by Gary J. Bass
The president took some comfort in the fact, relayed by Kissinger, that Jordan had illegally sent warplanes to help Pakistan. But Nixon complained that “when the chips are down India has shown that it is a Russian satellite.” He fumed, “I know the bigger game is the Russian game, but the Indians also have played us for squares here. They have done this once and when this is over they will come to us ask us to forgive and forget. This we must not do.”113
Soon after, Kissinger telephoned the president to report the cease-fire in the west. Kissinger saw this as an enduring achievement for himself. Jolly once again, he tried to cheer Nixon up: “Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved W[est] Pakistan.” Nixon brooded, not wanting Indira Gandhi to gloat in victory. “She shouldn’t get credit for starting the fire and then calling in the fire department,” he said. “It’s back to Hitler.”114
Kissinger savored a victory lap. He separately told Haldeman and George Shultz, “We have turned disaster into defeat,” and thanked John Connally, the anti-Indian Treasury secretary, for giving him “the moral courage to do it.” He spent the rest of the day calling reporters to claim credit and working the phones to try to cobble together a feeble United Nations Security Council resolution. About the Indians, he told the British ambassador, “I don’t know how you tolerated them for those years.” Kissinger joked to Bush, “don’t screw it up the way you usually do.”
“I want a transfer when this is over,” replied George Bush. “I want a nice quiet place like Rwanda.”115
EPILOGUE
Aftermaths
The Cold War expired without a formal reckoning of the superpowers’ different crimes: no international war crimes tribunal, no truth commission. There was nothing like a Nuremberg after the glorious democratic revolutions of 1989. Americans and Russians have been able to walk away without serious afterthought.
But if Americans have been able to forget the legacy of 1971, the peoples of the subcontinent have not. The atrocities remain Bangladesh’s defining national trauma, leaving enduring scars on the country’s politics and economy. Economic development was always going to be difficult there, but the challenges were made much worse by the loss of so many people, the disruption of families and rural communities, the decimation of the ranks of the educated, the devastation of infrastructure, the radicalization of political life, the widespread availability of leftover weapons from the insurgency, and the burden of getting the refugees back home.1
Nor could Bangladesh depend on India, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger feared it would. Although India, proving as good as its wartime word, quickly agreed to withdraw its troops from the new country, relations between the two neighbors rapidly soured. P. N. Haksar told Indira Gandhi, “Bangla Desh at present is, politically speaking, a primordial slime. Out of this chaos, cosmos has to be created.” The Bangladeshi government found the embrace of their Indian liberators stifling, with politicians making prickly complaints about the gargantuan shadow that India cast.2
Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, freed from a West Pakistani jail, set up a new democracy, but it did not endure long. As Haksar and other Indians had warned, Bangladesh’s underdevelopment and poverty proved overwhelming. Mujib’s government quickly sank into corruption. As the Indian foreign ministry noted nervously, the rural poor were hungry, while the middle class were disillusioned as their living standards declined. In December 1974, Mujib seized emergency powers for himself, gutting the democratic constitution that he had helped fashion. Then in August 1975, army officers launched a violent coup, storming Mujib’s Dacca house and shooting him dead, as well as his wife, brother, sons, and daughters-in-law. (Today, the house is a gruesomely preserved museum, displaying bloodstains on the steps and brain matter that splashed up onto the ceiling.) Bangladesh plunged into unrest and instability, with a brief flickering period of civilian rule followed by another coup, and then another. Haksar asked what was next: “Another night of the long knife?”3
Today, India stands aloof from Bangladesh. The two countries squabble about border enclaves, bizarre leftovers from Partition: tiny bits of Bangladeshi territory that are inside India, and little blobs of Indian territory located inside Bangladesh. India has separated itself from its neighbor with armed guards at a massive fence with barbed wire, running along most of the border. Since 2000, Indian forces have killed almost a thousand Bangladeshis trying to get across the border.4
Yet in recent years, Bangladesh’s investments in education have paid off, with reduced poverty and a nascent middle class. Even with crumbling infrastructure and awful—sometimes lethal—working conditions in the vital garment industry, even though millions of people still have no hope of anything more lucrative than subsistence farming, Bangladesh has managed impressive and sustained economic growth. But the country still suffers from broken politics. Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, is currently prime minister, and a rather awful one. There are unexplained disappearances and killings; Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate who broke new ground in microcredit, is hassled by the authorities; corruption is endemic; and opposition politicians face arrest or harassment. There are angry street protests.
