Magnificent Delusions (17 page)

This first discussion with Ayub was a lesson for Johnson in how, for Pakistanis, even the conflict in Laos was less about global communism than it was about their dispute with India. Ayub stressed that Nehru only wanted American economic assistance and the assurance of help if he should get into difficulties with the Chinese. “He would never help the United States,” he said of Nehru, and suggested that the United States should use its leverage with India to force a change in its policies. Once again, Ayub emphasized Pakistan's willingness to help America but only after its military had been provided “more equipment and more mobility.”
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Looking back, it seems that Ayub's script for conversation with American leaders seldom changed. He spoke to Johnson passionately about Kashmir just as he had briefed Eisenhower eighteen months earlier. He then repeated himself when he met Kennedy in Washington later that summer. Following up on his earlier offer, the United States had asked Pakistan to prepare a battalion to send to Laos. But at that time Ayub said that he had concluded “a battalion could do nothing but get itself lost.” He would rather send a brigade so that “it could fight well as a more integrated group.”
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But according to Ayub, Pakistan could not discount the threat on its borders with India and Afghanistan. If only the Americans pressured India, he argued as before, it would give in to Pakistani demands over Kashmir. Then Pakistan would be free to join the Americans in defending the free world. Kennedy retorted that he did not believe the Indians were going to march on Pakistan; they already had what they wanted in Kashmir. Ayub responded by saying that “the point was that India wanted to neutralize all Pakistan.” In answer to Kennedy's question of how that would help India, Ayub said that it was clear from the Indian army deployments that they regarded Pakistan as enemy number one.

The discussion that followed reflected the huge gap in Pakistani and American thinking over regional issues. According to the record of the conversation, Kennedy said he could understand India's desire, especially Nehru's, to hold on to what they had in Kashmir. He could also understand India's force being placed there to keep out Pakistan, which had irredentist feeling. But Ayub insisted that Kashmir was a test. “If India should settle with Pakistan on Kashmir, it would mean India wanted to live at peace with Pakistan,” he argued. Ayub described Kashmir as the manifestation of India's hostility toward Pakistan.

Kennedy explained that the United States had supported India not with the expectation that India would support US policies but instead because it was in the interest of everyone to save India from collapse. He acknowledged difficulties in dealing with Nehru, who had been around a long time, and he did not know how the United States could pressure him. “We could not even bring Chiang
Kai-shek, whom we had helped more than anyone, to do what we saw was in his own interest,” he pointed out.

But Ayub proceeded to paint the picture of an embattled India on the verge of a communist takeover piecemeal. According to him, the Chinese communists had an army of one-half million troops in Tibet, ostensibly to control a population of two million. These troops were not far from Calcutta, which was the base of communism in India and could act in concert. Ayub predicted that India was bound to break up in fifteen to twenty years, and the “key to the defense of the subcontinent was Pakistan.” Once again the leader of the newest country in the region was pontificating on the lack of viability of a historically older entity.

Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, wondered what both sides could agree to in the Kashmir dispute. Ayub replied that Nehru had shown no disposition to yield anything beyond the cease-fire line in Kashmir. Pakistan, he said, would have no objection to India taking Jammu, with some adjustments of the border. “Pakistan's people are getting fed up,” Ayub remarked, adding that this was the reason they sometimes talked of working more closely with China. When Kennedy asked what Pakistan might want from China, Ayub said Pakistanis wanted nothing of China, adding that he would “like to see it go to hell. But the Pakistani people were anxious to do something about Kashmir.”
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Kennedy promised that he would make a major effort with Nehru when the Indian prime minister came to Washington later that year. He wanted Ayub to know that even if he did not succeed, he would try. Ayub asked if the United States would support Pakistan if this effort failed and Pakistan brought the matter to the United Nations. Kennedy promised that the United States would support the UN resolutions—a promise he later kept. As with Eisenhower, Ayub also spoke critically of Afghanistan and asked Kennedy for US support in keeping the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Thinking that personal goodwill would help change Ayub's stance, Johnson invited him to his ranch in Texas. Because the vice president had been warmly received in Pakistan, he decided that equally warm hospitality would convince Ayub that Americans had Pakistan's best
interests at heart. In this effort, Air Force officers and men stationed at a nearby base complained that they were ordered to appear with their families to augment the crowd on Ayub's arrival. When reports of that complaint reached the media, an Air Force public relations officer said the men weren't ordered to show up but instead were encouraged to do so. A colonel even advised the press that reporting on the episode would be unpatriotic.

But the incident nonetheless attracted a critical editorial in the
Chicago Tribune
, arguing that international relations needed to be founded upon reality, not illusion. “It is no service to Pakistan or President Ayub to lead his countrymen or him to believe, contrary to fact, that the presence here of the Pakistani president has filled the American people with joyful excitement,” the paper said. “That is simply not true.” The paper cautioned that the “faked appearance of enthusiasm” for Ayub in Texas could lead the Pakistanis to believe that their exaggerated expectations have the support of American public opinion. But, the article stated, “the Pakistanis are destined to be disappointed.”
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Ayub's optimism did, in fact, rise as a result of his visit. Although Kennedy had refused to back away from his agenda of closer ties with India, Ayub had returned home with assurances of continued military and economic assistance. There was also the possibility of an American role in resolving the Kashmir dispute. In a somewhat overconfident mood, Ayub decided to get tough first with Afghanistan, shutting down Afghan consulates in Pakistan and demanding that Afghanistan close its own within two weeks. American diplomats got worried about the prospect of Soviet involvement and scurried to help deescalate tensions. Ayub kept pressing for similar American diplomatic efforts between India and Pakistan. Earlier, the dispute over irrigation waters had been resolved with the US-backed Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960, which enabled Pakistan and India to share the six rivers flowing into Pakistan from the north, with the World Bank providing funding for Pakistan to build dams and storage capacity. The Americans saw the Indus Treaty as a great success of rational problem solving in the subcontinent. They would have liked a similar approach in Kashmir.

