by Gary J. Bass
Nixon told Kissinger, “by God, I can’t emphasize too strongly how I feel.” The president was lost in bitter rage. “[W]e are not going to roll over after they have done this horrible thing,” he ordered Kissinger. “[W]e will cut the gizzard out.” Kissinger passed this presidential fire on down through the ranks. Nixon, he pointedly informed underlings, was “raging” or “raving.” He told a Situation Room meeting, “I’ve been catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the President who says we’re not tough enough.”15
Nixon immediately ordered a stop to military and economic aid to India. He ordered Kissinger to scour every option to punish that country. As Kissinger told Alexander Haig, his deputy, “He wants to cut off all aid; he thinks I’m too soft”—a thought that made Kissinger burst out laughing. Nixon aimed to do lasting economic damage by cutting off aid to India for a long time.16
Both Nixon and Kissinger only regretted not tilting more toward Pakistan. On arms shipments to Pakistan, Nixon—unconcerned that Pakistan had used U.S. weapons for domestic repression rather than foreign defense—wished that he had given more. He thought that cutting off U.S. military assistance to Pakistan might have encouraged India to attack its weakened enemy. Kissinger wished that the administration had boldly cut off military and economic aid to India earlier, which might have held India back.17
For Kissinger, this was no mere local clash, but a Cold War contest of wills against the Soviet Union: “here we have Indian-Soviet collusion, raping a friend of ours.” He told the president, “if we collapse now, the Soviets won’t respect us for it; the Chinese will despise us”—which, he said, would wreck their opening to China. He argued that all their foreign achievements were coming undone: “The Russians are playing for big stakes here.” If the White House backed down, “this will then be the Suez ’56 episode of our Administration.”18
Kissinger expected that the war would lead to Yahya’s overthrow. Nixon was cut to the quick at the thought. “It’s such a shame,” he said mournfully. “So sad. So sad.”19
Nixon and Kissinger reviled Indira Gandhi. Nixon intoned, “she says she is not going to be threatened by a country of whites 3 or 4 thousand miles away. Well, she didn’t object to the color of our money.” The president worried “whether or not I was too easy on the goddamn woman when she was here.” Kissinger thought he probably should have “recommended to you to brutalize her privately.” Nixon vowed that “she’s going to pay. She’s going to pay.”20
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s wrath also encompassed the Indian people. When Nixon noted that some people might not want to alienate millions of Indians, Kissinger cut him off: “Well, but we haven’t got them anyway, Mr. President.” Nixon agreed: “We’ve got their enmity anyway. That’s what she’s shown in this goddamn thing, hasn’t she?” Kissinger asked, “when have these bastards ever supported us?” “Never,” said Nixon. Early in the war, the president said, “The arguments from the New York Times and others will be ‘we will buy ourselves a century or decades of hatred and suspicion from the Indian people.’ Bullshit!” Decades of U.S. foreign aid had only bought “hatred and suspicion from the Indian people.” “Exactly,” said Kissinger. “Tell me one friend we’ve got in India, do you know any?” “Exactly,” said Kissinger.21
The Democrats, Nixon said, would “probably say we’re losing India forever. All right, who’s going to care about losing India forever?” Kissinger said, “We’ve got to keep the heat on them now. They have to know they paid a price. Hell, if we could reestablish relations with Communist China, we can always get the Indians back whenever we want to later—a year or two from now.” He did not seem to grasp how winning back hundreds of millions of angry Indian citizens might be different from winning over Zhou Enlai. “I don’t give a damn about the Indians,” Nixon later said. Soon after that, he scorned elites who worried that “we’ll lose six hundred million Indians.” With withering sarcasm, he said, “Great loss.”22
KISSINGER IN CRISIS
Henry Kissinger has burnished the image of himself as supremely coolheaded in a crisis—the real person you want to get that phone call at three o’clock in the morning. But to Nixon and his senior team, Kissinger, already worn out from the strain of handling the China opening and the Vietnam War, appeared to be coming frighteningly unglued. After months dedicating himself to preventing a major war, he had failed. His voice was shot, which Nixon thought was due to tension. He seemed exhausted and irrational.23
Alone in the Oval Office with H. R. Haldeman, the president suggested—in an empathetic, almost fatherly tone—that Kissinger’s problem was “maybe deep down recognizing his own failure. Now that’s what my guess is.” Haldeman agreed it was “a self-guilt thing.” Nixon said, “I think he’s gotten emotional. He sounded awfully fatigued to me.” Haldeman agreed that the “overexcited” Kissinger got “over-depressed about his failures.”24
