by Gary J. Bass
The prime minister turned to the huge numbers of refugees still streaming into India. (There were, by India’s count, over nine and a half million on that autumn day.) Nixon, trying to undercut what he and Kissinger saw as India’s pretext for war, said he would keep pressing Congress for a large relief effort. He wanted the refugees to go home. But Gandhi said that the refugees were from a different background and religion from Indians in the border states, leaving her government hard pressed to prevent bloody communal riots.
Nixon denounced the Bengali insurgents for interfering with relief supplies on ships near Chittagong harbor. This kind of guerrilla warfare, the president said, had to rely on sophisticated training and equipment. Gandhi dodged the accusation, foggily saying that “India had been accused of supporting guerrilla activity but that the situation was not that clear.” Nobody sitting in the Oval Office believed that, least of all Gandhi and Haksar. She perplexingly compared the insurgency to Cuban exiles in Florida striking against Cuba.
The two leaders sparred fiercely. It was, Kissinger later wrote, “a classic dialogue of the deaf.” Gandhi complained bitterly of Yahya’s talk of “Holy War,” and said that the vital issue was Mujib, who was a symbol of the autonomy movement. She raised Nixon’s and Kissinger’s hackles by mentioning her Soviet friendship treaty. Nixon, claiming that the United States had put “great pressure on Pakistan,” brought up again Yahya’s offer to unilaterally pull back his troops. Haksar dodged that, for which Nixon slapped him down.
Nixon ended with a steely warning. He said that the U.S. government would continue to help with humanitarian relief, urge restraint on Yahya, and try to find a political solution. But he declared that the disintegration of Pakistan would do no good for anyone, and rumbled, “The initiation of hostilities by India would be almost impossible to understand.” He warned, “It would be impossible to calculate with precision the steps which other great powers might take if India were to initiate hostilities”—hinting not just at the reaction of the United States but also the possibility of Chinese intervention. This implicit threat hung in the Oval Office as the final ugly moment.64
Nixon and Kissinger were stunned by the showdown. They had been sorely taxed by the sustained need to be civil to Gandhi. The next morning, in the Oval Office, alone except for Haldeman, they vented their frustrations. “This is just the point when she is a bitch,” said the president. Kissinger replied, “Well, the Indians are bastards anyway. They are starting a war there.”
The two men stripped the bark off the Indians. Kissinger, struck by Gandhi’s unyielding condemnation of Pakistan, suspected that she was out not just to free East Pakistan but to smash West Pakistan. He lavished praise on Nixon’s performance: “While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too.”
Nixon was revolted by the politesse shown to Gandhi. “We really slobbered over the old witch,” he said. Kissinger, doing a little slobbering of his own, reassured the president: “How you slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in the things that did matter, you didn’t give her an inch.” Kissinger flattered Nixon’s toughness and skill, while Nixon gloated, “You should have heard, Bob, the way we worked her around. I dropped stilettos all over her.”
Kissinger said, “Mr. President, even though she was a bitch, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that we got what we wanted, which was we kept her from going out of here saying that the United States kicked her in the teeth.” He added, “You didn’t give her a goddamn thing.” Although it would have been “emotionally more satisfying” to rip into her, Kissinger said “it would have hurt us.… I mean if you had been rough with her then she’d be crying, going back crying to India.” Thanks to the president, Kissinger said, Gandhi could not say that the United States had been cold to her and therefore she had to attack Pakistan.
Kissinger understandably winced at Gandhi’s protestations that she knew nothing about the guerrillas in East Pakistan. He was also incensed by India’s relationship with the Soviet Union: “They have the closest diplomatic ties now with Russia. They leak everything right back to them.” And Nixon cheered Kissinger, who had “stuck it to her on that book”—the one recommended to Kissinger by Zhou Enlai, which, in Kissinger’s words, “proves that India started the ’62 War” against China. Kissinger sarcastically said, “It was done with an enormous politeness and courtesy and warmth.” Nixon added that “she knew goddamn well that I knew what happened.”
Nixon and Kissinger were bitter at India for winning support in the U.S. media and Congress. “You stuck it to her about the press,” said Kissinger. “On that I hit it hard,” Nixon agreed. “I raised my voice a little.”
