by Gary J. Bass
The Pakistanis, Kissinger said, were “saying it’s war.” Nixon said, “And the Indians say it isn’t.” Kissinger, still without the facts, insisted, “It’s a naked case of aggression, Mr. President.” Nixon sulkily pointed out that John Connally, the Treasury secretary, had told him that “the Indians have been kicking us in the ass for twenty-five years.” Kissinger said that they did not want an Indian assault that made Pakistan disintegrate. He suggested that if there were debates at the United Nations Security Council, the United States did not have to go as far as China—whose delegation spoke in wild Cultural Revolution polemics—in condemning India. Nixon exploded: “I want to go damn near as far! You understand? I don’t like the Indians.”19
The next day, Kissinger said, “India is outrageous.” India’s actions, he asserted, were part of a Soviet plan to humiliate the United States. While calling the Indians “those sons of bitches,” Kissinger prepared a high-minded stance against aggression for a press briefing: “ ‘It is against the Charter of the United Nations, it’s against the principles of this country,’ and make them attack us on that ground.” But when privately told that a discussion at the United Nations was the only way forward, Kissinger snapped, “Let’s not kid ourselves—that means Pakistan will get raped.”20
After the battle at Boyra, General Manekshaw quietly ordered the Indian army to launch new and increasingly brazen attacks into Pakistani territory. Although the CIA argued that this was a limited operation, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was convinced that Indian troops were involved. “There is no way guerrillas could get tanks and aircraft and be operating in brigade formation,” Kissinger said. “We can play this charade only so long. What kind of a world is it where countries can claim these are guerrilla actions?” Without evidence, he was sure that India had attacked with regular units inside East Pakistan’s borders. Kissinger decided that India had long been planning this attack. He seemed to compare India’s actions to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Lithuania in 1941: “You have 12 planes against 200. It’s the Germans claiming they were attacked by the Lithuanians.”21
Pakistan declared a state of emergency, and Yahya drunkenly told a New Yorker reporter that he expected to be at war within ten days. When a State Department official suggested that this might be a good time for Yahya to cut a deal with Mujib before it was too late, Kissinger—although indifferent to the thought of an independent Bangladesh (“We don’t give a damn”)—shot back, “So, India having attacked Pakistan, the logical conclusion is that we should squeeze Yahya to talk to Mujib. What Indian troops can’t achieve, we should achieve for them.” He fumed, “If the situation were reversed and Pakistani troops were moving into India, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be committing mass hara-kari, and there would be marches on Washington.”22
By chance, Kissinger was scheduled for his first secret meeting in New York with Chinese diplomats the day after the Boyra battle. Late at night, Kissinger—along with George Bush, Alexander Haig, and Winston Lord—snuck into a seedy CIA safe house in an old brownstone on Manhattan’s East Side to meet a Chinese delegation led by Huang Hua, the new ambassador at the United Nations. “For these purposes, Mr. Bush works directly for me,” Kissinger conspiratorially told the Chinese. “No one else in the Government except the people in this room knew about this channel.” Kissinger and Haig gave a military briefing, accusing Indian troops of attacking near Jessore and Chittagong—and tantalizingly suggesting that India had left its northern border with China exposed. “This violates every security rule,” said Kissinger, about his sharing of U.S. intelligence. They coordinated the Chinese and U.S. positions for United Nations Security Council debates. Demonstrating U.S. support for Pakistan, Kissinger told Huang that India had no right to use military force to relieve the pressure caused by the refugees. Soon after, Kissinger fretted about what China would think “if the friend of the United States and China in the subcontinent gets raped without any resistance.”23
The battle at Boyra was still something less than war. Indira Gandhi had full-scale invasion plans, but she did not launch them. Nor did Pakistan, which dithered in its response. While Kissinger was convinced this was clear Indian aggression, Nixon was at first skeptical about whether the clash really meant the start of war: a jet fight, he said, “doesn’t mean that there’s a damn war going on.”24
But Kissinger pressed him: “the guerrillas have been operating with brigade strength with artillery support and air support and tanks.” Won over, Nixon said, “It’s like North Vietnam still denying they are in South Vietnam.” He added, “They want Pakistan to disintegrate.” Thus he instructed Kissinger to tilt their policy toward Pakistan wherever they could. Kissinger, ratcheting up, said that India aimed at regional domination.
