Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  The war was now at hand. Mrs. Gandhi visited New York and Washington in November to gain United Nations and American support for the Bengali people and India. She met a brick wall in the Oval Office. Nixon saw her as a Soviet partner, if not client, and was deaf to her concerns. It was an ugly meeting by all accounts. Nixon called the Indian prime minister a “bitch” and much worse behind her back; she thought that he was a cold war fanatic who cared nothing about innocent lives. India mobilized, and Mrs. Gandhi told the army commander, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, to prepare for war. He told her that the army was ready.

  Instead, Pakistan struck first. Operation Genghis Khan was a preemptive blow designed to get the upper hand by attacking Indian airbases on December 3, 1971, in an approach similar to that used by the Israelis against the Egyptians in 1967. It failed. India took the offensive, and Manekshaw had Pakistan on the run immediately. The 90,000-strong Pakistani garrisons in East Pakistan were in a hopeless situation: surrounded on three sides, with reinforcements a thousand miles away.

  America sided with Pakistan. The U.S. ambassador to the UN, George H. W. Bush, called India “the major aggressor.” Privately Bush thought Kissinger an “arrogant paranoid,” but in public he backed the White House line.37 Kissinger and Bush met with the Chinese ambassador to the UN, and Kissinger gave China tacit approval to help Pakistan. Kissinger told the Chinese that although the arms ban was still in force, he was pressing American allies like Iran and Jordan to transfer U.S.-supplied jets to Pakistan—an illegal maneuver. The CIA was told to push the king and the shah to ignore démarches from the American ambassador in each country against the transfer of American F-104 jets to Islamabad. Jordan delivered several to the Pakistanis. China did nothing.

  At just that point, the CIA delivered a secret intelligence report to Nixon suggesting that Mrs. Gandhi had designs beyond East Pakistan and was determined to destroy Pakistan entirely in the war. The report was judged alarming and probably incorrect by the CIA’s own analysts.38 Nonetheless, Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, told the White House that “Gandhi intends to attempt to eliminate Pakistan’s armor and air force” and “straighten out” Kashmir. Nixon called it “one of the few really timely pieces of intelligence the CIA had ever given me.”39 Helms later told me in a private conversation shortly before he died that the report was inaccurate but too important to be ignored. He felt that he had not handled it well by highlighting it to Nixon.

  Nixon dispatched a carrier battle group led by the USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal from the Strait of Malacca to try to save Pakistan’s fortunes by an intimidating show of support. He may have hoped that the Chinese would be emboldened by the move to attack India. It did not work. Indira, who probably had no designs on West Pakistan, was not easily intimidated. It was also too late for the Pakistanis. They asked the American consul in Dacca on December 14, 1971, to tell the Indians that they were ready to surrender. The darkest day in Pakistan’s history followed. Ninety-three thousand Pakistani soldiers became prisoners of war, and the nation of Bangladesh, led by the Awami League, was born. Zulfikar Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation to the UN to make Pakistan’s case that it had again been victimized, and on December 18 he saw Nixon and Kissinger. Kissinger thought him “brilliant and charming,” and they all but endorsed him as the next Pakistani leader. Two days later Yahya turned power over to Bhutto and stepped down in disgrace and humiliation.40 In February 1972 Nixon went to Beijing.

  The war ended in disaster for Pakistan and triumph for India, but both again felt let down by the United States. India had expected America to support a campaign to stop genocide; Pakistan had expected America and China to do something to stop India. Despite his sense that Pakistan had been betrayed again, Bhutto needed American support. He would spend the next five years trying to get Pakistan back on its feet, roaming the world looking for help from China to Saudi Arabia. In September 1973 he saw Nixon in the Oval Office one last time. He asked for arms sales and aid to be resumed and offered the United States a naval base at a new port in Baluchistan, Gwadar, as a sweetener. Nixon never seriously considered the offer. Behind the scenes Zulfi ordered Pakistan’s scientists to develop a nuclear weapon at any and all costs. An unknown Pakistani engineer in Belgium, A. Q. Khan, offered his services, and the ISI began to assist him in stealing nuclear centrifuge technology from the Dutch company where he worked.

