Magnificent Delusions (18 page)

Komer reasoned that Ayub would not likely be willing to risk Pakistan's relationship with the United States. “He may be a prisoner of Pak public emotions in this case,” but “even Ayub has found that a hard line often works well with us. “The CIA veteran thought that the Pakistanis will eventually realize that they get far too much from their US tie to be able to do without it. “So if we can weather the current shock, we should be able to hold on to our assets in Pakistan, while still emerging with the sub-continent-wide policy toward which we aim,” he concluded.
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After the initial negative noise, Ayub sat down with British minister for commonwealth relations, Duncan Sandys, and W.Averell Harriman, US assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, to discuss their proposal for India-Pakistan discussions on Kashmir without preconditions. Ayub turned down the idea of direct dialog with Nehru but accepted a meeting between cabinet-level representatives from both countries.

Harriman noted that he and Sandys had made it plain to Ayub that Pakistan's demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir could not be fulfilled and that the Vale of Kashmir, controlled by India, “could not be transferred to Pakistan.” But the Indians understood that “they had to make certain concessions beyond the present cease-fire line,” though the Americans and the British could not assure Pakistan of the nature of these concessions. Ayub accepted this situation, according to Harriman, and “recognized that the negotiations on Kashmir might last a considerable time.” From America's perspective, however, it was positive that India and Pakistan would now start talking.
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The negotiations began soon and lasted six rounds. India designated its minister for railways, Swaran Singh, a good-humored Sikh politician, as its negotiator. Pakistan's representative was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the charismatic scion of a land-owning Sindhi family, who served as minister for natural resources in Ayub's cabinet. Both men went on to become their country's foreign ministers. Bhutto also attained wide popularity in Pakistan when he dissociated with Ayub
and was elected prime minister once the country held national elections years later.

Ayub had decided to move Pakistan's capital from Karachi to a new city, Islamabad, which was to be built near the garrison town of Rawalpindi. Until the construction of Islamabad was completed, Rawalpindi would serve as the interim capital. The Indian delegation arrived in Rawalpindi for the first round of talks two days after Christmas in 1962. That very day Pakistan announced that it had reached an agreement with China to settle their boundary, which involved Pakistan giving a part of Kashmir to China. For the Indians, this represented bad faith on the part of Pakistan. An assurance from Ayub that the timing of the announcement was inadvertent saved the talks. But the discussions still went nowhere.

During the course of negotiations India offered changes in the cease-fire line that would have added fifteen hundred square miles to Kashmir's territory controlled by Pakistan. But the Pakistani negotiators rejected the proposal because it would still leave an overwhelming Muslim population of Kashmir under Indian rule. The British and the Americans proposed third-party mediation, which India rejected. Kennedy had thus kept his promise to Ayub to try to address the Kashmir dispute. Secretary of State Dean Rusk reported after traveling to both countries that “there is little evidence of a desire in either Pakistan or India to work hard toward a general reconciliation which would involve major concessions on Kashmir.”
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According to Rusk, “Nothing less than a Franco-German type of reconciliation is likely to work. India is more ready for this than Pakistan; the latter appears most reluctant to ease pressures on Kashmir by discussing or agreeing on other questions prior to a Kashmir settlement.” Rusk seemed to have understood the heart of the matter. “Pakistan pretends to be convinced that India has never accepted partition and seeks the disappearance of Pakistan,”
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he observed.

T
HE ASSASSINATION OF
John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, shocked the world. But it also affected US-Pakistan relations.
Johnson's priorities as president related to domestic matters. In foreign policy he tended to defer to the national security professionals. Bundy, the national security adviser, and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, led Johnson into an expanded war in Vietnam. John McCone, director of central intelligence, and Lieutenant General Gordon Blake, director of the National Security Agency, were instrumental in persuading the president of Pakistan's indispensability in intelligence gathering.

In a meeting with Bundy and McCone on November 30 Johnson brought up the question of Pakistan. McCone spoke of the intelligence community's view that the relationship with Pakistan was “of the greatest importance.” They did not want efforts at regional balance to jeopardize the operations of the Communications Intercept facility at Badaber. Johnson expressed the “greatest of confidence in Ayub” and voiced the feeling that Ayub had drifted away because of “the thought that we would abandon him in favor of India.” He directed his team that this should be “corrected in a most positive manner.”
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The Johnson administration's overtures encouraged Ayub to believe that Americans had reverted to recognizing Pakistan's importance as an ally. Only months beforehand the United States had been upset with Pakistan's decision to start civilian flights to and from China. In response, the United States had held back a $4.3 million loan for airport improvement over this China-Pakistan civil aviation agreement, which provided China air travel access to the noncommunist world for the first time.
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Regular flights had started between Canton and Shanghai in China and Karachi and Dhaka in Pakistan. The
Chicago Tribune
cited Pakistan's decision as an example of the limits of foreign aid as leverage in America's relations with other countries. “Not even a two billion dollar handout was able to keep one Asian ally in line,” it lamented.
⁸⁷

When Johnson attempted to offer reassurance that Pakistan would not be abandoned in favor of India, Ayub interpreted that as a signal that American aid would not be interrupted on account of Pakistan's continued engagement with China. Acting on this misunderstanding,
Ayub went on to tell General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs, that the United States should stop its aid to India, as it would not be used against communist China but instead to intimidate smaller neighbors. The United States “held Pakistan's interests too cheap,” he said, telling Taylor that “we will fight for this land of ours.”
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Taylor interpreted that as reiterating Pakistan's willingness to fight communism. In fact, Ayub was talking about fighting the Indians.