Kissinger had also met with Haksar, whom Nixon called “that clown.” Kissinger said that he had been just as rough on Haksar. He had complained to the senior Indian official that India gave visiting Democratic politicians “a royal reception, tremendous publicity, personal meetings. And then after you do all of this you come over here and ask us to solve all your problems.” Nixon said, “Good for you.” Kissinger continued, “I said look at the record the last 3 months. You’ve had a press campaign against us. You put out the word that our relations are the worst ever. You get Kennedy over.… You make a treaty with the Russians. And then you come here and say we have to solve your problems for you.”
Nixon decided to make that day’s meeting “cool.” Kissinger suggested giving Gandhi a rougher day, as the conversation turned to Vietnam and other international issues: “even though she is a bitch, I’d be a shade cooler today.”65
Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, had the joyless duty of meeting Gandhi and Haksar at the White House diplomatic entrance and escorting them up to see the president again. From the alcove in the diplomatic entrance, he remembers, he telephoned Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Woods told him to delay. After an interminable half hour, he says, Gandhi was “getting frosty as hell.” He called upstairs again. Woods told him not yet. “It’s clear to me what’s happening,” recalls Hoskinson. “They’re standing her up a little bit. You wait for the president of the United States, lady.”
After something like forty-five minutes, Hoskinson got the call to take her upstairs. “Then Rose Mary says, ‘Would you please take Madame Gandhi to the Roosevelt Room?’ I wait another ten or fifteen minutes. She is totally pissed. They’re whispering back and forth. It was the most excruciating scene you can imagine.” Finally, Hoskinson says, Nixon burst in, turning on the charm, and saying he did not know she had been kept waiting. “She was flabbergasted,” says Hoskinson. “It was a kind of one-upmanship. Nixon felt he had to show her he was in control.”66
With that, the exasperated president squared off against the offended prime minister in their final Oval Office session. “Mrs. Gandhi didn’t indicate much interest in anything in her conversations with the President,” Kissinger recalled a few days later. “When he asked her about military withdrawal, she said she would let him know the next day, and she didn’t even have the courtesy to mention it again.”67
To Nixon’s and Kissinger’s annoyance, Gandhi had asked that their second meeting cover issues beyond South Asia. With less at stake in this encounter, there was less to raise the temperature. This time, Nixon explained his opening to China, while Gandhi blandly said she supported it—not mentioning his implicit warning the day before that great powers might intervene against India. The prime minister asked about Vietnam, where India remained bitterly critical of the U.S. war effort. Haksar warily asked about China. The two leaders were able to wrap up on somewhat better form and be rid of each other. With not much to do, Haksar spent his Oval Office time mesmerized by the two Americans. He fought a strong urge to touch Nixon’s “mask-like” face, which seemed “unreal.” The president’s only sign of emotion, Haksar thought, was his sweat.68
No wonder Kissinger later declared that these were undoubtedly the worst meetings Nixon held with any foreign leader. Pakistan’s unilateral withdrawal plan was a dead letter. The Indians saw no
shift in the White House’s attitude, with Yahya still seen as irreplaceable. With nothing in hand, with no plan to defuse the confrontation, Gandhi and her retinue departed Washington. “My visit to Nixon did anything but avert the war,” she later said.69
The main discernible outcome of the summit was that the two leaders of these massive democracies now hated each other rather more. The last big chance to prevent a war had slipped away.
