To reduce US defence liabilities the Eisenhower administration strengthened reliable clients to create regional defence alliances against the Soviet Union. This had major consequences for Pakistan. Dulles became captive to British ‘Great Game’ thinking about how Afghanistan and Pakistan might be marshalled to thwart the Russian drive south to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea. Following a shift discernible under Truman, Pakistan was increasingly construed as a Middle Eastern rather than South Asian power, at a time when the Soviet threat to the Middle East – source of 70 per cent of Western Europe’s oil – loomed large. Of course, the governments of Egypt, Iran and Turkey were unhappy about Pakistani ambitions in their region. Pakistan’s strategic reorientation would depend on whether outsiders could resolve the issue of Kashmir, thereby freeing up Pakistan’s army for operations in the west. In fact, Kashmir would prove irresolvable.17
Pakistani governments played US geostrategic needs for all they were worth, eventually persuading the US, under a May 1954 defence assistance treaty, to equip five and a half divisions, plus six air squadrons and twelve naval vessels. What the Pentagon reluctantly envisaged as a one-off spend of around $30 million became a semi-permanent subvention that quickly rose to $500 million in the first three years. Rarely can so much money have been expended with so little reflection. Hardly anyone in the US administration questioned whether Pakistan would ever be in a position to deploy troops to check Soviet advances into Iran and the Gulf, where they were rightly viewed as cat’s-paws of the Americans. Nor did many ask whether the growth of the Pakistani armed forces, which consumed 70 per cent of Pakistani government revenue, might result in the neglect of urgent economic and social reforms, therby further alienating the people from the feudal elites who ruled.18
Possibly all the US gained from its embrace of Pakistan were air bases near the Soviet Union, notably Budaber near Peshawar, from which the U-2s operated and which housed a vast National Security Agency eavesdropping operation. Pakistan eagerly joined a web of US-sponsored alliances that obliged it to do very little. It entered into a bilateral defence agreement with Turkey and it joined the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), an odd alliance since the only South-east Asian member, if one discounts the Philippines, was Thailand. And what suited the Pakistani feudal elite appalled the average Pakistani, who resented his nation (for her views did not count) becoming a US client.
The influential columnist Walter Lippmann got to the heart of Foster Dulles’s view of Pakistan in a famous encounter shortly after Pakistan joined SEATO:
‘Foster . . . what do you think you’re going to accomplish with that thing [SEATO]? You’ve got mostly Europeans, plus Pakistan, which is nowhere near Southeast Asia.’
‘Look, Walter . . . I’ve got to get some real fighting men into the south of Asia. The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis. That’s why we need them in the alliance. We could never get along without the Gurkas.’
‘But Foster . . . the Gurkas aren’t Pakistanis, they’re Indians [they are actually from Nepal].’
‘Well . . . they may not be Pakistanis, but they’re Moslems.’
‘No, I’m afraid they’re not Moslems, either, they’re Hindus.’
Dulles shrugged that off as well and ‘proceeded to lecture Lippmann for half an hour on how SEATO would plug the dike against communism in Asia’.19
Following the collapse of the British Middle Eastern Defence Organization (MEDO) project, Pakistan joined its US-sponsored successor, the Baghdad Pact, which eventually metamorphosed into the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). This was based on the idea of a Northern Tier, designed to deter the Russians from going on the rampage in the oil-producing states of the Gulf.20 The involvement of Iraq automatically meant Egypt dropped out, which enabled the Soviets simply to leapfrog the imaginary rampart by arming Nasser directly. Towards the end of his first term Ike privately conceded that arming Pakistan had been a ‘terrible error’ from a purely military point of view, without regard to the way in which it had encouraged a bloated Pakistani military to usurp civilian politics.
An increasingly authoritarian President Iskander Mirza (another Sandhurst graduate) eventually proclaimed martial law in October 1958, only to be overthrown himself by the US darling General Ayub Khan. Thus was demonstrated Sandhurst’s power to inculcate British ‘values’ in the hearts and minds of its foreign graduates. Rather archly Khan explained that he was merely copying the US Electoral College when he concocted a base democracy of 80,000 village councillors, 95.6 per cent of whom duly agreed that he should remain president in what he claimed was an election.
