by Bruce Riedel
China briefly threatened to assist Pakistan. Beijing warned New Delhi that if India attacked East Pakistan, China would resume military operations along the McMahon line and possibly seize the tiny kingdom of Sikkim. It was a bluff. When China’s ultimatum to India to stop the war expired, China just extended it a few more days. In the end, China let down Pakistan. American intelligence suspected that Pakistan, China, and perhaps Indonesia had plotted together against India, but in the end Pakistan was left alone.29
Remarkably, the plan’s author, Zulfikar Bhutto, escaped blame for the disaster. He went to New York to present Pakistan’s case for Kashmir to the United Nations, and he was seen on the world stage and at home as a passionate defender of Pakistan’s position. He blamed America, because it had armed India, for what went wrong. He also blamed Ayub for not implementing the plan effectively, and he left the cabinet. Zulfi, as he was familiarly called, was a scion of one of Pakistan’s richest families, large landowners in Sindh province, and he was a master at portraying himself and his country as victim. A rich man who had never worked the soil, he painted himself as a revolutionary socialist like Che Guevara or Yasir Arafat and his new political party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), as the party of the aggrieved and the underclasses. He made friends with revolutionaries like Mao Zedong and Muammar Qadhafi as well as royalists like King Faysal of Saudi Arabia and his old friend Richard Nixon and Nixon’s national security aide, Henry Kissinger. Zulfi was educated in California and styled himself a modern Napoleon. He collected Bonaparte memorabilia and had a library with 10,000 books about the French military genius.30
Zulfi did not impress LBJ. The Johnson administration, distracted by Vietnam, decided to avoid significant involvement in the diplomacy surrounding the war, leaving it to the UN instead. However, it cut off military assistance to both parties. Although Pakistan was hurt much more because it was much more dependent on U.S. aid (U.S. aid to Pakistan in the period from 1954 to 1965 was twenty times the amount of aid to India), India was outraged because it was the victim of aggression and Kennedy had just promised a new era in American-Indian relations. As a consequence of the war, the United States, which went from arming both sides in the India-Pakistan rivalry to arming neither, lost the trust of both.
It got worse. The Soviets hosted a peace conference in Tashkent after the cease-fire to allow the belligerents to formally end the war, exchange prisoners, and return captured territory to restore the status quo ante. Moscow, not Washington, was the peacemaker in South Asia. Johnson was just too consumed with Vietnam. After signing the Tashkent communiqué, India’s prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded Nehru, suffered a massive heart attack at the close of the peace summit and died the next day, January 11, 1966.
Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, took his place. She had traveled the world with Nehru when he was prime minister and had been his keenest student of global and domestic politics. She had served as minister of information in the 1962 war with China and in the 1965 war with Pakistan, giving her tremendous public visibility. The power brokers who ran the Congress Party in 1966 assumed that she would be a weak prime minister whom they could dominate and manipulate. They underestimated her badly.
Initially, Mrs. Gandhi and Johnson hit if off well. She came to Washington looking for the resumption of military aid and stepped-up economic assistance, which India needed to make its agriculture sector more efficient. LBJ was smitten with her at first, and a brief honeymoon ensued. It was not destined to last. As Vietnam’s shadow grew ever darker, she denounced the war as an imperialist relic bordering on genocide, and she openly sympathized with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Johnson had no more use for her or India. His administration had begun with strong ties to India and Pakistan, but those ties were mutually antithetical. It ended with the United States being relegated to bystander status in South Asia.
For both Indians and Pakistanis, the Johnson era was a bitter disappointment. India thought that America would be its new ally against China and that the two democracies would finally escape the estrangement of the Nehru era. Although India had been receiving U.S. military aid, it was abruptly terminated, and Washington had sold the F-104s to Pakistan but not to India. India saw itself as the victim of unprovoked aggression from Pakistan and could not understand why LBJ did not see it that way too. The legacy of the Johnson arms cut-off remains alive today. Indians simply do not believe that America will be there when India needs military help. New Delhi turned elsewhere for arms, signing a major deal to build the MiG-21, the F-104’s competitor, in India with Russian assistance.
Pakistanis were shocked that they, the “most allied ally,” also were cut off from their main source of arms. SEATO and CENTO seemed to mean nothing when Pakistan really needed American help, nor did the secret U-2 and National Security Agency bases. Pakistan did not feel that it was an aggressor; it was simply trying to redress a wrong in Kashmir that the world was ignoring. It now would turn to other sources of arms, especially China, to replace the United States. The legacy of the U.S. “betrayal” still haunts U.S.-Pakistan relations today, but it would be only the first in a long line of American “betrayals” that Pakistani generals and politicians would nurture. The disastrous Operation Gibraltar fiasco had long-term consequences for South Asia. Until the second India-Pakistan war, it had been fairly easy for people to move between one country and the other, but India and Pakistan decided after 1965 to require visitors from the other nation to get a visa before entry. Consequently, travel, trade, and understanding between the two states began to dry up. As each developed trade partners outside the subcontinent, economic interaction would largely cease.
