Magnificent Delusions (13 page)

The Pakistani prime minister spoke emotionally of the risks that Pakistan had incurred in its relations with India, Afghanistan, and the USSR as a result of aligning with the West. These risks to the country as well as to its leaders could not be justified for “only $30 million of military assistance from the U.S.” Bogra seemed to suggest that the United States needed to make the alliance worth Pakistan's while by increasing the quantum of aid.

The US secretary of state remarked that he had “thought Pakistan had taken its anticommunist stand because it was the right one, not just to make itself eligible for certain sums of dollar aid.”
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An alliance needed a shared concern or shared enemy, Dulles averred, but Pakistan had chosen to become an ally by playing on a shared concern while seeking weapons to deal with an enemy that the Americans did not share. The allies simply could not agree.

This marked the beginning of the argument that American and Pakistani officials have had several times in the six decades since then. Both sides have been reluctant to say to each other that in relations between nations, each side must calculate its own costs. In this case, the Americans had failed to get a commitment on bases, whereas the Pakistanis had not negotiated the amount of aid beforehand. Even as transactional relationships go, this was one based on too many assumptions and insufficient clarity.

Further, the Americans were basing their policy toward Pakistan on their impressions of the people that ran the country instead of analyzing their policies. On his return from a trip to Pakistan at the beginning of 1955, Admiral Radford spent considerable time during his briefing to the State Department on his views of the various individuals within the Pakistan government. The Governor-General Muhammad, the admiral said, was “a very sick man, and might drop off at any time. If he does go, there was certain to be a struggle for power within the country.” Radford saw General Mirza as “the number two strong man,” but in his opinion “the best man was General Ayub.”

The minutes of the meeting reflect the US obsession with personalities at the expense of trying to understand the Pakistani leaders' view of Pakistan's national interest. Hearing Ayub's praise from Radford, the State Department's John Jernegan remarked that he did not know Mirza, but “the specialists in the Department think that General Mirza, who definitely expects to be Prime Minister one day, is more competent than General Ayub.” The minutes go on: “The Admiral said that that very well might be, but as far as honesty and directness is concerned, Mirza was no match for Ayub.” Radford then opined that “Pakistan was a potential ally of great importance” and that “from the military point of view, they have a trained armed force which no other friendly power can match, not even the Turks.”
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Amid all this discussion of Pakistan, there was no consideration whatsoever of Pakistan's unwillingness to spare its troops for Western alliances without first resolving its disputes with India. The State Department officials demonstrated even less understanding of the
debate about Pakistan's raison d'être that was holding the country back from writing a constitution.

The leaders the Americans preferred were the ones responsible for putting off popular elections; no steps were being taken to reform the economy or improve productivity, and the new country's national identity was being shaped around hatred of India and vague appeals to Islamic sentiment. All of these developments had implications for the future, but none of them received much attention from American diplomats and generals at the time.

It was the Pentagon's assistant secretary for international security affairs, H. Struve Hensel, who finally asked some tough questions. After he visited Karachi, he wrote that US civilian and military officials did not have “any clear idea of the part Pakistan was expected to play in the defense of the Middle East.” Military men like Radford wanted to increase Pakistan's military strength, “but no one seemed to know precisely why except that Pakistanis obviously make reliable fighting soldiers.”

Hensel pointed out that Pakistan regarded the Indian threat as much more serious to Pakistan than the threats from communist Russia or communist China. He saw this in the way the Pakistan army was deployed along the Indian border, and all its tactical and strategic planning centered on prioritizing India-related problems. Under what circumstances would Pakistan spare troops for the defense of the Middle East? he asked. “If it is thought that Pakistan can contribute to the defense of Southeast Asia,” he observed, “it should be remembered that practically all of the military strength of Pakistan is concentrated in West Pakistan.”

Apart from questioning the premises on which US engagement with Pakistan was based, Hensel also questioned the excessive coziness between American and Pakistani officials. He noted that Ambassador Hildreth had shared the details of anticipated aid for Pakistan over the next three years with Pakistan's prime minister in an aide-memoire. Even if Hildreth's disclosure was a mistake, it had effectively converted a dollar figure still under discussion in Washington into a firm commitment. Hensel remarked that any modification
of the amount or the time over which it would be disbursed would now result in dissatisfaction.
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But this voice of dissent within the Pentagon did not carry enough weight to dissuade Dulles and Radford from continuing to see their relations with Pakistani leaders as an investment that would bear fruit over time. More than a year after Pakistan joined SEATO there had been no progress in securing a “centrally positioned landing site” for possible operations against the USSR and China. Although Ayub had enticed Washington with possible offers of bases “if the price was right,” as it turned out the right price was an American guarantee of Pakistan's security against India, which was not as easy for Washington as Pakistani officials made it sound.

By the end of 1955 the American alliance with Pakistan had resulted in relations between India and the Soviet Union warming considerably. Pakistan had joined Britain, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey in the Baghdad Pact, which the United States had initially not joined. Nehru then visited Moscow that June. In fall, Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Marshall Nikolai Bulganin traveled to India, Afghanistan, and Burma—all three countries then neighboring Pakistan.

Khrushchev chose Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, as the location at which to make comments against American plans for building bases in Pakistan close to Soviet territory. He likely chose Srinagar as the place to make that statement deliberately; after all, the USSR wanted Pakistan to know that it had lost Soviet support for Kashmiri self-determination now that Pakistan had allied with America. Pakistan's prime minister responded by denying flatly that Pakistan had any intention of
ever
allowing
any country
to establish bases.

