Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  Yet Kennedy was also eager to maintain a tight alliance with Pakistan. He invited Ayub Khan to visit the United States twice during his 1,000 days in office. In July 1961, Khan was feted in New York with a ticker-tape parade on Fifth Avenue, and in Washington he embarked on a full state visit, including a state dinner at Mount Vernon, the only time in the history of the first president’s mansion that it had hosted a state dinner. His photo, taken with President Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, still hangs in the visitor center there. When Khan visited again a year later, in September 1962, JFK hosted him at the family home in Newport, Rhode Island, and at Kennedy’s farm in Middleburg, Virginia. The Kennedy team hailed Pakistan as a reliable ally against communism and a model for development in the third world. But it was India that most preoccupied JFK in his relations with South Asia. His appointment of Galbraith put a Kennedy man, an advocate of the New Frontier, at the center stage of U.S.-Indian relations. No president since has sent such a close friend and high-powered representative to New Delhi.

  President Kennedy never made a trip to India in his all-too-short presidency, but his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, did travel to India and Pakistan in March 1962. The charismatic and photogenic first lady was a very big hit with all, and she was met with an outpouring of affection that was unique in the travels of first ladies at the time. Massive crowds met her everywhere. Ayub Khan and the first lady discovered a mutual fondness for horses, and her Secret Service agent said that it was “love at first sight” when Ayub gave her a horse in Lahore.15 Nehru was so entranced that he kept a photo of Mrs. Kennedy in his private study for the rest of his life.16 Galbraith rightly saw the visit as a triumph for the Kennedy administration.

  The United States and India drew closer with the sending of Peace Corps volunteers to India, an increase in American economic assistance, and genuine dialogue between the top leaders. Nehru visited the White House in November 1961, accompanied by his daughter Indira. However, the visit, conceived as an opportunity for the leaders to get acquainted, did not go well; Nehru, at the age of seventy-one, was old and tired and seemed disengaged. No personal bond developed between JFK and Nehru.

  By far the most important development in the U.S.-India relationship was a result of the Chinese Communist invasion of India in October 1962. Like much of India’s border, the boundary between China and India had been drawn by the British to their advantage, and it was revised various times from the late 1800s into the 1920s. In the west, the boundary, initially known as the Johnson line, divided Kashmir from China; in the east, the McMahon line—agreed on by British India and Tibet but not by China in the Simla Accord in 1914—divided eastern India, including Assam, from China. When China invaded Tibet in October 1950, it therefore inherited a border that it did not regard as legitimate or fair. Negotiations between Beijing and New Delhi in the 1950s did not reconcile the two claims. China did open negotiations with Pakistan on their new common border in Kashmir, which ended with Pakistan ceding a large part of northern Kashmir to China and Islamabad and Beijing drawing an agreed border between the two countries. The Chinese encountered significant resistance from the Tibetan people to China’s occupation of their country, resistance that they blamed on India and the CIA. Both were in fact independently assisting the Tibetans.17

  Nehru had been sharply critical of the American policy of not recognizing the Chinese Communist government, and he championed its right to take China’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, which was still held by the Nationalist Chinese government, based in Taiwan. He argued that China and India were very much kindred spirits—two great Asian countries that were finally free of the Western imperialist powers that had long exploited them. So it was a crushing blow to Nehru and India when China launched a surprise invasion on October 20, 1962, to seize control of the territories that it claimed along its 3,225-kilometer border with India. The Indians were caught unprepared; their intelligence had grossly underestimated the strength of the Chinese, who had 125,000 well-trained mountain troops poised on the border. The Indian forces had no mountain training and were armed with World War I–vintage rifles.18 The much better led and equipped Chinese forces routed the Indian army, which retreated in some confusion from the Himalayas. The Chinese threat was most significant in the far eastern section of India, which is linked to the main land mass by only a narrow band of land north of what was then East Pakistan. After refusing to align itself for fifteen years with either the West or the communists in the cold war, India found itself the victim of a Chinese invasion that it could not halt with its own forces. Nehru was devastated by China’s betrayal. He reluctantly turned to the United States and United Kingdom, asking for immediate shipment of supplies for the Indian army and, in panic, for the deployment of American bombers to stop the Chinese advance. America quickly found itself arming both Pakistan and India, with no assurance that they would not use the arms against each other.