While there is a new war crimes tribunal charged with the atrocities of 1971, it is only pursuing Bangladeshis accused of collaborating with Yahya’s regime—which conveniently implicates members of the country’s biggest Islamist party, opponents of Sheikh Hasina. True justice for the horrors is vital, but the slanted trials so far have failed to live up to both Bangladeshi and international standards of due process. Showing how deeply Bangladeshis still feel the wounds of 1971, when a defendant got a life sentence rather than the death penalty, that was enough to spark the largest mass demonstrations in Dacca in the past two decades.5
It will be up to Bangladeshis to fix their own politics, but Americans should realize that this distant people’s task has been made harder from the outset by the U.S.-backed horrors of 1971. If an apology from Henry Kissinger is too much to expect, it would be an act of decency for the U.S. government to recognize a special American responsibility to make amends to the Bangladeshi people.
PAKISTAN
Pakistan was stunned by its military defeat. The population was in shock, dazed and resentful. During the war, the state-controlled press had falsely told Pakistanis that their army was winning; when the government abruptly lifted censorship, Pakistanis were unprepared for the hard slap of reality. They suddenly learned about the army’s atrocities and military defeats, leaving people disillusioned and disgusted.6
This second partition was devastating for Pakistan. “They know that India was the midwife of Bangladesh,” says Scott Butcher, the junior political officer in the U.S. consulate in Dacca back in 1971. “They [India] defeated the military, which is proud. That was a real sock in the gut for Pakistani dignity. They lost half their country and more than half their population.”
Yahya himself was so much in denial that he defiantly vowed to keep fighting for the east. But in the city streets of what had been West Pakistan and was now simply a truncated Pakistan, crowds screamed for Yahya and his cronies to be put on trial as traitors. Infuriated by Yahya’s drinking, mobs in Karachi burned liquor stores. The CIA reported that some of the military and the public thought he should commit suicide. Days after Dacca fell, Nixon’s friend reluctantly announced that he was resigning, swept aside by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Despite his electoral success back in 1970, Bhutto came to Pakistan’s presidency under a cloud: some Pakistanis blamed him for an aggressive obduracy in the constitutional negotiations that had helped lead to the current catastrophe.7
Piling on the humiliation, India worked energetically to frame the defeat as a foundational challenge to Pakistan’s ideal of itself as an Islamic nation. Indian thinkers rejected Pakistan’s “two-nation theory,” the belief that Hindus and Muslims comprised two distinct nations—which Haksar called “the purest fiction ever invented by the human mind.” The creation of Bangladesh “has sounded a death knell to the so-called two-nation the
ory,” gloated a senior Indian diplomat, rubbishing the “concept of Pakistan as an Islamic State.” Although Indians underestimated Pakistan’s reliance on other ideals such as nationalist modernization, Pakistanis still grapple with this breakdown. More than a decade after the war, the journalist Tariq Ali wrote, “The ‘two-nations’ theory, formulated in the middle-class living rooms of Uttar Pradesh, was buried in the Bengali countryside.”8
Nor did Pakistani leaders believe that India was done hammering them. In June 1971, Swaran Singh, India’s foreign minister, had secretly told his diplomats about other ways to crack up West Pakistan itself, by stirring up rebellion in restive areas such as Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province—hoping to get those places to follow Bangladesh’s lead. After the success of Indian intelligence in covertly sponsoring the Mukti Bahini, Indian officials pushed to expand the use of the spy agencies more widely. Disastrously, this came to include R&AW sponsorship of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who went on to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi.9
Among the mandarins in India’s ruling circles, Jaswant Singh is one of the most sympathetic to Pakistani fears. He says, “Now when you say, ‘Come on, it’s over. Why do you sink yourself into this hellhole of state-sponsored terrorism? Why do you try to kill India with a thousand cuts?’ Friends in Pakistan tell me, ‘Well, we can’t forget ’71.’ It simmers.” Arundhati Ghose, Haksar’s protégée at the Indian foreign ministry, says, “We haven’t yet absorbed that the Pakistanis today are not thinking about Partition anymore. It’s ’71 that they agonize about. That’s what they hold against India. That we split their country. It was already difficult, but it’s a very powerful thing from the Pakistani side of it. There’s terrible resentment. We don’t seem to be aware of it.”
