by Gary J. Bass
Official opacity is far worse in India, despite the passage in 2005 of the landmark Right to Information Act. Indira Gandhi’s own papers as prime minister are still guarded jealously by the Gandhi dynasty. The best source on her foreign policy is P. N. Haksar’s papers, at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, as well as those of T. N. Kaul, also there. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library has been extraordinarily successful in building up its archival collections, and—despite some spectacular fights over access in recent years—generously makes them available to Indian and foreign scholars. The National Archives of India, too, provides access to an important collection of documents from the foreign ministry and the prime minister’s secretariat. But at all these Indian archives, the material is nowhere near as comprehensive as what has been released by the U.S. government, and often leaves out the most significant and controversial papers.
I have spelled out the dizzying plethora of abbreviations and acronyms used in U.S. and Indian cables. It is a diplomatic convention that cables to Washington are usually addressed to the secretary of state (SECSTATE WASHDC), and they are cited as such (e.g., Keating to Rogers). Where possible, I have identified the primary drafter or approver of a cable from Washington. Outgoing cables are routinely “signed” by the secretary of state, even when written by someone else; but unless I specifically cite William Rogers in the main text as the author of a cable, those are not his own words.
For the sake of simplicity, I have spelled the names of cities the same way that they were spelled in 1971, not the way they are spelled today: Dacca instead of Dhaka, and Calcutta instead of Kolkata.
Key to Citations
Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, California
NSC Files: National Security Council Files
White House tapes
Oval Office
White House telephone
Executive Office Building (EOB)
United States National Archives II, College Park, Maryland
R.G. (Record Group) 59: State Department papers
POL: Political affairs
REF: Refugee affairs
FRUS: the State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States series
United States Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection
National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
NSA: online at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/, and nsarchive.chadwyck.com/home.do
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi
NMML, P. N. Haksar Papers, III Installment
Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh Relations
Prime Minister’s Secretariat Files
India’s Relations with USSR, other countries, and United Nations
NMML, T. N. Kaul Papers, I–III Installment
Ministry of External Affairs papers
National Archives of India, Janpath, New Delhi
PMS: Prime Minister’s Secretariat papers
MEA: Ministry of External Affairs papers
Other Abbreviations in Notes
memcon: memorandum of conversation
telcon: telephone conversation
WSAG: Washington Special Actions Group
SRG: Senior Review Group
PREFACE
1. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Blood to Rogers, 7 April 1971, Dacca 1168. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Blood to Rogers, 30 March 1971, Dacca 986.
2. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Blood to Rogers, 30 March 1971, Dacca 986. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Blood to Rogers, 31 March 1971, Dacca 1010. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Bell to Shakespeare, 9 April 1971, Dacca 1211. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Blood to Rogers, 30 March 1971, Dacca 986.
3. Archer K. Blood, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat (Dacca: University Press of Bangladesh, 2002), p. 213. POL 23-9 PAK, Box 2530, Blood to Rogers, 28 March 1971, Dacca 959. POL 1 PAK-US, Box 2535, Blood to Rogers, 6 April 1971, Dacca 1138; NSC Files, Box 138, Kissinger Office Files, Country Files—Middle East, Blood to Rogers, 6 April 1971, Dacca 1138.
4. MEA, WII/109/31/71, vol. I, Singh statement to UN Security Council, 12 December 1971.
5. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984). Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). The United States was aligned with Iraq during the 1987–88 genocidal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds (Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 174), and turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein’s atrocities. While this is probably the example that comes closest to the Pakistani case, the United States and Pakistan were treaty allies with an enduring relationship—closer ties than those between the United States and Iraq (Power, “A Problem from Hell,” pp. 172–245).