  It is clear from Galbraith’s diary that the Americans also were surprised by the Chinese invasion. With no embassy in China, the United States was blind. This crisis coincided with the most dangerous crisis in the entire cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred when the Soviets built bases in Cuba where nuclear ballistic missiles capable of reaching most of the United States were housed. At the time, the two superpowers were on the brink of nuclear war. Since the entire bureaucracy in Washington was consumed by the life-or-death duel over Cuba, Galbraith was given almost no instructions from the White House or the State Department during the key period in the Indo-Chinese crisis. As a result, he was very much the main decisionmaker on the American side, a role that he relished. He wrote: “Washington continues to be totally occupied with Cuba. For a week, I have had a considerable war on my hands without a single telegram, letter, telephone call, or other communications or guidance.”19 To add one more level of drama, the crisis also coincided with the move of the ambassador and his family into a new residence, Roosevelt House, where the staff could not find any dishes and Galbraith could not find a room suitable for small intimate discussions.20 Working closely with his British counterpart—a recurring approach to U.S. crisis management in South Asia over the decades—Galbraith fashioned a response that backed India and delivered much-needed military assistance to the Indians. Once a request for aid was formally transmitted, the first American shipments of arms and matériel arrived by air four days later. British support came as well.

  The intentions of the Chinese were impossible to decipher. After their initial victories, they paused for several weeks and then attacked again, with devastating results, driving the Indians back in the east of India. If they had pressed on in the most vulnerable sector, they could have cut off Assam and eastern India and linked up with East Pakistan. Even Calcutta was at risk. Nehru asked for more aid—a dozen squadrons of American fighters and two squadrons of bombers—to shift the balance. He was so desperate that he was asking for direct American military intervention, at least in the air. That would have meant a major war with China. There were some very anxious moments in New Delhi, Washington, and London until, with no warning, the Chinese announced a unilateral cease-fire on November 21, 1962. JFK never had to answer the request for air power. The war was over. India was humiliated, Nehru was devastated, but U.S.-Indian relations were at an all-time high. Approval ratings among Indians for America soared from 7 percent at the start of the war to 62 percent at the end.21

  Galbraith’s memoirs also make it clear that even as he faced the Chinese threat, he had to devote as much of his energy and skill to managing Indo-Pakistani relations. Pakistan saw an opportunity in India’s distress and sought to exploit it. Ayub Khan’s government suggested to the U.S. embassy in Karachi that Pakistani neutrality in the war could be ensured by Indian concessions in Kashmir, threatening, by implication, the opposite scenario if those concessions were not forthcoming. China tried to encourage Pakistan to attack India on its own by offering a nonaggression pact with Pakistan. Galbraith wrote that “my conc
ern was about equally divided between helping the Indians against the Chinese and keeping peace between the Indians and Pakistanis. The nightmare of a combined attack by Pakistan and China, with the possibility of defeat, collapse, and even anarchy in India was much on my mind.”22

  In short, at a defining early moment in U.S.-Indian relations, when China and India were military adversaries, the United States found itself trying to manage the Indo-Pakistani rivalry in order to avoid a second front in the war. Pakistan was threatening to stab India in the back while it was fighting Communist China. Pakistan, outraged that America was arming its rival, wanted Indian concessions on Kashmir in exchange for staying out of the conflict. Working with the British, Galbraith and his counterpart in Karachi secured support for India and Pakistan to renew their dialogue on Kashmir. Nehru reluctantly agreed, understanding the need for a quiet Pakistani front. As Galbraith describes it, Nehru was a much diminished prime minister. He had fought his whole life for Indian independence, and now he had been forced to rely on Washington and London for assistance. American C-130s were delivering vital military aid, and an American aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, was sailing in the Bay of Bengal and visiting Madras to show tangible support.