Nixon, fatalistically convinced that nothing could have been done to prevent the war, said Kissinger “feels very badly about this thing, because he always has a feeling that something we have done could have avoided it.” After yet another tiff with the State Department, Kissinger stormed into Haldeman’s office to say he would have to resign. “He’s mixed up,” said an exasperated Nixon. “He’s tormented internally,” agreed Haldeman. A few weeks later, after press criticism about anti-Indian policies set Kissinger off again, the president’s aide John Ehrlichman noted, “Nixon wondered aloud if Henry needed psychiatric care.”25
Enervated and humiliated, out of favor with the president, Kissinger became erratic in his behavior. In his fury, he turned apocalyptic, invoking the 1930s in ways that spooked even the most rock-ribbed White House officials. Haldeman warned Nixon that a “raging” Kissinger “talks about Chamberlain, and how this is our Rhineland.” Even Haldeman, no squish, recoiled at Kissinger’s “doomsday” talk of World War II. He dismissed the analogy of “Germany taking the Rhineland or something like that, but I mean there’s a little difference there. India doesn’t have a plan for world conquest.”26
Nixon pointed out that Kissinger, scapegoating the bureaucracy, “really has the inability to see that … he himself is ever wrong.” George H. W. Bush found Kissinger paranoid and out of control. “Henry is very excitable, very emotional almost,” he wrote privately. While admiring Kissinger’s intelligence and wit, he noted that he “is absolutely brutal on these [State Department] guys, insisting that they don’t know anything and asking why they are screwing up policy etc. I went through that, and … had a little bit of a battle myself.”27
So the war arrived with Kissinger seeking vindication, needing a win to bolster his standing with the president. For all his commitment to dispassionate realpolitik, he seemed propelled almost as much by emotion as by calculation. He would not admit that the United States had missed opportunities to avoid war by pressuring Pakistan. Despite having spent months denying that the United States bore responsibility for Pakistan’s actions, he now wholeheartedly blamed the Soviet Union for India’s. Nixon, despite his visceral hatred of India, saw the bigger picture: this was just one crisis in just one part of the world, where the United States was playing a losing hand. But Kissinger, in his despondency and rage, kept trying to escalate. He wanted to force the Soviet Union to back down.28
ONE WAR ON TWO FRONTS
India waged starkly different campaigns in the east and west, with goals as dissimilar as the terrain. In the east, Indian troops fought a blazingly rapid war for the independence of Bangladesh, racing across swampland toward a decisive victory in Dacca, needing to get there before the United Nations Security Council stopped them in their tracks. Before the war, D. P. Dhar wrote to Haksar that they needed to finish up completely within eight days before foreign intervention halted them.29
Thus, as Indian generals argued, charging to Dacca itself was a fast way to secure Bangladesh. While blocking the territory’s ports and airfields from any help from the West Pakistanis, the Indian army launched a devastating a
ssault of several different forces of infantry and armor.30
No such feats were possible on the western front. There Pakistan meant to punish India and gain land in Kashmir to compensate for eastern losses; as Pakistan’s generals used to say, the defense of East Pakistan was in the west. West Pakistan itself was a tough redoubt, with invaders facing highly motivated Pakistani troops in bunkers and pillboxes, defenses such as antitank ditches, and, as Jacob noted respectfully, a “well equipped force strong in armour.” Indian forces were only somewhat stronger than Pakistan’s there, without the kind of decisive superiority required for a successful offensive. So India and Pakistan became locked in a bloody but inconclusive stalemate, with tanks dustily clashing in the desert or in the mountains of Kashmir. General Manekshaw later said that his troops kept a “mainly defensive posture” against West Pakistan, only launching “limited offensives” meant to defend communications and bases and to improve their positions in Kashmir.31
Pakistan, encouraged by long months of White House support, hoped for foreign succor and perhaps intervention. As the CIA noted before the war, Pakistan’s “prideful, honor-conscious generals” might suddenly assault India, knowing defeat was likely, but hoping for good luck or a timely intervention by the great powers. Manekshaw would later speculate that Pakistan had attacked in the hope of grabbing large parts of Kashmir to compensate for the amputation of Bangladesh, and “to internationalise the whole issue and rouse World opinion, especially the USA in the hope of preventing INDIA from striking back. They were also perhaps expecting much more help from CHINA.”32