This trauma could have been an opportunity for self-examination in Pakistan. As one of Yahya’s ministers later wrote, “The Pakistan Army’s brutal actions … can never be condoned or justified in any way. The Army’s murderous campaign in which many thousands of innocent people including women, the old and sick, and even children, were brutally murdered while millions fled from their homes to take shelter either in remote places or in India, constituted a measureless tragedy.” Days after the shooting stopped, Bhutto set up a judicial commission to investigate the battlefield defeat in East Pakistan. Led by Pakistan’s chief justice as well as two other eminent judges, it produced a scathing official record condemning the military for corruption, turpitude, and brutality, and demanding courts-martial for Yahya, Niazi, and other disgraced military leaders. While the report concentrates on military defeats, it includes frank testimony on the atrocities from senior army officers and civilian officials. This judicial commission, convinced that “there can be no doubt that a very large number of unprovoked and vindictive atrocities did in fact take place,” urged Pakistan’s government to set up a “high-powered court or commission of inquiry” to “hold trials of those who indulged in these atrocities, brought a bad name to the Pakistan Army and alienated the sympathies of the local population by their acts of wanton cruelty and immorality against our own people.”10
But nothing happened. The report was so harsh on the military that it was suppressed, and only came to light in an Indian magazine in 2000 and in Karachi’s intrepid Dawn newspaper in 2001. While Bhutto was keen to discredit the likes of Yahya and Niazi, he—far from facing up to the horrors—refused to accept losing Bangladesh and insisted on the necessity of the crackdown. “I would have done it with more intelligence, more scientifically, less brutally,” Bhutto told an interviewer, heaping all blame on “Yahya Khan and his gang of illiterate psychopaths.” Bhutto put the notorious General Tikka Khan in charge of the army, insisting that during the massacres “he was a soldier doing a soldier’s job.” (Tikka Khan later became a leader of the Pakistan People’s Party.) He denied not just the inflated Bangladeshi statistic of three million dead, but also the number of ten million refugees, insisting that Indira Gandhi had sent people from West Bengal. As for the women who were raped and killed, he flatly said, “I don’t believe it.” While saying that “such brutality” against the people was unnecessary, Bhutto defended the use of force at home: “You can’t build without destroying. To build a country, Stalin was obliged to use force and kill. Mao Tse-tung was obliged to use force and kill.”11
For liberal Pakistanis today, the year 1971 marks a failure to fashion a workable constitutional order. In Lahore’s Friday Times, Najam Sethi, an outspoken liberal journalist, recently criticized Pakistan’s effort to centralize its control in both the west and east wings, resulting in the “exploitation and repression” of the Bengalis: “The consequence of this false start was disintegration of the country in 1971 and the rise of dangerous sub-nationalisms and separatisms in what remains of Pakistan.” After all, the loss of East Pakistan, as grievous as that was, was always a rather likely event. Anatol Lieven, an eminent Pakistan expert with deep sympathy for the country, has thoughtfully argued that the real catastrophe was the “terrible circumstances” in which Bangladesh left—more like Yugoslavia than Czechoslovakia—not the fact that it did. The separation, he believes, was all but inevitable.12
But Pakistani remembrances of 1971 usually omit the military’s own atrocities. The army, the big political parties, and many newspapers would all prefer to forget their responsibilities. Even someone as sophisticated as Benazir Bhutto remembered that, as a Harvard College student in 1971, she initially “refused to believe” American newspapers, and “found security in the official jingoistic line in our part of the world that the reports in the Western press were ‘exaggerated’ and a ‘Zionist plot’ against an Islamic state.” As she later forthrightly wrote, “How many times since have I asked God to forgive me for my ignorance?”13