This led Hildreth to approach Mirza, who was now governor-general and head of state, for clarification. Pakistan had continually sought US support in return for bases, Hildreth reminded Mirza, as he also expressed puzzlement with the unequivocal declaration that Pakistan would never give any bases. The ambassador had completely overlooked the fact that Mirza's predecessor as governor-general, Ghulam Muhammad, had issued a similar statement a couple of
years earlier. This kind of ignorance of relatively recent history has remained a constant of American interaction with Pakistani leaders.

In his meeting with Hildreth, Mirza responded by keeping the American's hopes alive, expressing impatience with the “Prime Minister's over-caution.” But he said that it was untimely for the United States to seek bases until it had “shown more support for Pakistanis on Kashmir” and backed the Baghdad Pact. Instead of accepting that Pakistan was unlikely to grant bases to the United States, Hildreth told the State Department that Pakistan might be trying to trade US adherence to the Baghdad Pact as a precondition for the use of Pakistani bases.
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By the time the pact was renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1959, the United States joined the Baghdad Pact countries, including Pakistan, in bilateral military agreements. Yet the prospect of Western naval and air bases in Pakistan did not materialize. The United States could not secure Kashmir for Pakistan, and without that, Pakistan would not offer the United States what it sought. As a result, US economic and military assistance trickled into Pakistan at a rate much slower than that sought by Pakistan's leaders.

The United States had committed itself to providing Pakistan with equipment and training for five and a half new divisions at a cost of $ 171 million. But Ayub employed creative methods to get an increase in the dollar figure. He altered the numerical strength of each Pakistan army division to be able to claim that the amount of money was insufficient for the target force levels. Before American tanks were delivered, the Pakistan army speculated that the tanks would wear out quickly without tank transporters or railway flat-cars. Having provided the tanks, then, the Americans had to pay for them to remain usable. Requests for additional expenses for fuel and motor transport as well as grumbling about a shortage of motorized battalions, reserves, and troop accommodations followed.
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By 1957 many people, including President Eisenhower, wondered what American purpose was served by ballooning military aid to Pakistan. Lippmann wrote in a column that it was “fiction” that the United States was arming Pakistan “to defend the Middle East
against the Red army.” This fiction had “earned us the deep suspicion of India.” In Lippmann's view Dulles had based US foreign policy to “escape from reality.”
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Hans J. Morgenthau, the well-regarded scholar of international relations, raised similar doubts. “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state,” wrote Morgenthau in an article in the
New Republic
titled “Military Illusions.” “It has no justification in history, ethnic origin, language, civilization, or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interest in common, save one: fear of Hindu domination. It is to that fear, and to nothing else, that Pakistan owes its existence, and thus far its survival, as an independent state.” He also derided the geographic and political distance between East and West Pakistan: “It is as if after the Civil War Louisiana and Maryland had decided to form a state of their own with the capital in Baton Rouge. In fact, it is worse than that.”

Morgenthau also questioned the rationale of arming and equipping the Pakistan army in the hope of using it against the Soviet or Chinese communists. “Against whom and how is an army likely to fight, which is built upon so tenuous a political foundation?” he wondered. “Only extraordinary wisdom and political skill” could keep Pakistan together, he wrote, and it was “not to be found among the politicians of Karachi.” Morgenthau saw it difficult how “anything but a miracle, or else a revival of religious fanaticism” would assure Pakistan's future. He predicted that Pakistan's government “might well need its army to maintain its rule over the two disparate territories of Pakistan.”

According to Morgenthau's clear analysis, geography allowed the Pakistan army to conduct military operations against only two countries: Afghanistan and India. But “While the Pakistani army could easily take care of Afghanistan and might perhaps be able to defend West Pakistan against India at the price of the surrender of East Bengal, such capabilities are obviously meaningless in view of the overall political and strategic situation on the continent of Asia as it appears from the vantage point of the United States.” A local war between Pakistan and one or the other of its neighbors did not necessarily
affect America's vital interests. “By allying ourselves with Pakistan, we have alienated India which is infinitely more important than our ally,” he pointed out.
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The benefits of the alliance were questioned in Pakistan as well, albeit from an opposite perspective. One example was the Pakistani media reaction to any suggestion that the Western powers would not take sides in South Asian disputes. The British Foreign Office announced before a meeting of the SEATO Council that the anticommunist alliances were not concerned with the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir or the Pashtunistan issue between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This announcement created uproar in Pakistan. Politicians and editorial writers criticized the “lack of Anglo-American support for Pakistan in its disputes with India and Afghanistan.”
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Pakistani diplomats also repeatedly told their American counterparts that their government encountered difficulty explaining to its people its alliance with the West without an American promise of support against India. For instance, visiting finance minister Amjad Ali told US officials that Pakistan's alliances were “operating to the detriment of Pakistan.” The government was being criticized for failing to contribute to unifying the world's Muslims and for being unable to succeed in resolving the Kashmir dispute in Pakistan's favor.

Ali's suggestion was that the United States could help its ally by enabling it to argue that Pakistan had gained strength in relation to India by becoming America's partner. American officials quickly reminded him that Pakistan had previously said that it had joined US-led alliances to defend the free world against communism. Pakistan had given assurances it was not acquiring US arms to fight India. Ali's American hosts then explained to him that public statements about Pakistan's military buildup being aimed at India would erode support among Americans for the aid program.
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