6. NSC Files, Box 574, Indo-Pak War, South Asian Congressional, Kennedy speech, 23 September 1971. NSC Files, Box 570, Indo-Pak Crisis, South Asia, CIA Office of National Estimates, “The Indo-Pakistani Crisis,” 22 September 1971. Tad Szulc, “U.S. Military Goods Sent to Pakistan Despite Ban,” New York Times, 22 June 1971, pp. A1, A11. Indian officials spoke of a million dead, and Bangladeshis of three million, which are inflated numbers. Richard Sisson and Leo Rose interviewed a senior Indian official who stated the death toll at three hundred thousand (War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], p. 306n24). The New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg wrote that diplomats in Dacca believed that hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, perhaps as many as a million or more, had been killed (Sydney H. Schanberg, “Long Occupation of East Pakistan Foreseen in India,” New York Times, 26 December 1971, pp. A1, A13). A more recent study based on world health surveys came up with roughly 269,000 deaths (Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou, “Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia,” British Medical Journal, vol. 336 [28 June 2008], pp. 1482–86). Robert Dallek estimates that as many as five hundred thousand people were killed by Yahya’s troops (Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power [New York: HarperCollins, 2007], p. 335); so does Walter Isaacson (Kissinger: A Biography [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992], p. 372). On the low side, Pakistan’s postwar judicial inquiry—working from the army’s Eastern Command situation reports—estimated that the military had killed in action roughly twenty-six thousand people, while admitting that local commanders “tried to minimise the result of their own actions” (Government of Pakistan, The Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry into the 1971 War [Lahore: Vanguard, 2001], pp. 317, 340, 513; for a somewhat higher estimate in a book that is critical of Bangladeshi nationalism, see Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War [New York: Columbia University Press, 2011], p. 181). In South Asia, the tolls of death and dispossession are only rivaled by Partition, in which half a million or a million people died, and twelve million people were displaced (Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007], p. 6).
7. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: South Asia Crisis, 1971 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005), vol. 11, Louis J. Smith, ed., 40 Committee meeting, 9 April 1971, pp. 63–65. Hereafter cited as FRUS.
8. See, for instance, NSA, SRG meeting, 17 January 1972, 3:09–4:05 p.m., and NSC Files, Box 626, Country Files—Middle East, Pakistan, vol. VII, Hoskinson to Kissinger, 13 August 1971. Samuel Hoskinson wrote that an account of a talk with a senior Pakistani general was “phrased and sanitized so that it could be released to State and Defense without causing any problems.” Daun van Ee letter to author, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 30 September 2010, on file with author.
9. Dom Moraes, Mrs Gandhi (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), p. 188. For a mixed verdict, see Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1989), pp. 133, 188. MEA, HI/121/13/71,
vol. II, Sen statement to UN Security Council, 4 December 1971. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 90, 101–8; Michael Walzer, “On Humanitarianism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 90, no. 4 (July–August 2011), pp. 77–79; Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Reluctant India,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 22, no. 4 (October 2001), p. 100; Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael W. Doyle, “A Few Words on Mill, Walzer, and Nonintervention,” Ethics and International Affairs, vol. 23, no. 4 (2010), p. 363; Thomas M. Franck, Recourse to Force: State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 139–43; Subrata Roy Chowdhury, The Genesis of Bangladesh: A Study in International Legal Norms and Permissive Conscience (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1972); John Salzberg, “UN Prevention of Human Rights Violations,” International Organization, vol. 27, no. 1 (winter 1973), pp. 115–27; Richard Lillich, “The International Protection of Human Rights by General International Law,” in Report of the International Committee on Human Rights of the International Law Association, vol. 38 (1972), p. 54. For a cogent critique, see Thomas M. Franck and Nigel S. Rodley, “After Bangladesh,” American Journal of International Law, vol. 67 (1973), pp. 275–305. See Ramachandra Guha, “The Challenge of Contemporary History,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 26–27 (28 June 2008), pp. 192–200.
10. This book extends my argument that liberal states can be driven toward humanitarian intervention (Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008], pp. 11–38), expanding its scope from Europe to Asia, adding India as a least likely case: a liberal state, but one with a potent postcolonial doctrine against violating national sovereignty, unusually divided domestic politics, and a prime minister without a deep commitment to human rights. India was driven by an impure mix of humanitarian and strategic motives, but the presence of such humanitarian impulses in Indian domestic debates lends support to my argument about the impact of liberal norms and institutions. (Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], pp. 44–46, 209–12; see also Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975], vol. 7, pp. 79–137; Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997], pp. 49–88; and Robert H. Bates et al., Analytic Narratives [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998], pp. 3–18.) While India certainly wanted to harm Pakistan, that was always true, and does not explain why war came in 1971 rather than in previous years. Although India had particular solidarities with Bengalis and Hindus, that had less impact than might be expected, as will be discussed. The case studies in this book, of the United States and India, are also meant to fill out a wider collective empirical project of process-tracing about the decision making in massive human rights crises, including Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003); J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim, Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jennifer Welsh, ed., Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York: Holt, 1981); David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Power, “A Problem from Hell”; Bernard Kouchner, Le malheur des autres (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1991); Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Wheeler, Saving Strangers; Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); and Geoffrey Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Archer Blood could be remembered in the company of other Americans who tried to stop genocide, whose stories are recounted magnificently in Power, “A Problem from Hell” (see pp. 514–16).