When Yahya attacked on December 3, he obviously had in mind something like the Israeli air force’s preemptive strike on Egyptian airfields in the Six-Day War in 1967, to be followed by devastating advances on the western front. He failed. India had dispersed and protected its air force in anticipation, and the Pakistani attack proved surprisingly ineffectual.33
Indian MiG-21 fighter-bombers pounded Dacca’s airport. Thousands of people watched thunderstruck from the crowded city’s streets and rooftops as Pakistani F-86 Sabre jet fighters fought them in quicksilver dogfights. The air was thick with flak, appearing as red tracers at night and puffy white smoke in daylight. In the U.S. consulate in Dacca, some of Archer Blood’s remaining dissenters cheered the Indians on. “It’s hard to describe this without seeming callous,” says Desaix Myers, the rebellious junior development officer, “but we were taking sides at this point. We didn’t think that Pakistan was going to be able to put it back together, we thought that what Pakistan was doing was wrong, we thought they needed to be controlled, we thought that Indira had to take action, we wanted the army to reach Dacca as soon as possible and to end the war.” Holed up at the Intercontinental Hotel, with blackout curtains on the windows, they could watch Indian warplanes flying in to bomb the airport, coming out of the sun to make themselves a harder target.34
The Indian air force—which had a three-to-one advantage in aircraft—quickly established mastery of the eastern skies, pulverizing the Dacca airfield into uselessness, and wiping out most of Pakistan’s small collection of warplanes in the east. With this air superiority, India’s air force provided cover for its advancing troops below, and pummeled Pakistan’s remaining warplanes and airfields, radar units, fuel dumps, and armored columns.35
Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the general officer commanding-in-chief of the Indian army’s Eastern Command—a tough and brainy Sikh soldier, with sharp eyes and upturned mustache—would later call the fight for Bangladesh “the battle of obstacles.” He and Jacob, his chief of staff, raced their troops across terrain unforgivingly sliced by fast-flowing rivers and streams, improvising as they went, relying on engineers, bridging equipment, and rivercraft to get the troops across. Adding to the challenge, the Mukti Bahini guerrillas had already blown up many of the bridges.36
But the Mukti Bahini—who would later in the war be brought under General Aurora’s command—more than compensated by establishing bridgeheads and organizing local transport for the Indian troops. These Bengali rebels, relying on the support of local civilians, sped the Indians’ advance with riverboats, rickshaws, and bullock carts. Bengali villagers carried guns and ammunition across their familiar countryside for the Indian troops. At one point, twenty locals pushed a 5.5-inch medium gun through a boggy rice field, with other Bengalis carrying its ammunition.37
India’s air superiority left the Indian columns free to advance without fear of strafing from enemy warplanes, without having to disperse or take cover. India used helicopters to drop battalions of paratroopers deep inside East Pakistan, to link up with the Mukti Bahini and, eventually, the Indian army. To General Jacob’s satisfaction, they went ahead with a big paratrooper drop precisely on schedule with the war plan—confident enough of their air supremacy to land the paratroopers in daylight. The helicopters became, in an Indian general’s words, an “air bridge.”38
With Pakistani soldiers dug into bunkers and fortified positions, the Indians preferred to bypass them rather than attack them directly, leaving behind enough Indian troops—or in many cases a Mukti Bahini force—to keep the Pakistanis stuck there. “We went around the towns and went straight for Dacca,” recalls Admiral Roy. There was no time to capture cities. Bent on reaching Dacca, Indian troops wound up taking only two major towns, Jessore and Comilla. Rather than taking the highways, which were sure targets, the Indians tried to go on dirt roads or through fields, helped along by the Mukti Bahini’s peerless knowledge of the local riverine terrain. In a bombed-out school, an Indian officer told Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, “We are kicking the shit out of them.”39
In many places, like Jamalpur, the Indians faced pitched resistance from the Pakistan army. “Give my love to the Muktis,” wrote one Pakistani colonel in reply to an Indian demand for surrender, enclosing a Chinese-made bullet in his letter. At another village, Schanberg, who accompanied an Indian tank unit, remembers staring in horror at charred Pakistani soldiers in a trench that had been blown up by tank fire. In a field, he counted twenty-two dead Pakistani soldiers in their bunkers, some of them seemingly peaceful, but others mangled or torn apart by Indian artillery bursts. One bunker had collapsed completely, with two booted feet sticking up from what had become a grave.40