  Galbraith suggested to Kennedy in one of his private letters that the United States and the United Kingdom seize the opportunity to quietly move toward a Kashmir settlement. Galbraith opposed a territorial settlement; he envisioned a much more subtle deal that would transform the entire nature of South Asian politics, a fundamental rapprochement based on regional cooperation that made Kashmir largely irrelevant. In a letter to the president dated December 6, 1962, the ambassador wrote:

  It would be fatal to show hesitancy at this moment when the Indians are relying on us and when the fear of the Chinese is so great. Now that we have got the Kashmir issue out in the open—a significant achievement in itself—we must press it, but in such a manner as not to involve ourselves in the inbuilt antagonisms between the two countries. We must continue to make it clear to the Indians that it is their task, not ours and not Pakistan’s. In my view, incidentally, Kashmir is not soluble in territorial terms. But by holding up the example of the way in which France and Germany have moved to soften their antagonism by the Common Market and common instruments of administration, including such territorial disputes as that over the Saar, there is a chance of getting the Indo-Pakistani dialogue into constructive channels.23

  Galbraith had reached the right conclusion about the proper American role in South Asia in the midst of a terrible crisis. But instead of taking Galbraith’s sophisticated approach, the Kennedy team, working closely with the British, tried a more conventional approach. After Kennedy sent letters to Ayub and Nehru, the two reluctantly agreed to resume bilateral discussions on Kashmir, with American and British diplomats pushing each side to make compromise offers. On the eve of the first round, Pakistan’s new foreign minister, Zulfikar Bhutto, announced that China and Pakistan had reached an agreement to demarcate their border in Kashmir, an agreement in which China had been given a considerable part of the territory of historic Kashmir. The Indians were furious. They had been attacked and invaded by China, and Pakistan had now given away part of the territory still in dispute and on which bilateral negotiations were just about to commence. Bhutto claimed that the Chinese had tricked him into prematurely announcing the deal. The United States and the United Kingdom accepted this farce; Nehru did not. Talks began, but they were bound to fail. After six desultory rounds, they collapsed.

  Kennedy began his 1,000 days in office eager to build the ties with India that had languished under Eisenhower and Truman. By the end of that time, the United States was helping to build a new Indian army, including six mountain divisions to face China. India wanted more, including at least two squadrons of F-104 jets. But Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, did not agree to send India high-performance jet aircraft like the F-104s that Pakistan was getting. Both Kennedy and Johnson considered the F-104 deal with Pakistan a foolish excess of the Eisenhower and Nixon days that should not be repeated.

  JFK was equally determined to maintain a strong alliance with Pakistan, but Islamabad did not want an ally that armed both sides. It had not joined SEATO and CENTO to see American arms flowing into India; it wanted an exclusive alliance against its rival. The U.S.-Pakistan connection was coming apart, and Pakistan turned to China for a new ally. After the border agreement on Kashmir, Pakistan signed an aviation agreement with China, which broke an American-inspired campaign to isolate China both politically and physically. Pakistan International Airlines began regular flights between Dacca and Shanghai. The Kennedy team responded by canceling a deal to upgrade Dacca airport, the first of what would become a long list of sanctions against Pakistan. Pakistan in turn upgraded relations with China to full embassy status.24

  In what would be his last days, Kennedy became more and more irritated with the Pakistanis and with Ayub. In one of his final meetings with his national security team, he asked, “What do we get from Pakistan? In return for the protection of our alliance and our assistance, what do they do for us?”25 JFK’s question was purely rhetorical. The answer was still the secret intelligence base that the CIA and National Security Agency used to eavesdrop on China and Russia—America’s desire for which Ayub had skillfully exploited. The base was expanded considerably in a new secret protocol in September 1963.26 Less than two months later, Kennedy was dead. Sardar, the horse that Ayub had given Mrs. Kennedy in Lahore, followed his casket down Pennsylvania Avenue riderless.