To this day, the country’s memories about its treatment of its former east wing remain, as one leading Pakistani publication put it, shrouded in “a fog of confusion” or lost in “collective amnesia.” Although upper-level textbooks can be much better, many of Pakistan’s textbooks have whitewashed out the atrocities against Bengalis and falsely claimed that the United States wanted Pakistan divided. In the big cities, there is more awareness; in cosmopolitan Lahore, a recent poll found that 79 percent of youthful respondents remember that East Pakistan was treated unfairly. But overall, just 38 percent of young Pakistanis say that East Pakistan was dealt with unfairly, while 19 percent say it was treated fairly, and 40 percent simply do not know.14
This was the rubble out of which Bhutto had to rebuild his country. He sought out a new national identity and new foreign friends. Perhaps the most bizarre outcome of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s hell-bent support of Pakistan was that its new president and many of his fellow citizens felt betrayed by the United States.15
Bhutto had long been anti-American, but Pakistan’s dismemberment redoubled his suspicions. During the civil war, many Pakistani elites and army officers had seen the United States as fickle at best, or secretly scheming to rip Pakistan apart. Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, who surrendered to the Indian generals, bitterly claimed that his troops could have held out if not betrayed by conspiracies, and wrote that his humiliation suited the Americans. Other Pakistanis discerned a shadowy American plot—sometimes blamed in part on American Jews—to dismember their country.16
This is perplexing and unfair. Whatever else might be said of them, Nixon and Kissinger cannot be faulted for any lack of commitment to Pakistan. “In everything we do with Yahya,” Kissinger directed the U.S. ambassador in Pakistan, “we cannot have it said that we stabbed Pakistan in the back. This must be your guiding principle.” Kissinger instructed George H. W. Bush that Nixon “[d]oesn’t want anyone to say we pushed Pakistan over the edge.” During the war, Bhutto told Kissinger that “we are completely satisfied” with U.S. backing, and promised a lavish show of appreciation when peace came.17
But Nixon’s and Kissinger’s kind of support was not likely to win over ordinary Pakistanis. Their most enthusiastic acts on b
ehalf of Pakistan—encouraging Chinese military mobilization and illegal arms transfers through Iran and Jordan—were so secret that hardly anyone in Pakistan could have known about them. And the most conspicuous U.S. support went to the junta, not the public, even when Yahya showed contempt for democratic election results in both wings of the country. This was fundamentally an alliance with Yahya and his generals; when they were ousted and discredited, it left little popular goodwill.18
Instead, Bhutto’s Pakistan cooled toward the United States and turned to other countries for succor. In 1972, China used its first United Nations Security Council veto to block the United Nations from admitting Bangladesh, which China saw as a breakaway province no better than Taiwan. (The United States, yielding to reality, would not go so far.) At the same time, Bhutto cast his lot with friendly Muslim countries, culminating in a gala Islamic summit in Lahore in 1974 for leaders such as Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya, who declared that Pakistan was the “citadel of Islam in Asia.” In 1973, Pakistan got a new constitution including some distinctly Islamic inflections, which grew more extreme during the ideological dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the general who overthrew Bhutto in a military coup in July 1977.19
Today the loss of Bangladesh is widely remembered in Pakistan as an early American betrayal, presaging a long series of them: a tepid U.S. response to India’s nuclear test in 1974, U.S. support for Zia’s authoritarianism, sanctions against Pakistan’s nuclear program, backing for Pervez Musharraf’s military regime in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and ongoing drone strikes. From the standard Pakistani nationalist viewpoint, in 1971, despite all of Pakistan’s help with Nixon’s opening to China, the United States was at best useless in preventing the loss of half the country.20