The Mukti Bahini fought alongside the Indians. As a Bangladeshi commander later bragged, “Once again we demonstrated to the world that the Bengalis are a fighting martial race.” After an Indian pilot got shot down, the rebels sheltered him. When the insurgents attacked Pakistani soldiers, terrified villagers fled, sometimes getting cut down in the crossfire. Wading knee deep through the muddy water, one rebel incongruously remembered small fish “friskily moving around … playing their own games in their own world.” This guerrilla recalled his jubilation while watching the “beautiful” sight of three Indian Gnat fighter planes swooping down out of a clear sky toward Pakistani gunboats on a river, followed by blasts and dense smoke.41
The euphoric Indian troops were greeted with cheers and hugs from the local Bengalis. As the Indian army advanced, Schanberg noticed that nervous Bengali civilians followed about a mile or two behind them, hoping to return to their homes. Some, the victims of final spiteful attacks by the retreating Pakistanis, would not make it. The New York Times reporter saw two dead Bengali civilians left in a field to be gnawed by dogs, and another with his left arm sliced off and his chest torn open. For their part, some of the Mukti Bahini and Bengalis took cruel revenge on Pakistani troops and collaborators. Despite Indian army orders against reprisal executions, an Indian army captain saw the mutilated corpses of Pakistani soldiers, their fingers and nipples slashed off and their throats cut.42
On both sides, as even partisans had to admit, soldiers fought with extraordinary courage. Still, with the Pakistan army crumbling in the east, India urged the enemy troops to surrender rather than die for no reason. Manekshaw broadcast repeated appeals emphasizing that prisoners of war would be treated honorab
ly under the Geneva Conventions. There was another, nastier incentive for the Pakistanis to yield to the Indians: as senior Indian officials surmised, Pakistani troops would probably fare better if they surrendered to Indian soldiers rather than to the Mukti Bahini.43
India’s victories were not just the product of the bravery of its soldiers, but also the quality of their equipment and weapons—the fruit of India’s own defense industry and Soviet support. Manekshaw thanked the Soviet Union for its camouflaged PT-76 amphibious light tanks, which could handle mud and marsh in Bangladesh, and its Mi-4 transport helicopters, which got Indian troops across streams and rivers, and evacuated wounded soldiers. India’s sturdy Soviet-made T-55 medium tanks could take out Pakistan’s U.S.-made M-54 Chaffee light tanks. Soviet commanders, proud as Indian troops redeemed the iffy reputation of their armaments, praised India’s armed forces with their highest compliment: comparing them to Soviet fighters in World War II.44
As Indian troops and Bengali guerrillas closed in on Dacca, the non-Bengali minority in Bangladesh—the Urdu-speaking Biharis, many of whom had supported Pakistan—were at terrible risk of vengeful atrocities by the Mukti Bahini. Yahya told Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador, that India would kill “not thousands but millions.” Farland, echoing that, alerted the State Department to the “potential … for one of the greatest blood lettings” of the century, with Bengalis mercilessly taking revenge upon Biharis who had helped the West Pakistanis. Bihari men, women, and children would be butchered, he wrote, unless the Indian army prevented it. A senior United Nations official in Dacca warned that Biharis had gathered there, “armed to the teeth,” gripped by “animal fear” exacerbated by “threats of reprisals” on All India Radio.45
Kissinger responded well. He swiftly wanted to call on all parties to prevent massacres. So the United States urged India to prevent retaliation against Biharis and—as India had already pledged to do—treat Pakistani troops humanely under the Geneva Conventions. Of course, Kissinger had shown no such alacrity when the Bengalis were slaughtered; since the Biharis were, in his eyes, Pakistani citizens facing peril from other Pakistani citizens, their protection should not have been an international concern; and the White House was plainly seeking to puncture India’s pretense of moral superiority. He told Nixon that “in six months the liberals are going to look like jerks because the Indian occupation of East Pakistan is going to make the Pakistani one look like child’s play.” Nixon was eager for signs of Indian atrocities: “Here they are raping and murdering, and they talk about West Pakistan, these Indians are pretty vicious in there, aren’t they? Aren’t they killing a lot of people?” Even when his own officials denied him such evidence, he persisted, at one point furiously saying, “Henry, I just want the Indians to look bad. I want them to look bad for bombing that orphanage”—an incident that the U.S. consulate and the UN representative in Dacca believed had actually been done by a Pakistani airplane, in order to discredit India’s air force. But such hypocrisies are beside the point. The United States was asking for decent behavior, which could save innocent lives. It was right to do so.46