  Indira Gandhi did not need America. She was convinced that Nixon was her enemy, and she harbored suspicions that the CIA was determined to assassinate her. Her suspicions intensified after the hero of Bangladesh’s independence struggle, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was murdered in a bloody coup in the summer of 1975 that she believed was orchestrated to punish her for the 1971 war.41 She won an overwhelming majority in the next elections. The prime minister had faced two nuclear powers backing Pakistan in 1971, America and China, but she had been too strong to let them intimidate her, even when the United States tried gunboat diplomacy to do so. She was seen around the world as a winner who had stood up to Nixon and prevailed. She did conclude that India needed the bomb, and on May 18, 1974, India exploded a nuclear device and thereby joined the nuclear club.

  THE BOMB AND FORD

  The postmortem on India’s nuclear test conducted by the U.S. intelligence community noted that “the intelligence community failed to warn U.S. decision makers that such a test was being planned. This failure denied the U.S. government the option of considering diplomatic or other initiatives to prevent this significant step in nuclear proliferation.”42 The postmortem concluded that the CIA and other agencies had long expected an Indian test—some since 1965 and the second Indo-Pakistani war—but that in 1974 there were simply too few intelligence collection assets (spies, satellites, and intercepted communications) against “an admittedly difficult target” to provide timely warning. Just two years earlier, a special national intelligence estimate (SNIE) had argued that “Mrs. Gandhi knows that a test would be popular at home, stimulate a rising sense of national pride and independence, and—in the eyes of many—reinforce India’s claim that it should be taken seriously as a major power.” Once a decision to test was made, the SNIE said, a test could come within a few days, and India could build a stock of ten to twelve low-yield weapons in a year. Within a few years it could build fifty to seventy devices a year.43

  For the first but not the last time the CIA had rightly predicted India’s ability to test a nuclear device but had been unable to provide timely warning of the preparations for an actual test. Over the course of the next four decades, the challenge of detecting test preparations in advance would be a key priority for the CIA. It would have successes and one more failure, in 1998. The 1974 test was one more negative factor in the already deeply strained U.S.-India relationship at the end of the Nixon administration. Washington protested the test, but Nixon was riveted on the collapse of his administration in the Watergate scandal. In August 1974, he resigned in disgrace. Gerald Ford became president and kept Kissinger as his secretary of state. Kissinger visited India in October for a three-day mission to try to repair the damage done by the 1971 crisis. He spoke publicly about the need for America to recognize India’s rise to world power status and acknowledged past errors. In a very public snub, Mrs. Gandhi had lunch with the secretary on his first day in New Delhi and then left town for Kashmir. In February 1975 the embargo on sales of weapons to Pakistan and India was finally lifted by Ford, ten years after President Johnson had imposed it. Since that greatly benefited Pakistan, Mrs. Gandhi was not pleased. She got her revenge just two months later, when the American-backed regime in Saigon fell to the communists. India announced that it was a “gratifying vindication” of decades of Indian policy in Vietnam.

  For forty years America had sought to build strong ties to both India and Pakistan. The attempt had failed. Two powerful Indian prime ministers, Nehru and his daughter Indira, had been difficult interlocutors for four American presidents; only Kennedy had succeeded in building
a real partnership with India. In Pakistan, America had twice deeply disappointed the generals who ran the country by not treating Pakistan as an exclusive ally. It was not a promising start to the American involvement in the rise of India and Pakistan. It would get worse.

