by Gary J. Bass
This set off Nixon, who fumed, “the Indians put on this sanctimonious peace Gandhi-like Christ-like attitude, and they’re the greatest, the world’s biggest democracy, and Pakistan is one of the most horrible dictatorships.” Bush followed Nixon’s lead, saying he had told the United Nations, “look, we’re talking about war and peace. We’re talking about invasion. We’re talking about 150,000 troops in the other guy’s country.” This was the early voice of the future president who would two decades later go to war to undo Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Still, showing a bit of bad conscience over the Pakistani atrocities that they were not mentioning, Bush said, “that’s the point where the United States is right. We’re trying to stop that. We’re not whitewashing Yahya.” Nixon pointed to the administration’s success in using its influence on Yahya over the refugees, United Nations observers, and talks with, as he put it, “Mujib deal and all that jazz.” Nixon admitted that much of the criticism of Yahya’s government was “justified,” but ringingly said that “it does not justify resort to invasion of another country. If we ever allow the internal problems of one country to be justification for the right of another country, bigger, more powerful, to invade it, then international order is finished in the world. That’s really the principle, isn’t it?” Bush agreed enthusiastically: “That’s the fundamental. And that’s why they lost the vote.”
Nixon warmed to the principle that a sovereign government could do whatever it wanted inside its own borders. He conceded that “as far as Yahya is concerned, there’s no clean hands there either. I mean, they handled this very clumsily, very badly.” But he and Bush reserved their anger for the Indians. The president growled, “They’re caught in a bloody bit of aggression.” He gave Bush his marching orders: “the main thing, as I say, all this yak, if you can constantly emphasize that world opinion, world opinion, it isn’t a question of being pro-democracy or against—anti-democracy, it’s not a question of being for six hundred million as against sixty million. Aggression is wrong. And the difference in size between countries does not justify it. The difference in systems of governments does not justify it. Aggression on the part of a democracy, if it is not justified, is just as wrong as aggression on the part of a dictatorship.” He concluded, “It is aggression that is wrong. That’s what the UN is built upon, after all. Those goddamn communist countries are all, if they engage in it, it’s wrong on their part, but if a democracy engages in aggression, it’s wrong.”
Bush had much more to say, but Nixon cut him off, said, “Knock ’em dead,” and hung up without saying goodbye.77
“I WANT TO PISS ON THEM”
At home, Nixon and Kissinger unleashed the full power of the White House to brand the war to Americans as flagrant Indian aggression. Any way they could—from Kissinger’s background briefings, Vice President Spiro Agnew, White House flacks, cabinet secretaries, State Department officials, and surrogates in Congress such as Gerald Ford—they got the word out. “Let the Indians squeal,” said Nixon. “Let the liberals squeal.”78
“I want a public relations program developed to piss on the Indians,” Nixon told Kissinger. “I want to piss on them for their responsibility.” He fumed, “I want the Indians blamed for this, you know what I mean? We can’t let these goddamn, sanctimonious Indians get away with this. They’ve pissed on us on Vietnam for 5 years, Henry.”79
The White House skillfully took advantage of Americans’ distaste for the Vietnam War. “Let’s let our opponents side with India at this time, with this aggression,” said Nixon. “People don’t like war. They’ll turn against it.”80