11. FRUS: Documents on South Asia, 1969–1972, vol. E-7 (online at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve07), White House tapes, Oval Office 637-3, 12 December 1971, 8:45–9:42 a.m. Hereafter cited as FRUS, vol. E-7.
12. For a range of intelligent skepticism, left and right, see Alan Wolfe, Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2009); Jonathan Rauch, “When Moralism Isn’t Moral,” New York Times Book Review, 7 October 2011; “A Solution from Hell,” n+1, no. 12, August 2011.
13. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), p. 4. See Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Perry Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage,” London Review of Books, 5 July 2012, pp. 3–11. See Steve Coll, On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (New York: Times Books, 1994), pp. 33–52, 118–23, 262–63; Atul Kohli, ed., The Success of India’s Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, “Putting Growth in Its Place,” Outlook India, 14 November 2011; Ashutosh Varshney, “Is India Becoming More Democratic?” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1 (February 2000), pp. 3–25; Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, “Party Aggregation and the Number of Parties in India and the United States,” American Political Science Review, vol. 92, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 329–42; Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). For poverty numbers, see Nikhila Gill and Vivek Dehejia, “What Does India’s Poverty Line Actually Measure?” India Ink blog, New York Times, 4 April 2012. On inequality, see Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Breaking the Silence,” The Caravan, 1 October 2012, and Atul Kohli, Poverty amid Plenty in the New India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For a brilliant portrait of the real lives of poor Indians, see Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (New York: Random House, 2012).
14. For thoughtful skepticism, see Ramachandra Guha, “Will India Become a Superpower?” Outlook, 30 June 2008, and Coll, Grand Trunk Road, pp. 274–82, 88–91. For outstanding literary reflections of these events, see Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), pp. 419–55, and Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age (New York: Harper, 2008).
15. Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1977), p. v. The entire India-Pakistan crisis warrants just five cursory pages in Stephen Ambrose’s monumental three-volume biography of Nixon, which totals 1,933 pages of writing (not counting notes and bibliography). See Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon, 3 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988–91). There are good sections about Bangladesh in three excellent works—Isaacson’s Kissinger, Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger, and Seymour M. Hersh’s The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit, 1983)—although my project gives the crisis a more central place and tries to offer a mor
e comprehensively detailed account of it than would be practical for those already-long books. For a first-rate short account of U.S. policy, see Robert J. McMahon, “The Danger of Geopolitical Fantasies,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For an outstanding book on Indian and Pakistani decision making, based on interviews with almost all the senior participants, see Sisson and Rose, War and Secession. See A. M. A. Muhith, American Response to Bangladesh Liberation War (Dacca: University Press, 1996). For a bracing and sophisticated castigation, which does not condemn Bangladesh to the usual amnesia, see Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London: Verso, 2001).
CHAPTER 1: THE TILT
1. Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 278. On Nixon’s moralism, see Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 427–33.
2. White House tapes, Oval Office 520-6, 15 June 1971, 11:02 a.m.–12:34 p.m. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 134, 137.
3. Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 2. Nixon, RN, pp. 131–32. See Robert J. McMahon, “The Danger of Geopolitical Fantasies,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 250–51; and White House tapes, Oval Office 505-4, 26 May 1971, 10:03–11:35 a.m. On Nehru and nonalignment, see Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Sunil Khilnani, “Nehru’s Judgement,” in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, eds., Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, 3 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975–84); Shashi Tharoor, Nehru: The Invention of India (New York: Arcade, 2003). For lucid analyses of U.S.-Indian relations, see W. Norman Brown, The United States and India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); G. W. Choudhury, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Major Powers: Politics of a Divided Subcontinent (New York: Free Press, 1975); Norman D. Palmer, The United States and India: The Dimensions of Influence (New York: Praeger, 1984); Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). Richard Nixon, Leaders (New York: Warner Books, 1982), p. 271.