Chapter 17
The Guns of November
Henry Kissinger despairingly told Richard Nixon, “Paks are up the creek.” The president replied, “The Indians have screwed us.” After the failure of the Washington summit, the Nixon administration fully expected war.1
Indira Gandhi, despairing of any political deal in Pakistan, reportedly ordered a military solution. Indian troops stepped up their border skirmishes with the Pakistanis, often sparked by India’s sponsorship of the Bengali insurgents. When the Mukti Bahini fought against Pakistani troops, the Pakistani soldiers would sometimes wind up in hot pursuit back across the Indian border—resulting in clashes with the Indian troops at the frontier. India, increasingly open about crossing onto Pakistani soil, sent troops into Pakistani territory in strength on two separate occasions. India complained that Pakistan was firing shells and bullets into Indian territory.2
Although these clashes were too big to hide, Gandhi’s government was prickly about its troops being caught on the wrong side of the border. On November 7, Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times trekked out to the Indian border with East Pakistan. The next day, he filed a front-page story reporting that Indian troops had ventured into East Pakistan to take out Pakistani guns that had been lobbing artillery into a town in India. Schanberg’s article flew in the face of India’s official line that its troops had “strict orders” not to cross the border, even when provoked. When they read the Times story, both Haksar and Gandhi hit the roof. Haksar reprimanded the defense ministry, saying that Gandhi wanted a thorough investigation into leaks to Schanberg.3
India’s defense secretary hauled Schanberg in to protest a story that seemed perfectly accurate. Schanberg politely stood his ground and, according to an Indian account, deployed a traditional dodge of the foreign correspondent: blaming nitwit editors back home for slanting the story. He effectively boxed in the Indians by purporting not to see the harm in what they were doing. But he said that he could not believe the official claim that Indian troops were under instructions not to cross the border. The prime minister gave Indian officials fresh orders to hold their tongues.4
Worried that the State Department was sending mixed signals, Nixon ordered Kissinger to swiftly get word to China that the United States was unfaltering in support of Pakistan. Kissinger promised to do so, planning to use the Paris channel.5
But if the United States’ commitment to Pakistan was unwavering, China’s seemed wobbly. When Pakistan sent Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to Beijing to firm up Chinese support, Indian intelligence suggested that Bhutto had gotten a “frosty” reception in Beijing, with the Chinese urging him to avoid war. Despite Bhutto’s public claims that China had promised its support if India attacked, this at best seemed to mean arms and ammunition, not the kind of direct intervention that Nixon and Kissinger were hoping for. The CIA reckoned that there was little chance that China would do much to bail Pakistan out in a war.6
After the face-off with Gandhi at the White House, Kissinger was freshly energized in his anger against India. Her fierce Oval Office condemnations of Pakistan had stuck with him, and he repeatedly brought them up: “She spent most of her time telling him [Nixon] that Baluchistan should never have been made a part of Pakistan.” Thus he expected India to rip away East Pakistan, driving West Pakistan to collapse, in order to “settle the Pakistan problem once and for all.” Although he thought India would attack, he also saw the desperate logic of a Pakistani first strike: “If they will lose East Pakistan politically anyhow, why not lose in a war?”7
Gandhi was under tremendous public pressure, which only intensified as the Indian Parliament reconvened for its winter session—“thirsting for blood,” as Kissinger later wrote. Returning from Washington, she denounced “the thinly disguised legalistic formulation that it was merely an internal affair of Pakistan,” and cheered on the Mukti Bahini’s “heroic struggle … in defence of the most elementary democratic rights and liberties.” Although she urged Nixon to commit “the vast prestige of the United States” to finding a political deal with Mujib, there was no hope that any such thing was going to happen.8
“I wish we could do more!” Nixon told Pakistan’s foreign secretary in an Oval Office meeting. “I wish we could do more, believe me.” Here Nixon, for the first time in eight months of killing, personally beseeched a Pakistani official to find “political solutions” rather than solve a problem by force. But it was unclear if the president meant Pakistan cutting a deal with the Bengali nationalists, or defusing the military standoff between India and Pakistan.9
Soon after the failure of the summit, the Nixon administration began preparations for some U.S. military saber rattling—a customary part of their playbook. Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander in chief of the Pacific Command, drew up plans to pull an aircraft carrier task group away from providing tactical air support in Vietnam and sail it into the Bay of Bengal. The Joint Chiefs of Staff quickly agreed, as the White House staff briefed Kissinger about the military’s secret planning.10
Nixon and Kissinger had bet everything on Yahya, but they realized that he was being swept away by events. Back in August, while planning the White House’s calendar of upcoming summits for December, H. R. Haldeman had asked if Yahya was still on the schedule. “No,” said Nixon, after an awkward pause. Kissinger added softly, after another painful interval, “I don’t think he’ll be in office by then.”11
Soon after the Gandhi summit, the White House staff warned Kissinger that an isolated Yahya was no longer calling the shots with his own military. He had no real idea what was happening in East Pakistan, where the army had nearly complete control. Yahya might listen to U.S. suggestions, but the army did not implement them. Although Nixon was still loyally calling Yahya “a good friend to me,” Kissinger starkly warned the president that the Pakistani leader was on his way out. At the same time, Kissinger told Nixon of ongoing “terror raids” and noted, “Reprisal operations continue to focus against Hindus.”12
Much of this grim news to Nixon should have been familiar from the reporting by U.S. officials in Dacca. It had long been clear that there was no real civilian government in East Pakistan; that the civil war was raging out of control; that Yahya’s political concessions were too little to matter; that Hindus were still being singled out for persecution; that the Bengalis were only getting angrier at their overlords in West Pakistan; and that the refugees would not go home. Now these unpleasant facts were sinking in for Nixon and Kissinger. It was too late.