  The Indo-Chinese war had one more major consequence: India moved closer to a decision to develop a nuclear deterrent. India had begun a nuclear power program early after gaining independence and had acquired reactors from the United States and Canada. But Nehru had insisted that India would use them only for peaceful purposes. In his world view, the use of nuclear weapons was unthinkable, so they were not to be acquired. However, in the wake of the Chinese invasion the opposition party called for development of a nuclear weapons program to deter further Chinese aggression. Nehru still demurred, but India was on the path to conducting its first test of a nuclear bomb.

  The Americans also had come to realize that America and India needed the bomb if they were going to be able to stop another major Chinese invasion. In 1963, shortly before his death, Kennedy met with his military advisers to review the options in the event of another Chinese attack. Secretly recorded tapes of the meetings reveal that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told JFK that “we should recognize that in order to carry out any commitment to defend India against any substantial Chinese attack, we would have to use nuclear weapons.” Kennedy responded that “we should defend India, and therefore we will defend India if she were attacked.”27

  JOHNSON AND THE SECOND INDO-PAKISTAN WAR

  Lyndon Baines Johnson, a senator from Texas, had been chosen by Kennedy as his running mate to capture Southern white votes for a Catholic liberal Democrat from Massachusetts. LBJ brought with him years of experience in domestic affairs but not a wealth of foreign policy experience. However, as vice president he had bonded with Ayub, and he had little of Kennedy’s fondness for India. But the Pakistani leader made an early mistake in dealing with Johnson. Instead of coming to Kennedy’s funeral himself, he sent his foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had already spoiled his copy book with Washington because of the Kashmir deal with China and his outspoken leftist rhetoric. Moreover, Bhutto insisted on a private session after the funeral to deliver an important message from Ayub; when an irritated Johnson reluctantly agreed, Bhutto only antagonized Johnson more by having literally nothing important to say.

  The Vietnam War was Johnson’s overwhelming priority in world affairs, and it came to consume his presidency. LBJ expected Pakistan to live up to its obligations as a SEATO member by sending troops to defend South Vietnam from communism, and he asked Pakistan at least “to show the flag” with a token deployment.28 He argued that if the dominoes fell in Sou
theast Asia, then East Pakistan would find itself sharing a border with communist Burma. Nonetheless, Ayub refused repeated requests for a Pakistani troop deployment, including during a face-to-face encounter with Johnson in December 1967 when Johnson briefly stopped in Karachi on a flight home from Saigon. He was the second sitting American president to visit South Asia, although it was only for a few hours.

  Pakistan had not joined SEATO to fight communism, of course, and it certainly did not want to antagonize its new ally China by fighting in Vietnam. It had become the “most allied ally” of the United States to enhance its ability to fight India. Now American arms were rapidly building a stronger India, thus tilting the balance of power even more against Pakistan. Bhutto turned to his foreign minister and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to develop a plan to seize the initiative before American arms decisively gave India the upper hand.

  In 1965 Bhutto and the ISI came up with Operation Gibraltar, a foolish and dangerous plan conceived as a clever scheme to create an insurgency in Kashmir that would provide an excuse for a massive Pakistani armored thrust across the border to separate the valley from India. The ISI, working with elite Pakistani commandoes, would send teams into Kashmir to start an uprising; once the turmoil began, an armored attack, code-named Operation Grand Slam, would follow. Gibraltar was named after the famous port in Europe where Muslim invaders first entered Spain; Grand Slam was apparently named after a fictional plot to rob Fort Knox in the hit 1964 movie Goldfinger. Both were poorly thought out and incompetently executed; even so, the plan was slavishly followed. Some 7,000 Pakistani commandoes and militants infiltrated the valley, but the insurgency was a bust. The ISI had done little or nothing to prepare the Kashmiris to revolt, and in any case the Indians arrested many of the infiltrators before they could do any damage. Nonetheless, Pakistani armor attacked, leading to some of the largest tank battles since World War II. The battle turned against Pakistan, and soon Indian armor was threatening to take Lahore. The war was a fiasco, and it would doom Ayub’s government.