  For forty years American presidents had also tried, to varying degrees, to resolve the Kashmir problem. The efforts of Truman and Kennedy were the most serious, but both failed. Nehru proved to be a very difficult interlocutor on Kashmir, but the Pakistanis made impossible demands; they would not accept anything less than possession of the valley. The lesson that American diplomats drew from years of failure was that Kashmir was too difficult to deal with and therefore best ignored—an understandable conclusion but the wrong one.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE CARTER AND REAGAN YEARS

  TAMPA, FLORIDA, IS a long way from South Asia, but in mid-2011 I was there to attend a conference at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command on Pakistan as a guest of General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. CENTCOM is the regional command of that part of the U.S. military whose area of responsibility includes Pakistan, but not India. I have been to CENTCOM many times over the past three decades to discuss American war plans and military missions. This time I was to review Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. My message was simple: the United States was fighting a proxy war with Pakistan in Afghanistan.

  The audience was not thrilled with the message. They knew that I was right, but the hard truth of it was not eagerly welcomed by American commanders. After all, only twenty-five years ago the United States had fought a war against the Soviets in Afghanistan with Pakistan’s help. I was a junior player in that war effort, but even I could see that it would be much easier for the United States to win if Pakistan provided it and its allies with safe havens along the border and a sanctuary in which to train and prepare to fight. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan enjoyed Pakistan’s support and won the war. Now, in the twenty-first century, America and Pakistan are on opposite sides in the Afghan civil war. It’s a lot harder to envision success.

  CENTCOM planners look at Pakistan from the west. It sits at the edge of their area of responsibility (AOR), on the far end of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf; consequently, CENTCOM sees Pakistan primarily in terms of how its actions and policies affect Afghanistan and the Gulf. Pakistan’s military leaders, of course, look primarily the other way, east toward India. They are obsessed with India and the threat that they believe that it poses to their country. So American and Pakistani generals—and diplomats and spies for that matter—generally look at the world with very different priorities. Sometimes they can find common ground for short-term reasons, like fighting communism in Kabul, but generally their strategic views are at odds with each other.

  Forty years of cold war diplomacy had left America’s relations with both India and Pakistan dysfunctional by the mid-1970s, and the two Indo-Pakistani wars, in 1965 and 1971, had been bad for both bilateral relationships. Seeing South Asia through the prism of the cold war had only made the difficult business of building strong ties to the two rivals harder for the United States. The next decade would see the cold war intensify to its conclusion under President Reagan. Kashmir would fall off the American agenda, a forgotten conflict.

  CARTER’S INTERREGNUM

  After the scandals of the Nixon administration and the discouraging end to the war in Vietnam, Americans wanted a new face in the White House. When Georgia governor James Carter was chosen to succeed President Ford, he inherited a South Asia in transition. Profound political change was under way in both India and Pakistan. Indira Gandhi had proclaimed a state of emergency in June 1975 in response to a growing wave of protests against her increasingly authoritarian practices and the corruption surrounding her younger son, Sanjay. Opposition leaders were arrested, the press was muzzled, and for the first and only time in India’s democratic history the rule of law and freedom of speech were curtailed. Then, as suddenly as she imposed the state of emergency, Indira lifted it in January 1977 and called new elections. She lost. Carter would have a new government headed by Morarji Desai, a Congress party dissident and long-time enemy of Indira, to deal with.

  As Carter came to office, Pakistan also was in transition. Zulfikar Bhutto, like Mrs. Gandhi, had become more and more authoritarian in his ways. Mounting protests were met with crackdowns on dissent and increasing reliance on the security services to enforce order. In February 1976, Zulfi appointed a new chief of army staff, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, skipping over several more senior officers because he was supremely confident that Zia was a loyal sycophant, totally apolitical and too weak to challenge his control. At dinner parties and in front of foreign guests, Bhutto called Zia his “monkey general.”1 New elections in 1977 were rigged, leading to more protests, and on July 5, 1977, the “monkey general” overthrew Zulfi and became Pakistan’s third military dictator. So Carter had a new Pakistani partner as well.