Although Nixon knew that India would win a war, his support for Yahya did not waver. “He’ll be demolished,” the president said. “Pakistan eventually will disintegrate.” Even now, at the eleventh hour, he never faltered in his sentimental attachment to Yahya. Rather than merely defending the Pakistani strongman as a tainted but necessary partner, Nixon repeatedly vouched for his friend’s integrity. “Yahya is a thoroughly decent and reasonable man,” he said. “Not always smart politically, but he’s a decent man.”
Nixon insisted that he bore no responsibility for the situation that he had allowed Yahya to unleash back in March. He did not want to “take the heat for a miserable war that we had nothing do with.” Kissinger bucked him up, saying that if they had made any mistake, it was being too hard on Pakistan. Nixon said, “We just got to get it across to the American people that we cannot be responsible for every goddamn war in the world.… We are not responsible for this war.” This battle, the refugees, Pakistan’s convulsions: “we couldn’t avoid that, could we?”25
Sydney Schanberg set out from Calcutta to prove that India was forging into Pakistani territory in several places. “The Indian army was making interventions that none of us are allowed to see,” he remembers. India was still officially denying that any of its troops had crossed the border; it had closed off the frontline areas to the press, and he was definitely not allowed to go to Boyra. But the New York Times reporter found a way. Each time he came to a checkpoint, he bluffed his way past by telling the Indian soldiers that he did not want to go to the border, he just wanted to talk to their lieutenant. This ruse got him to a staging area a few miles from the border, which was buzzing with military activity. In under two hours, he saw hundreds of troops stream past, heading for the border, on truck convoys that kicked up red dust. The soldiers had automatic weapons and full ammunition packs. There were trucks massing, covered with camouflage netting and loaded with ammunition. “They had everything from tanks and desks, office supplies,” he says. “You knew they were going inside.”
In the distance, he could hear artillery fire. The Indians stopped him. Schanberg found a group of officers drinking beer, and tried an old reporter’s trick. Rather than asking if they were inside East Pakistan, he simply assumed that they were. He told a major, “You must be kicking the bejesus out of the Pakistan army.” The Indian officer said yes, they were all the way to Jessore. Schanberg wrote it all down. He got his scoop plastered on the front page of the New York Times.26
Gandhi was finally forced to admit for the first time that Indian troops had gone into East Pakistan, although India claimed it was self-defense. At a raucous rally in Calcutta, India’s defense minister announced that its troops had permission to go as far into Pakistan as the range of Pakistani artillery, meaning several miles. At that event, a Congress party speaker cried, “India will break Pakistan to pieces.” Another declared, “We will make shoes out of Yahya’s skin.” In retaliation for Schanberg’s story, the West Bengal government canceled his border permit. Schanberg says that an Indian cabinet minister told him years later that they had debated throwing him out of the country.27
Nixon and Kissinger both wanted to slash all military aid t
o India. But Kissinger soon decided it was better to block the most crucial 70 percent of U.S. arms deals, saving the remainder in case of further misdeeds. As Kissinger told Nixon, they would cut off some $17 million of military supply, grounding India’s C-119 military transport planes, and stopping all ammunition.28
Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador in Delhi, was sent over to the Indian foreign ministry to break the bad news on December 2. (“He may start weeping all over them,” Kissinger said.) The Indian defense ministry privately pointed out that it could have been worse, but the Indian government was angered, and the public was shocked. Nixon also ended funding for a food program and stopped a loan, amounting to roughly $100 million.29
Gandhi was coldly determined. Shrugging off United Nations mediation, she denounced the ongoing “military repression and denial of basic human rights in East Bengal.” Keating found her more grim than he had ever seen her. She bluntly refused to pull back her troops to ease the pressure on Yahya: “we are not in a position to make this easier for him.” She did not see how she could tell Indians to keep waiting: “I can’t hold it.”30
On December 2, Pakistan’s ambassador told Kissinger that Yahya “wants to take further actions.”31
Chapter 18
The Fourteen-Day War
Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, had been preparing for war for months, and a bit longer too. The son of a prominent Sephardic Jewish family from West Bengal, he had learned how to box and shoot as a schoolboy in Calcutta. He liked it.