Kissinger set out to make the case against the Indians to the White House press corps. He contemptuously said that “of course, they are bleeding about the refugees. But it’s beginning to tilt against India.” In a press background briefing, he kept a straight face while saying that he was unaware if Nixon preferred Pakistan’s leaders over India’s. While deploring to the reporters the American public’s “love affair with India,” he privately grew confident that American support for India was shallow. He told Nixon, “The sons-of-bitches in this country can piss on you as much as they want.” He explained that “our liberal establishment” is “morally corrupt, but it’s also intellectually so totally corrupt. What they’re telling you is, in effect, to preside over the rape of an ally.” He added, “I don’t know which American likes India.” “Nobody,” said Nixon. “Except those intellectuals who are against you,” Kissinger added.81
Once the war started, Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats could not compete with the president’s bully pulpit. Nixon and Kissinger lashed back at their Democratic critics, encouraging Republican allies in Congress to decry India. After the United Nations General Assembly’s vote, Nixon gloated to Kissinger, “God damn, I must say, these Churches, Henry, and these Kennedys, and the New York Times, and the rest, and Time, they’ll look at that vote.” Kissinger urged him to go on the attack against Kennedy.82
Nixon thought of himself as a man of ideals, and justified his policies as a necessary moral stand against aggression. He insisted that something “that State needs to get pounded into its goddamned head” was that U.S. policy was not determined by “whether a country is a democracy or whether it is not a democracy.” He told Kissinger, “By God, we just don’t do it that way.… [A]n evil deed is not made good by the form of government that executes the deed, Henry. I mean, as I’ve often said, the most horrible wars in history have been fought between the Christian nations of Western Europe.” Aggression, he argued, was worse when committed by a democracy, because democracies should have higher moral standards. With satisfaction, he added, “I really think that puts the issue to these sons-of-bitches.”83
Driven by the White House’s campaigning, the American mood swung against India. Despite unease about Nixon’s own handling of the subcontinent’s war, Americans came to sympathize somewhat more with Pakistan than India. Many more Americans simply tuned out, not caring about either side or not being sure what was going on. As the president told Kissinger, “People don’t give a shit whether we’re to blame—not to blame—because they don’t care if the whole goddamn thing goes down the cesspool.” Nixon, while regretting that public opinion did not allow him to do more to help Pakistan, was reassured. “[T]hey’re not going to touch us with this thing,” he said. “Because, by God, the country doesn’t give a shit.”84
Kissinger was relieved. As the Pakistan army faced defeat in the east, he said, with his voice dripping contempt, “That means no one can bleed anymore about the dying Bengalis.”85
Chapter 19
“I Consider This Our Rhineland”
On December 7, Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, the commander of Pakistan’s Eastern Command, was haggard and exhausted. According to another general, he wept loudly in a meeting. After only a few days of combat, the Pakistan army was being routed in Bangladesh. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger became sincerely convinced that ripping Pakistan in half would not be enough for India. India could next redeploy its eastern forces for a crushing assault against West Pakistan.1
What was India fighting for: the liberation of Bangladesh or something more? “The destruction of Pakistan, which seemed to be the ultimate war aim at the time,” answers Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, without hesitation. “Indeed, she was ready to do it. We had pretty good information that this was under serious consideration in the war cabinet.” Once Bangladesh was secured, the White House staffer says, “Her intention was to move troops across northern India and attack in the west, to finish off this problem.” He says, “I know that it was being discussed actively with her generals and her top people.” This was intolerable for the White House. “This would be a mighty strategic defeat for the U.S.,” says Hoskinson. “She had taken on an ally and destroyed it. Nixon and Kissinger were always aware of national prestige.… This would be a total victory for the Soviets.”