Then there was India. Although India had a four-to-one superiority in manpower, the arrival of Patton tanks and F-86 jet fighters in Pakistan to some degree offset it. The US could never grasp that such a large country as India lived in mortal dread of the military in Pakistan. Nehru retaliated by banning US freight planes from using Indian air-space to resupply the French in Indochina. He even made difficulties about allowing US commercial planes to cross Indian airspace, and ordered the closure of several US Information Agency centres for being nests of propagandists, as though that were not their declared function.
Quickening relations with Pakistan had consequences for US relations with India. The Soviets promised India economic assistance and cheap loans to supplant the meagre US effort and in 1954 they offered to construct a vast steel mill at Bhilai. In June 1955 the Soviets played expertly to Nehru’s vanity with a resoundingly stage-managed welcome when he visited the Soviet Union. In November and December Premier Nikolai Bulganin and General Secretary Khrushchev made a return visit to India. In Calcutta, two million people turned out to greet them. No Pakistani leader would visit Moscow until 1965.
Ike was fully aware that support for Pakistan was alienating India, and resolved to use economic aid to woo it away from the generous Soviets. The problem was that Nehru’s hostile comments about the US meant it was much harder to get these packages through Congress. When the President requested $70 million for 1956, Congress reduced it by $20 million in retaliation for Nehru ‘playing both ends against the middle’, as the New Hampshire Republican Congressman Styles Bridges put it. Undeterred, and following a visit from Nehru in which Ike cleverly indulged the visitor’s fondness for abstract speculation, he decided to underwrite India’s Soviet-sounding second five-year economic plan. This in turn worried Pakistan, which believed it would free India to acquire modern weapons and to erode the qualitative edge Pakistan enjoyed, which indeed it did. In fact, once Dulles was dead, Eisenhower assiduously courted India, which he visited in December 1959, partly because he realized that India was falling out with China, and that Soviet neutrality over their disputes was in turn alienating the Chinese from Moscow. No wonder Eisenhower quadrupled India’s aid allocation.21
One of Nehru’s achievements was not to get locked into Cold War logic, by consolidating India’s relations with a much wider array of partners. A subtle formula was found to enable this great republic to belong to a Commonwealth whose head was the British monarch. That platitudinous forum suited Nehru’s style very well, especially as the growing British Gandhi cult made London suitably obsequious to the Mahatma’s heir. Nehru’s disdain for the ideological simplicities of the Cold War led him to participate enthusiastically in the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in April 1955. Twenty-nine nations attended, including India and Pakistan, as well as Nasser for Egypt, both Vietnams and Communist China. Zhou Enlai reached Bandung only thanks to missing his official plane, which blew up after leaving Hong Kong, killing the rest of his delegation. He quickly and keenly resented being treated as the younger brother of the older Asian power. Nehru took a close interest in the conference arrangements, since he did not trust the Indonesian hosts to do so.22
The aim at Bandung was to represent the one and a half billion people of the newly independent nations, who would become a powerful moral force between the Cold War
superpowers. There was much discussion of racism on the part of people who had experienced it and who, in returning to the theme ever after, were like an enthusiastic football team playing the game after the referee had blown his whistle and the opposing side had departed. The subject of caste was not on the agenda. Non-interference in the sovereign affairs of others was another important theme, especially among those still subject to the interference of former colonial powers.
Though Nehru was correct about the mentally constraining effects of ‘bloc thought’, in which one was either Communist or anti-Communist, he was wrong to believe that the Cold War must result in a global nuclear catastrophe, and that consequently Soviet ambitions must be accommodated at all costs. While the participants rapidly condemned (Western) colonialism, Ceylon, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran ensured that Communist imperialism was also denounced. The Ceylonese Prime Minister, Sir John Kotelawala, was vociferous in denouncing Communist imperialism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a stance not unconnected with Soviet vetoing of Ceylonese membership of the United Nations.23 Within a decade, the irenic simplicities of Bandung received a cold douche of reality.