Jake Jacob was a stocky, robust bull of a man with heavy-lidded eyes. When Nazi Germany stepped up its persecution of European Jews, with Jacob’s family sheltering refugees who had fled as far as Calcutta, he decided there was an enemy that had to be defeated. So in 1941 he enrolled in the British army, he says, “to fight the Nazis.” His regiment got cut to pieces fighting off German troops in Libya, and Jacob was wounded in hellish swamp conditions in Burma, but he survived to enlist in an independent India’s army. After serving in the 1965 war against Pakistan, he rocketed up through the senior ranks. Jacob is the rare person who speaks fondly of Indira Gandhi, who charmed him with kindly questions about India’s Jews (her favorite musical, he says, was Fiddler on the Roof) and stories about her children. “I liked her very much,” he says. “I don’t care what other people say.”1
Jacob savors the fact that three of the Indian generals fighting against Pakistan were a Parsi, a Sikh, and a Jew. General Sam Manekshaw, India’s topmost army commander—a dashing and jovial Parsi veteran of World War II who sported an outsized bristling mustache—was, like Jacob, confident of victory.2
The Indian generals knew they had an overwhelming military advantage in East Pakistan. The CIA estimated that India’s army had 1.1 million soldiers overall, dwarfing Pakistan’s three hundred thousand. India had built up and modernized its war machine, and had planned coordinated efforts from its army, air force, and navy. In East Pakistan, the Indians had the enthusiastic support of much of the Bengali populace, as well as a local fighting partner in the Mukti Bahini, which pinned down the Pakistan army and offered deep knowledge of the terrain. Pakistan’s eastern troops were outnumbered, demoralized, and exhausted from trying to quash the Bengali citizenry and rebels. Archer Blood had always known East Pakistan was a military liability: “They could never defend it against India because it is surrounded virtually by India and separated by over a thousand miles.”3
India’s war plans bore this out. In the east, the Indians seem to have chosen a daring strategy, which Jacob says he proposed: “You go straight for Dacca. Ignore the subsidiary towns.” Several other generals hashed out the plan of attack, but they agreed on the core concept. As Jacob explains, “Dacca is the center of gravity, the geopolitical heart of East Pakistan. Unless you take Dacca, the war cannot be completed.”