Although the most sensitive wartime records are still secret, i
t is not clear that India was seriously trying to break apart West Pakistan. As Kissinger briefed Nixon, “the Indians still seem to be essentially on the defensive” in the west. Even if India could smartly finish up its eastern campaign, it would take more time to redeploy its troops westward than the Soviet Union, stalling a cease-fire at the United Nations, could accept: the CIA reckoned that it would take five or six days for India’s airborne division to move to the western front, and much longer for their infantry and armor fighting in the east. U.S. intelligence analysts argued that in order to hack apart West Pakistan, India would have to not just defeat the Pakistan army, but completely wipe it out—something probably beyond India’s capacities, even if it wanted to do so.2
Hoskinson’s verdict, echoing that of Nixon and Kissinger, depended heavily on raw intelligence from a CIA mole with access to Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. Based on this one source, the CIA reported that Gandhi meant to keep fighting until Bangladesh was liberated, India had seized a contested area of Kashmir currently controlled by Pakistan, and Pakistan’s armor and air force were “destroyed so that Pakistan will never again be in a position to plan another invasion of India.”3
It is still not certain who the mole was, nor how reliable he was. Many intelligence analysts doubted the report. For a start, the real debates and decisions happened in the prime minister’s secretariat, sometimes widening to include a small political affairs committee of key ministers, but certainly not the whole unwieldy cabinet of blabbermouths. It is true that Indian diplomats were evasive when asked about that contested area of Kashmir, and Indian officials later admitted wanting to gain some other small, strategic bits of territory in Kashmir—but they emphasized that Gandhi had overruled her hawks and insisted on waging a basically defensive war in the west. Whether the informant was worth much, the U.S. government relied overwhelmingly on this information.4
Kissinger, whose emotions were already running high, was jolted. He did not question the intelligence, which confirmed his preconceived view of India. He did not ask how India would manage such a major campaign against West Pakistan, nor about how it could extricate itself afterward. Instead, he decided that the United States needed to get much tougher on India. On December 8, he told Nixon, “the Indian plan is now clear. They’re going to move their forces from East Pakistan to the west.” They would then “smash” Pakistan’s army and air force and annex some of Kashmir. This, he argued—going beyond the CIA intelligence—could well mean “the complete dismemberment” of West Pakistan, with secessionism in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. “All of this would have been achieved by Soviet support, Soviet arms, and Indian military force.” So Soviet client states in the Middle East and elsewhere would feel free to attack with impunity, while China would think the Americans were “just too weak.” The crisis was, he told Nixon, “a big watershed.”5
Nixon was hit hard too. Like Kissinger, he swiftly accepted the intelligence, without wondering whether this was bluster or if India would really be so reckless, or asking skeptical questions about India’s military difficulties besieging West Pakistan. Both Nixon and Kissinger might have seen this one source as revealing hostile but standard Indian war aims in the west: some gains in Kashmir, substantial damage to Pakistan’s war machine, all of it limited by West Pakistan’s own formidable resistance. Instead, they foresaw the imminent annihilation of West Pakistan. Extrapolating beyond the CIA mole’s information, Nixon spoke of a U.S. intelligence “report on Mrs. Gandhi’s Cabinet meeting where she said that, she said deliberately that they were going to try to conquer West Pakistan, they were going to move their forces from the East to the West.”6
KISSINGER’S SECRET ONSLAUGHT
Yahya’s only hope was outside help from China and the United States. Pakistan’s General Niazi says that he was told to hold out for help from “Yellows from the North and Whites from the South”—the Chinese and the Americans. Kissinger urged Nixon to “scare them”—the Indians—“off an attack on West Pakistan as much as we possibly can. And therefore we’ve got to get another tough warning to the Russians.”7
Kissinger now proposed three dangerous initiatives. The United States would illegally allow Iran and Jordan to send squadrons of U.S. aircraft to Pakistan, secretly ask China to mass its troops on the Indian border, and deploy a U.S. aircraft carrier group to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India. He urged Nixon to stun India with all three moves simultaneously.