“PAKISTAN WILL GET RAPED”
Indian troops were allowed to go ten miles into East Pakistan—instructions that Indian officers quickly used to bolster their offensive posture, capturing substantial areas and wiping out Pakistan army posts. On the night of November 21–22, there was a frightening escalation, culminating in the first air battle of the crisis.13
India and Pakistan accused each other of starting this border clash, though Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob later conceded that India had moved first. He recalled that on November 20 an Indian infantry division launched a preliminary attack around Boyra, in East Pakistan near the Indian border. Then the Pakistan Air Force struck back, losing three Sabre jets in the process. The Pakistan army’s U.S.-made M-24 Chaffee light tanks made a disastrous thrust over open ground—it reminded Jacob of the charge of the Light Brigade—into concentrated fire from Indian tanks and recoilless guns. In the combat, Pakistan lost thirteen or fourteen tanks and many men. Then the Pakistani troops crossed into India and struck at several Indian villages. India claimed that Pakistani shelling wounded s
everal Indians.14
But in public, India stuck to a version blaming Pakistan for attacking. In this less embarrassing account, the trouble began when a Pakistani infantry brigade, fortified by tanks, artillery, and air support, attacked a Mukti Bahini base in the Boyra area, in East Pakistan, about five miles from the Indian border. India, admitting that it had crossed into Pakistan’s territory, claimed it had no choice. Haksar argued that India had remained restrained despite Pakistan’s repeated violations of Indian airspace and shelling of Indian territory bordering East Pakistan. In Haksar’s retelling, India then struck at Boyra to take out Pakistani tanks and guns; the next day, three Pakistani Sabre jets crossed into Indian airspace and were shot down. India captured two pilots who had bailed out over Indian soil.15
The battle suited India’s strategic purposes. General Jacob later confessed that the air battle had been controlled from his command at Fort William in Calcutta. D. P. Dhar, one of the most bellicose officials in India’s ruling circles, welcomed war but wanted to be sure that, when it came, it detonated out of the civil war in East Pakistan. India, he wrote, would need to be “able to furnish the elaborate pretext” that India was helping with a Bengali “war of liberation.”16
Just as important, this clash was right on schedule for India. According to Jacob, when Indira Gandhi first asked the army to march into East Pakistan back in April, he had told her that the earliest they would be ready for war was November 15. General Sam Manekshaw, on his own account, had wanted six months to prepare. When November 15 came, Jacob privately wrote to another general, “In the East conditions are ripe for a swift offensive.” It was the season for war: the monsoons were over; the army had had time to train; and wintry weather in the Himalayas would foil any Chinese troops.17
That morning at the White House, Kissinger burst into Haldeman’s office saying that India had attacked Pakistan. Relying only on Pakistani radio broadcasts, unsure of what was really going on, Kissinger sounded the alarm to Nixon. There was, he told the president by telephone, a big encroachment taking place, “heavily backed by the Indians.” Nixon stormed that he wanted Kissinger to “lay it out hard” that all aid would be stopped to both India and Pakistan, which would “hurt the Indians more.”18