It is a measure of how well the war went that India’s generals have squabbled about credit ever since. According to Jacob, when they discussed the plan back in August, Manekshaw and other generals had wanted to take the other two main cities, Chittagong and Khulna, which would make Dacca fall. Jacob says, “I said, ‘No way. Chittagong is peripheral. It has no bearing on the war.’ He said, ‘Sweetie, don’t’ ”—the endearment being Manekshaw’s way of prefacing a rebuke.4
PAKISTAN STRIKES
December 3, 1971, was a quiet political day in Delhi. Indira Gandhi was off in Calcutta, and her senior cabinet was scattered. A little before 6 p.m., air-raid sirens howled in the capital.5
“We were going to attack on December 4,” says Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, India’s director of naval intelligence. “They guessed it, I suppose.” Gandhi had reportedly approved General Manekshaw’s plans to attack on December 4, taking advantage of a full moon. According to K. F. Rustamji of the Border Security Force, he had instructions from the army for when war came. Their task was to force the Pakistani troops out of their bases and scatter them, and to fight skirmishes at the border. The rest would be handled by the army.6
But Pakistan struck first. At 5:30 p.m. on December 3, Pakistan’s air force launched coordinated surprise attacks on India’s major airfields in the north, in cities in Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Soon after, the Pakistan army began heavily shelling Indian army positions all along the western border, opening up a wide front in Punjab and Kashmir. In Kashmir, United Nations military observers reported an attack by Pakistani troops at Poonch. According to a Pakistani postwar judicial commission, Yahya had on November 29 decided on the assault, without knowing about India’s own plans to strike.7
In Calcutta, Gandhi—who had been addressing an immense rally of as many as a million people—privately said, “Thank God, they’ve attacked us.” She had wanted Pakistan to get the blame. Now it would. The prime minister showed no visible emotion when she got the news, but later that night as she winged back to Delhi, she was nervous that Pakistan’s air force might try to blow her airplane out of the sky. She met with her chiefs of staff, raced to the map room to take stock of the military situation, and then consulted with parliamentary leaders. She was in a gloweringly bad mood. One of her top aides remembered her “almighty rage” at an underwhelming speech her staff had hastily written for her. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the hawkish Jana Sangh politician, remembered her as “a picture of worry and concern.”8
The prime minister directed India’s armed forces to fight back. General Manekshaw later said that, with the prime minister and defense minister away, he had to decide to retaliate, and to have that decision approved later by the cabinet. After midnight on the night of December 3–4, Gandhi told Indians by radio, in a slow and grave voice, “Today the war in Bangla Desh has become a war on India.” On December 4, Yahya—having made his last big mistake—declared that Pakistan was at war with India.9
Yahya’s attack gave India the high moral ground. “We meet as a fighting Parliament,” Gandhi stormed before the Lok Sabha. “A war has been forced upon us, a war we did not seek and did our utmost to prevent.” She justified the war not merely as self-defense, but invoked liberty and human rights in Bangladesh. Writing to Richard Nixon, she condemned Pakistan’s aggression as well as its “repressive, brutal and colonial policy,” which “culminated in genocide.”10
Arundhati Ghose, the Indian diplomat posted in Calcutta, remembers, “We thought, now they’re going to hit Calcutta. It’s jammed with people. Even a firecracker would kill people.” In Delhi, people jumped at air-raid alarms in the dead of night and the sounds of jet aircraft overhead. But the country rallied behind the war. For all the theatrics—the government imposed a nightly blackout and encouraged civilians to dig trenches—the fighting was far away from the population centers, leaving most civilians feeling safe enough to enjoy the government’s reports of uninterrupted martial triumph. Despite his past criticisms, even Jayaprakash Narayan proclaimed his full support for Gandhi, arguing that there was no time for factionalism in this national emergenc
y. One Indian activist wrote, “I wish to thank God, in whom I do not believe, that a strong, determined and fearless person like Indira Gandhi is our Prime Minister at this time of crisis.” P. N. Haksar worked hard at using the government’s pronouncements to drive home “the why and wherefore” of the war to India’s citizenry.11
Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times recalls, “Jacob was delighted that night. Now we’ll show you what an army is.” Jacob’s superior was just as confident. “Don’t look so scared, sweetie,” General Manekshaw told the anxious officer who informed him of Pakistan’s attack. “Do I look worried?”12
In Washington, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, without the facts, were immediately convinced that India had started the war. The outbreak of war distilled all of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s resentments of India down to their essence. They would brook no dissent. They snapped into a state of self-righteousness, suddenly convinced that they and Pakistan had made herculean efforts, while India had done everything wrong.13
Kissinger, nobody’s fool, realized correctly that India had been waiting for the opportune moment for war: “they moved as early as they were able to. The rains were over; the passes from China were closed with snow; the Bangla Desh had now been trained and the Indians had moved their own forces.” But even if the Pakistanis had actually struck first, Kissinger forgivingly said, the U.S. line should be that they had been provoked into aggression: “it’s like Finland attacking Russia.”14