In 1959 Nehru adopted a forward strategy, establishing more Indian military posts to define what he claimed was the border with China. Convinced of India’s moral unassailability, he failed to notice that Gandhian non-violence had left his armed forces in a parlous condition, with defence budgets slashed to pay for India’s crash industrialization. The armed forces had also stupidly declined British and US offers of military manuals, based on experiences in Korea, of Chinese infantry battle tactics. The Chief of the General Staff was a brave man, but he had no battle experience. Nehru was ill advised by his feeble intelligence services that the Chinese would not try to fight at such high altitudes and on such intractable terrain as the Himalayan foothills. On 20 October 1962 the Chinese invaded to occupy the whole of the disputed 40,000 square miles east and west of Nepal, crushing the poorly prepared Indian army. Much to Nehru’s surprise, while the West supported India, Russia got off the fence and supported China – how else could it react in view of the Cuban Missile Crisis – and the non-aligned world remained non-aligned, notably Nkrumah of Ghana, in whom Nehru had invested much time and hope. A desperate Nehru asked the US for enormous military resupplies, which began arriving by jet freighters from Germany within a week. By November, when the Chinese launched a massive thrust that made their opening moves look like a jabbing feint, Nehru asked the US for fifteen squadrons of bombers and fighters to repulse the invaders before they arrived in New Delhi.24
The following year Pakistan officially ceded to China the disputed Kashmiri border area adjacent to its own territory, which had been agreed some time before but held in abeyance because the area was also claimed by India. The good relations between Pakistan and China that persist to this day were born of this largely forgotten conflict between India and China. Contrary to General Ayub Khan’s hopes, however, China did not support Pakistan in the Second Kashmiri War in 1965.
The effect on Nehru and the India he had led since independence was profound. His pose as the apostle of non-violence had been exposed as cant when he sent the Indian army into the Portuguese enclave of Goa in 1961. Domestically his democratic credentials had taken a battering when in July 1959 he arbitrarily dismissed the world’s first democratically elected Communist government in the Indian state of Kerala. Now the Chinese had exposed India’s weakness and rudely rejected his airy assumption of leadership of the developing world. He was never the same man again and for the remaining months of his life (he died in May 1964) his spirit was broken by his loss of domestic and international prestige. He did not seem to notice the large rat that regularly sped across his office carpet to a big hole in the wall.25 India’s defence budget doubled and US and British air forces were invited to conduct air defence manoeuvres from Indian air bases. Despite all the heady talk at Bandung, there was massive resentment against ‘these amoral neutralists who have refused to give India the unreserved sympathy and support she had asked for’. The ghost of John Foster Dulles might have smiled.26
12. LOSING BY WINNING: ALGERIA
Birth of a Nation: Algeria’s Fight for Independence
The eight-year war in Algeria began as one between French government forces and indigenous Arab and Berber nationalists. It encompassed a civil war waged by the supposedly socialist Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which practised widespread ‘compliance terrorism’ to enforce popular support, against the rival Mouvement National Algérien led by the veteran nationalist leader Messali Hadj, which probably enjoyed covert French support. In 1957 alone, some 4,000 Algerian Muslim immigrants were killed in feuding between these two groups in mainland French cities. The conflict ended with French right-wing Organisation de l’Armée Secrète terrorists declaring war on the French authorities and bombing and shooting their opponents in Algeria and in metropolitan France. The OAS alone killed as many people as died in the entire thirty-year Troubles in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1998. It was the worst of the dirty wars waged by European colonial powers, eclipsing even Britain’s brutal campaign in Kenya.1
The Second World War had raised the national consciousness of many of the Algerians who fought for France, while the collapse of France in 1940 had lowered its prestige in the eyes of Arabs, who were treated like dirt by French settlers. Chronic food shortages added to the tensions. The first covert armed Algerian nationalist movement was established in 1947 as the Organisation Spéciale, but this had been crushed by 1951. Its ranks included Ben Bella, who after the war had declined a regular army commission to become a local government councillor in Marnia, where his family had a farm. In 1947 he was subject to obscure chicanery about ownership of his farm, which like all Arab land lacked title deeds. He fled after shooting one of his would-be dispossessors. In 1949 he planned a robbery on the Oran Post Office to garner funds for the underground ‘army’ which was not even a band. Careful police work led to his arrest and imprisonment. In 1953 Ben Bella broke out of jail with the aid of a file hidden in a baguette, fleeing to Cairo, where he had to communicate with his fellow Arab nationalists in French since his own Arabic was poor.2
World events were encouraging. At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 the French army suffered epic defeat. Perplexed Viet Minh interrogators asked captured Algerian Muslims why they were not fighting their own war of national liberation. It was a good question.3 Ben Bella was closely involved in establishing the FLN on 10 October 1954, with an armed wing called the Armée de Libération Nationale, or ALN. The FLN had a collective leadership of nine, who divided the country into six wilayas or administrative cum military districts. It had external representatives in Cairo, for the rebels realized that international diplomacy would be crucial to victory. Within Algeria its underground apparatus administered rough justice and extorted money, while nullifying local expressions of French power.