Kissinger knew that the American public would be shocked by this gunboat diplomacy. “I’m sure all hell will break loose here,” he said. Still, Nixon quickly agreed to all three steps: “let’s do the carrier thing. Let’s get assurances to the Jordanians. Let’s send a message to the Chinese. Let’s send a message to the Russians. And I would tell the people in the State Department not a goddamn thing they don’t need to know.”8
Nixon and Kissinger’s most perilous covert gambit was the overture to Mao’s China—already on poisonous terms with India. Kissinger believed that Zhou Enlai was somewhat unhinged when it came to India, and the deployment of Chinese soldiers could easily have sparked border clashes. Such a movement of Chinese troops would have made an effective threat precisely because of the danger of escalation out of control. At worst, this could have ignited a wider war.9
That, in turn, risked expanding into a nuclear superpower confrontation. If China was moving troops to help Pakistan, India would surely want the Soviet Union to do likewise. According to the CIA’s mole in Delhi, Indira Gandhi claimed that the Soviet Union had promised to counterbalance any Chinese military actions against India. Just two years before, China had set off hydrogen bombs in its western desert to threaten the Soviet Union. Would the Soviets dare to confront the Chinese? And if the Soviets got dragged in, how could the Americans stay out?10
Back on November 23, Kissinger had enticingly suggested to a Chinese delegation in New York that India’s northern border might be vulnerable. Now, on December 6, Nixon told Kissinger that he “strongly” wanted to tell China that some troop movements toward India’s border could be very important. “[D]amnit, I am convinced that if the Chinese start moving the Indians will be petrified,” the president said. “They will be petrified.” He shrugged off the obvious problem of winter snows in the Himalayas, admiringly recalling China’s bravery in the Korean War: “The Chinese, you know, when they came across the Yalu, we thought they were a bunch of goddamn fools in the heart of the winter, but they did it.”11
Kissinger had personally and repeatedly promised Indian leaders at the highest levels—including Haksar and Gandhi herself—that the United States would stand with India against threats of Chinese aggression. Now the Nixon administration was secretly doing the opposite.12
Kissinger was heartened at U.S. intelligence reports of truckloads of military supplies flowing from China into West Pakistan. But the CIA insisted that China was “keeping its head down,” neither prepared for nor capable of a full-scale war against India. In harsh mountainous terrain, it would be tremendously hard to move forces fast enough to matter. The CIA argued that it would take at least two months for China to get ready for a moderate amount of combat with India. Still, the CIA noted, with India’s “traumatic” memory of the last war with China, Chinese saber rattling and harassing attacks could cause real trouble for India, even without a war. India would have to divert large numbers of troops to guard its northern flank. As Kissinger wrote to Nixon, the CIA did think that China could launch smaller but still substantial military efforts, from “overt troop movements” to a “limited diversionary attack.”13
Kissinger linked the China gambit to the United States secretly providing aircraft from Iran and Jordan to Pakistan. On December 8, in the private office that Nixon kept in the ornate Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, Kissinger told the president that “we could give a note to the Chinese and say, ‘If you are ever going to move this is the time.’ ” Nixon immediately agreed. Kissinger did not think it would be so
simple to scare off the Soviet Union. He admitted that if the administration’s bluff was called, they would lose, but added that if they did not act now, they would definitely lose. Nixon was resolute, saying they had to “calmly and cold-bloodedly make the decision.”
The president argued that “we can’t do this without the Chinese helping us. As I look at this thing, the Chinese have got to move to that damn border. The Indians have got to get a little scared.” Kissinger agreed, proposing that they notify the Chinese about what Nixon was secretly doing, and tell them of the advantages of China moving some of its soldiers to India’s frontier. Nixon bluntly instructed Kissinger to go to New York, to the Chinese mission at the United Nations, with a message directly from him to Zhou Enlai. Kissinger, who wanted to impress the Chinese leadership by showing the administration’s toughness, guessed that China might start a small diversion—enough to prevent India from moving too many of its troops west.14
Nixon was tantalized by the prospect that the Chinese would move if they thought that the White House would act too. Although Kissinger cautioned that China had “just had a semi-revolt in the military” and had “a million Russians on their border,” the president said, “Boy, I tell you, a movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those goddamn Indians to death.”15
“IS IT REALLY SO MUCH AGAINST OUR LAW?”
Kissinger told Nixon, “We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.” That understates it. In fact, to help Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger knowingly broke U.S. law—and did so with the full awareness of George H. W. Bush, H. R. Haldeman, Alexander Haig, and others.16