NIXON, INDIRA, AND THE 1971 WAR
Richard Nixon came to the Oval Office with more South Asia experience than any president before or since. He knew the players and had traveled in the region. In many ways, he was the founding father of the American-Pakistani alliance in the 1950s. When he traveled to South Asia in December 1953, he told the New York Times on background that “the time has come to put an end to Washington’s patience with Nehru, who has often embarrassed the U.S.”; in contrast, he praised Pakistan. So in 1969 Indians were understandably apprehensive about his election and Pakistanis hopeful that they would have a champion in the White House.
Nixon fulfilled the expectations of both. A new American rapprochement with Pakistan, based on Pakistan’s channel to China, became the centerpiece of his South Asia policy, reversing two decades of American animosity to Pakistan’s China connection and Nixon’s own vehement China bashing. Another Indo-Pakistani war would take America and India to the brink of conflict in 1971 and move India to test a nuclear bomb.
Henry Kissinger was the guiding hand of Nixon’s foreign policy, especially in South Asia. Kissinger’s account of his experiences, published later in his memoirs, is unusually rich and detailed, but it raised considerable dissent among others in the administration, especially South Asia hands at the Department of State and other departments. Kissinger needed to explain his views in detail for several reasons, but the most urgent was that immediately after the 1971 crisis a journalist, Jack Anderson, obtained access to the detailed notes taken for the Pentagon leadership during the National Security Council crisis meetings and published them. They portrayed a Nixon White House at war with its own bureaucracy and very much isolated from outside opinion. Nixon saw the crisis as a global test of wills with Moscow while almost everyone else saw it as a regional battle over the future of East Pakistan, soon to be Bangladesh.
East Pakistan had always been the second-class citizen in the Pakistani state. While a majority of the country’s population lived in the east, West Pakistan’s Punjabi establishment dominated the state, especially the army. A disproportionate amount of development was sent to West Pakistan and virtually all officers in the military came from the west, mostly from the Punjab. In 1970 there were only 300 Bengalis among the 6,000-strong Pakistani officer corps. Moreover, although more Pakistanis sp
oke Bengali than any other language, it was not a recognized national language. Jinnah had insisted on that. For Bengalis, West Pakistan was another colonial master; it had simply replaced the British.
Ayub Khan had stepped down in 1969, exhausted and under fire for the 1965 war fiasco. East Pakistanis were especially angry, recognizing that Ayub had taken on India in a war that left them defenseless against New Delhi. Almost all of Pakistan’s armor and airpower were in West Pakistan; had India chosen in 1965 to occupy East Pakistan, which it surrounds on three sides, it could have done so easily. In short, the Pakistani army was ready to lose Bengal to gain Kashmir. The Bengalis got the message.
Yahya Khan was Ayub’s successor. A veteran of the British Eighth Army in World War II, he had fought in Libya and Italy. Yahya, who was a Shia but also a Punjabi, had a bad drinking problem and poor judgment. He reluctantly agreed to hold relatively free elections in December 1970. The separatist Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, swept East Pakistan, winning all 167 seats. Zulfi’s PPP did the best in West Pakistan, taking a majority of seats (81 of 138) there. The election results meant that power would shift from West to East Pakistan; the downtrodden Bengalis would run the country simply by virtue of being a majority of the population and having all voted for one party.
The Punjabis would not stand for that. Yahya and Zulfi both went to Dacca to talk to the Bengalis. After some ineffectual negotiations, Yahya flew home, drinking Scotch all the way, and ordered the Pakistani commander in Dacca, Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, to conduct a sharp crackdown on the Awami League and Bengali separatists.31 Code-named Operation Searchlight, it became a massacre. American-made armored personnel carriers invaded the university in Dacca and killed thousands of students. Political leaders, poets, novelists, and the best of Bengal were rounded up or shot. Sheik Mujib, as he was called, was arrested, but not before he announced the independence of Bangladesh on March 26, 1971.32 The Bangladesh government subsequently charged that the Pakistani army had engaged in genocide against its own people, killing 3 million people during the repression. Millions of Bengalis fled across the border into India, rapidly creating a major refugee problem for the Gandhi government. By May some 10 million Bengalis had escaped to India and the Awami League had set up a guerrilla front to wage an insurrection against Tikka Khan’s army. India began to arm the insurgents.
To make matters worse, the Pakistani government had provoked India directly in the lead-up to the crisis. On January 30, 1971, an Indian airliner was hijacked by two Kashmiris after it left Srinagar and was forced to land in Lahore, Pakistan, where it was blown up after its passengers had deboarded. India, blaming Pakistani intelligence, closed Indian air space to Pakistani aircraft flying from the two halves of Pakistan, thus vastly complicating Pakistani logistics. Pakistan proclaimed its innocence, charging that the two hijackers were Indian spies. After the 1971 war, the hijackers were freed in Pakistan and remained there, clearly indicating that they were in fact Pakistani agents. The hijacking and the massacres drove Indira Gandhi to take action. But first she looked to America to act.33
However, Nixon and Kissinger refused to take any serious action to halt the massacre. Acting under the president’s guidance, Kissinger ordered the American government to “tilt” toward Pakistan and Yahya. Many in the bureaucracy resisted. At one National Security Council meeting, Kissinger, exasperated by the pushback from the regional specialists, exclaimed, “The President always says to tilt toward Pakistan, but every proposal I get is in the opposite direction. Sometimes I think I am in a nut house.”34 The American diplomats on the scene were appalled at their country’s policy. In April 1971, virtually the entire country team in Dacca signed a dissent cable, which is worth quoting here in some detail.
Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens [dual nationals of the United States and (East) Pakistan] while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pakistan dominated government and to lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact against [it]. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya a message defending democracy, condemning arrests of leaders of a democratically elected majority party (incidentally pro-West). But we have chosen not to intervene even morally on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter.35
The consul general, Archer Blood, sent the cable—the so-called Blood telegram—to Washington, and several officers in the department signed a letter to Secretary of State William Rogers supporting it. The consul general had classified the cable “confidential,” but Nixon had it reclassified “secret/NODIS,” the highest classification possible for a State Department cable, to restrict its dissemination. Nixon’s tilt was only in part a reflection of his animus toward India and his fondness for Pakistan. Behind the scenes the president and his national security adviser were reversing over two decades of American policy toward China, and they needed Yahya and Pakistan to do it. It was a very closely held secret; not even Rogers, the secretary of state, knew what they were doing.
Nixon had visited South Asia three times as a private citizen between his years as vice president and his election to the presidency, and on each visit he was snubbed in India and hailed in Pakistan. In August 1969, Nixon again visited India and Pakistan, this time as president. His meeting with Mrs. Gandhi in New Delhi was strained and uncomfortable. Because he was now president, she could not snub him again (she had famously asked an aide in Hindi during an earlier visit, “How much longer must I talk to this man?”), but their contempt for each other was self-evident.
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s new capital, the reception was much warmer. Nixon was greeted as a close friend by Yahya, for whom the president had a surprise request. He asked Yahya to use Pakistan’s close ties to China, forged after the invasion of India in 1962, to pass a very important message to Chairman Mao: Nixon was interested in a dialogue at the highest level with the communist government, ending decades of isolation. Nixon told Yahya to communicate via very secure means and not to discuss the American opening with anyone in the U.S. embassy or State Department. The Pakistani ambassador in Washington was to communicate only with Kissinger regarding the message and China’s response.
Beijing did not respond immediately. It was not until February 1970 that Yahya’s ambassador reported a positive response from the Chinese to Kissinger. In October, as the crisis in East Pakistan was getting worse, Yahya came to the White House to meet Nixon personally once again. To greet his guest Nixon had arms sales to Pakistan, banned since 1965, lifted for selected equipment, including 300 armored personnel carriers.
On October 25, 1970, Nixon gave Yahya another message for Mao. He wanted to send a secret high-level emissary, Kissinger, to Beijing to start a direct dialogue with Mao and his comrades. Two months later, on December 8, 1970, the day after the Pakistani elections brought the Awami League to power, the Pakistani ambassador had a top secret positive response, in principle, to the request for a Kissinger visit. But the Chinese remained in no hurry, and the timing of a trip was still under consideration in Beijing.
After Operation Searchlight began, Nixon and Kisssinger felt that they could not afford to tilt away from Yahya and Pakistan without endangering their China connection, which remained a closely held secret. Rogers and the rest of the State Department and government bureaucracy were still out of the loop, and they could not understand why Nixon was so unwilling to criticize Pakistan.
On April 27, 1971, with Dacca under Tikka’s boot, the Chinese gave their approval for a Kissinger secret mission. Kissinger told the Chinese in early June that he was coming, and he arranged a visit to Islamabad. The CIA and the ambassador were brought in on the secret, and they were told to work with Yahya’s staff on a plan to disguise Kis
singer’s upcoming visit to China. After Kissinger had dinner with Yahya, Kissinger’s staff told reporters that he was ill. Instead of flying to his next destination the following morning, Kissinger would spend a couple of days in the mountains north of Islamabad to recover. He would not see any journalists while he rested.
On July 10, 1971, Kissinger flew to Beijing on a Pakistani aircraft to see Mao and the Chinese leadership. He flew back to Islamabad the next day and resumed his schedule. The great secret was intact. A few days later, Nixon announced the breakthrough and told the American people that he intended to visit China himself. In a private letter to Yahya thanking him for helping to bring about the breakthrough, Nixon wrote: “Those who want a more peaceful world in the generation to come will forever be in your debt.”36
Indira Gandhi saw her worst nightmare developing. A massive crisis in East Pakistan was destabilizing Calcutta and Assam, the Americans were backing Pakistan, and a new Islamabad-Beijing-Washington axis was developing. She went to Moscow to build a counteralliance. In August, India and Russia signed the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty, which bound the two countries more closely together than ever before. It was not a formal military alliance like NATO, but it symbolized India’s growing reliance on Soviet military equipment and served to counterbalance any Chinese consideration of intervening on Pakistan’s behalf in a future war. In short, Indira was telling China to stay out of the upcoming war or it might have a war in Siberia and Manchuria on its hands.