikka Khan, who likes to say: “We want perfect law and order."
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