Kennedy sought the advice of “the best and brightest” that he had assembled around him, but none of them seemed convinced of the case for getting more deeply involved on Pakistan's side. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, had tasked Robert Komer, a fifteen-year CIA veteran, with evaluating the developments in South Asia. Many saw Komer as the model of what novelist John LeCarre described as an “intellocrat”—an intelligence man, armed with information, commanding a theater of war from his desk. Komer's acerbic memoranda and arguments during the Vietnam War earned him the nickname “Blowtorch Bob.”

Komer wrote a comprehensive memorandum for Bundy on US-Pakistan relations, arguing that Pakistan's exclusive focus on India militated against its usefulness as an ally against China or the Soviet Union. “Our basically different views on how to deal with the Afghan, Kashmir, and Indian problems have been apparent in the series of exchanges the New Administration has had with Ayub,” he wrote. “Ayub's main concerns are Pakistan's position versus Afghanistan and especially India,” Komer added, concluding that Pakistan viewed its alliance with the United States “primarily as insurance against Indian and Afghan threats, and as a means of leverage.”
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The American official sympathized with Pakistan's concerns “as the weaker power on the subcontinent, fearful of eventual Indian attempts to reunify it.” He also saw some merit in Pakistan's case on Kashmir and Pashtunistan. “But to the extent Ayub uses his alliance tie to push us into supporting his forward policies vis-à-vis India and Afghanistan,” Komer observed, “he forces us into a position which runs contrary to our larger strategic interests in the area.”

In his view Americans tended to lean over too far in their concern, “lest we offend a staunch ally.” They had failed to get across to Pakistan the limitations on, as well as the benefits from US support. Ayub seemed to think that the United States was “so attached to him as an ally that he can pursue his own aims with renewed vigor, and drag us along with him.” But other than “some highly important facilities,” the United States had received nothing from showering largesse on Pakistan “except a paper commitment to SEATO and
CENTO on which it is hard to see how Ayub could effectively pay off in more than peanuts.”
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“Blowtorch Bob” concluded that “Pakistan's chief preoccupation will long remain India,” but if the United States had to choose among the countries of the subcontinent, “there is little question that India (because of its sheer size and resources) is where we must put our chief reliance.” Although the Ayub regime was seen as more “pro-Western” than the Indians, it was “questionable whether most Pakistanis are really less neutralist than Indians.”

Komer posed the question that many have asked frequently since: “Are we more interested in a Western-oriented weak ally or a strong neutralist India able to defend its own national interests (which happen to broadly coincide with ours)?” Inverting Jinnah's postulate that had guided all Pakistani governments in their policy toward the United States, he remarked, “In the last analysis, Pakistan needs the U.S. connection more than we need it.” In essence, Washington needed to stop “showering” Pakistan with aid and deal with it on a more realistic basis.

Although Kennedy himself agreed with some of Komer's arguments regarding military aid, his administration still supported economic assistance. As a result, Pakistan received $169.1 million in development aid in 1961 and $403.4 million in 1962. But the US president was “dubious about giving more jets” to Pakistan and “was extremely reluctant to give any new commitments” of military aid. He even asked, like Eisenhower, why the United States got into multiyear commitments about providing specific weapons systems to countries like Pakistan in the first place.
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Pakistan's military had become totally dependent on American equipment obtained as aid, whereas India bought weapons from multiple sources. But that balance was seriously upset when, in October 1962, India went to war with China along their disputed Himalayan border. The United States then initiated an urgent air shipment of military supplies to India. The US-supplied materiel included antipersonnel mines, machine guns and their ammunition, mortars, and radios.
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Although these were aimed at reinforcing Indian resistance against the Chinese communists, Pakistan immediately protested against what it described as the American arming of India. As an American ally, Pakistan claimed, it had a right to be consulted before supplying weapons to its enemy. There was clamor in the Pakistani media for the government to take advantage of India's misfortune and settle the Kashmir issue by force. “All this talk of the Chinese being the aggressors is Washington-brewed tommy rot,”
Dawn
claimed in an editorial designed to arouse religious and racial passion. The trouble had been stirred “at the instigation of India's White patrons in Washington, London—as well as Moscow,” it said.
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This was an unsophisticated conspiracy theory, based on the notion that the West and the Soviets might be enemies in other parts of the world but in the subcontinent they were acting in concert to support Hindu India against Islamic Pakistan.

Pseudonymous articles appeared in newspapers, describing Nehru as Hitler and calling for Pakistan to play a lead role in confronting India's “expansionism.”
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Members of Pakistan's National Assembly, dominated by Ayub supporters in the Muslim League, called for revisiting Pakistan's association with SEATO and CENTO, which were described as being against Pakistan's national interest. Ayub approached his American friends with the plea that he would face a popular uprising even though elements within the government were fueling the potential uprising.

In Washington the National Security Council saw the India-China conflict in global strategic terms. “The Pakistanis are going through a genuine emotional crisis as they see their cherished ambitions of using the US as a lever against India going up in the smoke of the Chinese border war,” Komer synopsized. According to him: “Their plaint about lack of consultation is mere cover for this (if we'd ‘consulted' with the Paks, instead of notifying them, we'd still be arguing about Kashmir).”

The United States needed to be patient and understanding with Pakistan, said Komer, but there was “no need to apologize.” In his analysis any attempt to compensate Ayub for American actions vis-à-vis India would result in postponing the long-needed clarification
of the United States' position. This was “a time when we've never had a better excuse for clarifying” the US position to Pakistan, he pointed out.