  Carter’s priority was India. The damage done by Nixon’s 1971 tilt toward Pakistan was enormous and required remediation, and the departure of Mrs. Gandhi presented an opportunity. Shortly after Carter’s inauguration, the Indian president died (the presidency in India is a largely ceremonial post), and Carter sent his mother, Lillian, to represent him at the funeral. Lillian had served in the Peace Corps in India, and the personal gesture was much appreciated in New Delhi. In January 1978 Carter went to India himself as part of a global trip that would take him to Europe and Iran but not to Pakistan. His deliberate omission of Pakistan from the itinerary, which was favorably received in India, was unprecedented for an American president traveling to South Asia, and it signaled a new U.S. posture. The Delhi Declaration, a result of the summit between Carter and Prime Minister Desai, committed the two great democracies to practice “moral responsibility” in global diplomacy and included a strong commitment to human rights. The visit was tarnished only modestly by an open microphone incident in which Carter was caught complaining about India’s nuclear policy to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Desai returned the visit in June 1978, when he visited Washington. Carter took the prime minister on an impromptu evening visit to the Lincoln Memorial after the official state dinner, a sign of the warmth that the two had developed.

  Their rapprochement was to be short lived. The Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis came to dominate Carter’s presidency. Even his triumphs, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and the Panama Canal treaty, were sidelined by the Iranian crisis. Then, in December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. While America saw it as a sign of Soviet imperialism, India was less alarmed. For the Carter team, the moderate Indian reaction was like a “ton of bricks” shattering the goodwill that Carter had sought with Desai.2 In January 1980 Indira Gandhi swept back into office in a landslide victory in which her party won 350 of 542 seats. Her animus toward the United States had softened during her years out of power, but it had not disappeared. She and Carter would increasingly differ over Pakistan. In the end, Carter’s effort to rebuild bridges to India went nowhere. His trip to New Delhi would be the last presidential visit to India for a quarter-century.

  Carter had not been pleased by Zia’s 1977 coup, which put an end to Pakistan’s second experiment in elected government, even if the elections were often tainted. In contrast to Nixon’s, his administration was pledged to support democracy and foster human rights. Carter would have been unhappy enough with the coup, code-named Operation Fair Play, but what followed upset him much more. After first promising that new elections would be held in ninety days and releasing Zulfikar Bhutto from detention, Zia changed his mind. Pakistan was too small for two power-hungry leaders. Zia, turning on his nemesis with a vengeance, had Bhutto charged with murder. Carter and many other world leaders appealed to Zia for clemency; Carter himself wrote Zia three letters urging the general to spare his rival. In March 1978 Bhutto was found guilty by a court in Lahore, and more appeals for mercy from Car
ter followed. Finally, on April 4, 1979, Zulfi was hanged to death. The long, drawn-out trial and appeals process had consumed Pakistani politics for almost two years, and Zulfi’s death marked a new low in U.S.-Pakistan relations. Behind the scenes, arguments over Pakistan’s developing nuclear program had made matters worse. Carter pressed France and other countries not to provide nuclear technology to Pakistan. Zia, though angered by the American campaign to stop Pakistan’s bomb project, was not intimidated.

  It got worse. On November 20, 1979, a mob stormed the American embassy in Islamabad, angered by reports that the United States and Israel were secretly supporting the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which had been seized by Saudi extremists who believed that the mahdi, or redeemer, had arrived. The reports were entirely false. They had been circulated by the new Iranian revolutionary regime, led by Ayatollah Khomeni, which wanted to cause damage to the United States. The demonstrators at the embassy broke into the compound, and the embassy staff, 137 Americans and Pakistanis, locked themselves in a secure vault. The mob set the embassy on fire, and only the bravery of the U.S. marine guards and the embassy staff saved the day. They were able to escape via the roof to safety, but at the cost of two American lives. The crisis at the embassy lasted for hours, and at CIA headquarters a team of analysts watched the drama unfold (I was one of them). At the State Department and the White House, every effort was made to get the Pakistani army to come to the rescue of the embassy, but for hours nothing happened. Zia was touring the city to promote bicycling in Pakistan, and his staff said that they did not want to interrupt him. Finally, Carter got through to the general by telephone. Belatedly, the army sent some helicopters to monitor the scene and then sent troops to regain control.