Beyond such exogenous triggers as Dien Bien Phu, it is not hard to see why an armed revolt should have occurred in the mid-1950s. A visiting French commission acknowledged that 90 per cent of Algeria’s wealth was in the hands of a minority of the European 10 per cent of its ten million people, the large landowners who produced cereals, cork and wine. One-third of the nine million Muslims were either under-employed or chronically unemployed. Low wages were the lot of those in work. Eighty per cent of Muslim children did not attend schools, a trend accelerated after guerrillas took to burning them down. Eighty-five per cent of Muslims were illiterate in a society whose masters harped on about Western civilization. Whereas the European birth rate in Algeria corresponded to European norms, the Muslim figure was ten times higher. While the European population enjoyed a standard of living roughly equivalent to those of Greece, Portugal or Spain, life for the majority Muslim population resembled that of the poorest people in Egypt or India. Western military buffs may be tantalized by tales of the Paras, but the reality for the majority of Algerians was grinding rural poverty a
nd far from casual racism.4
The nationalist insurrection began on All Saints’ Day 1954, with seventy co-ordinated attacks on army bases and police stations in the Aurès region. A French teacher and his wife, together with a caid (one of the village headmen cum judges through whom the French ruled), were dragged off a bus and murdered. Radio Cairo broadcast the FLN’s essential aims: ‘restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam’ and ‘preservation of all fundamental freedoms, without distinction of race or religion’. The guerrillas’ initial military outing may have been unimpressive, but it had a defined strategy, which it would pursue with unerring purpose.5
The first phase of the war, from November 1954 to late 1955, was a struggle for survival by a small guerrilla force lacking modern arms except for those sold or abandoned during the Second World War. Most FLN violence was directed at other Muslims as it went about creating a counter-state. Although the FLN was a predominantly secular movement, it also espoused a grim Islamic puritanism. Political toughs cut the throats of any Muslims who served the colonial power, drank alcohol or smoked, the method deliberately chosen to resemble the halal slaughtering of sheep.
The French Premier Pierre Mendès-France, fresh from liquidating the French Empire in Indochina, declared that Algeria was different. ‘The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic,’ he said. ‘Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession.’ The Socialist Minister of the Interior, François Mitterrand, flatly stated that ‘the only possible negotiation is war’. French troops began to mount ‘raking’ operations (ratissages) through the hills from which the guerrillas conducted their raids. The mountain scrub known as bled was not like the jungle that served the Viet Minh so well, and initial French successes included the capture or killing of three of the historic nine FLN leaders. They were, however, replaced by even more implacable younger men, and the ratissages, carried out with brutal insensitivity, replenished the pool of potential nationalist recruits. They also caused Muslims in the Algerian Assembly to walk out, among them the moderate liberal Ferhat Abbas who flew to Cairo in April 1956 to join the FLN.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 38