Ayub had settled on a three-part strategy: he kept protesting to the Americans regarding their aid to India while also continuing to seek US military assistance, he deepened Pakistan's ties with communist China, and he prepared to settle the Kashmir dispute by force, based on the assumption that the United States, because of its reliance on the Badaber Intelligence base, would not cut off military supplies to Pakistan.

In a letter to Johnson, Ayub laid out the argument against military aid to India. “This aid imperils the security of Pakistan, your ally,” Ayub wrote. “It prevents an Indo-Pakistan rapprochement over Kashmir which immobilizes the bulk of their armed forces in a dangerous confrontation,” he went on. According to Ayub, American aid to India “must lead to an arms race between India and Pakistan and thereby place a crushing burden on their economies. Surely this is no way of preventing the inroads of communism into the subcontinent—if this is the United States objective. On the contrary, it would facilitate them.”
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Ironically, all of these arguments could be reversed to make the Indian case against American aid to Pakistan.

Ayub's single-minded focus on India and Kashmir annoyed Johnson, who decided to share his opinion with the Pakistani ambassador, Ghulam Ahmed, after receiving the Pakistani president's letter. Johnson told the ambassador that he did not share “Ayub's feeling that because the United States has helped India, Pakistan should ignore its alliance obligations.” Johnson did not think it would be in Pakistan's interest to leave the alliances, but that would have to be Pakistan's decision. He “expressed great admiration for President Ayub and great affection for the people of Pakistan,” but he also realized
that the two countries were coming “to the point at which we would all have to re-evaluate the condition of our relationship.”
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Johnson also told the American ambassador to Pakistan, Walter P. McConaughy, that he was distressed that “such an old and valued ally of ours as President Ayub should want to give the attention he has given to Communist China.” He wanted McConaughy to tell Ayub that America was “having all sorts of trouble with China in Southeast Asia right now.”

In his discussion with McConaughy Johnson asked the question that both his predecessors had asked: he wondered how much the United States was getting for the very large amounts of aid it was giving to India as well as Pakistan. According to McConaughy's notes of the meeting: “The President said that when Ayub was willing to send men to Laos, he thought our aid was worthwhile. But now that the Pakistanis refused to help us in Viet Nam, he didn't know whether we were getting very much for our money.”
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Johnson was not the only one frustrated by the course of US-Pakistan relations; Ayub had also started talking of reconsidering ties with the United States. When demonstrations against the Vietnam War outside US government buildings in some Pakistani cities turned violent, the Pakistani media had taken an extremely anti-American turn. Further, the fact that police showed up late or failed to act against the demonstrators made Americans wonder if this was not a coincidence. The discussion between McConaughy and Ayub that followed summed up the weariness of both sides.

The US ambassador spoke of the Chinese communist challenge, stating that the “Chinese communist shadow would be even longer and more ominous than the Soviet one for the next few years.” As the reported North Vietnamese attack on an American Navy vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin had occurred only a few days earlier, the United States thought it was “entitled to ask our allies and indeed every free country to stand up and be counted in the current dangerous confluence of events.” McConaughy expressed disappointment that Pakistan had “not yet seen fit to make even a token non-strategic contribution in Viet Nam.” Ayub confirmed that
Pakistan would not be able to contribute in Vietnam because of its “vulnerability” in relation to India.

McConaughy asked Ayub how a token contribution in the nonmilitary field would represent any enlarged political or military commitment. Ayub's response—that his “people would not understand”—elicited an angry retort from the career American diplomat. If the people did not understand, he replied, “It would be because of the conditioning they had received in recent months from official and other public news media.”
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At this time Ayub also conveyed to the United States his intention to “re-examine” Pakistan's tie to SEATO. He told McConaughy that Pakistan had never had a deep intrinsic interest of its own in SEATO anyway. Pakistan had joined in 1954 only as a cooperative gesture to the United States and was now “embarrassed by her current inability to pull her weight in the organization because of liabilities nearer home,” he explained.

The State Department read this as a reflection of two already apparent trends in Pakistan's foreign policy: the country was pulling away from alliances and it was trying to narrow its relationship with the United States to bilateral interchange. But if Pakistan revised the terms of its relationship, the United States would naturally do the same. Americans interacting with Ayub at the time saw no realization among Pakistani officials that there would be consequences for Pakistan if they were to back out of alliance commitments.
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Ayub and other Pakistani leaders had succeeded in repeatedly getting the Americans to give aid without asking for an immediate return, which had made them oblivious of the possibility of the United States turning around and someday saying, “No.”

Little had obviously changed since the days of the Korean conflict, when Pakistan's leaders had made a similar argument. Since then the United States had invested heavily in increasing the size of the Pakistani armed forces, which, by the summer of 1964, had reached a strength of around 250,000 troops. Economic, military, and food aid to Pakistan between 1950 and 1966 totaled $5 billion. Large loans from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank provided additional capital during
Ayub's decade of direct military rule, leading to GDP growth averaging 5 percent annually.