Magnificent Delusions (20 page)

Also significant for Komer was an intelligence report that Bhutto had distributed among Pakistani officials: three hundred copies of the book
The Invisible Government
, written by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross. The book detailed the CIA's clandestine operations in several countries, including Iran. It contained previously unpublished information about the Badaber facility near Peshawar. If Bhutto had, in fact, distributed copies of the book among officials, this meant that he wanted to question Pakistan's secret relationship with US intelligence. If the allegation of his role in distributing the book was false, however, someone in Pakistan's establishment was gunning for him and feeding false information about him to the US embassy.

According to Komer, the US embassy in Pakistan doubted that Pakistan's government had “an exaggerated idea any longer of the importance of Peshawar [Badaber] to the U.S., since the recent record of our aid hold-ups must convince them that they can't use Peshawar as a decisive lever.” Although six smaller US intelligence installations in Pakistan had been closed down “because of petty irritations,” the embassy did not fear closure of the Badaber base. Komer, more realistic than the embassy, thought that the Pakistanis were convinced the intelligence facilities they hosted were much more important and, thus, would use it as a lever soon. In his view the United States would not be able to convince the Pakistanis “to play ball unless we confront them continually with the prospect of losing all U.S. support.”
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But the US intelligence community was not willing to risk their Badaber communications intercept facility. As such, they were partly instrumental in convincing Johnson to offer Ayub further food aid when the two met in December 1965 for the first time after the war. The American president spoke to the Pakistani dictator as if nothing had gone seriously wrong. Reviewing the meeting with his advisers, Johnson said he thought that Ayub was much chastened. “He had
gone on an adventure and been licked,” Johnson said, adding that he hated to see a proud man humble himself so. He saw Ayub “subdued, troubled, pathetic and sad.”
¹¹¹

Johnson asserted that he understood Ayub's difficulties. “Ayub felt hemmed in by powerful neighbors on all sides—China, Russia and India,” he remarked. Johnson observed that at home the Pakistan president had his domestic problems with the Bhutto group and others, but “Ayub seemed almost to have a psychosis about India.” Ayub had apparently told Johnson that “I know you won't believe it but those Indians are going to gobble us up.”
¹¹²
Johnson had replied that if they tried this, the United States would stop them. The US president emphasized how close he felt to Ayub. He said he understood Ayub—his fears and his problems.

Ayub had managed to take Johnson into confidence before letting the Soviets help shape the postwar peace. Once again the personal feelings of an American leader about a Pakistani one had saved the relationship. But Ayub never shared the extent of Pakistan's dependence on the United States with the Pakistani people, nor did he acknowledge that the war against India was a blunder. He published a book titled
Friends, Not Masters
, which served both as his memoirs and a statement that he had sought friendship with the West, which in turn sought to act as Pakistan's masters.

The book helped exacerbate Pakistani anger against the United States. In it Ayub acknowledged that “the objectives which the western powers wanted the Baghdad Pact to serve were quite different from the objectives we had in mind.” But he argued that Pakistan had “never made any secret of our intentions or our interests” and that the United States knew Pakistan would use its new arms against India. This feigned version of events was also fed to the public through the media.

People were told that India attacked Pakistan and the United States stabbed Pakistan in the back by withholding crucial military materiel. The Pakistani people were not told that Pakistan's alliance treaties with the United States did not apply to war with India or that the 1965 war had, in fact, started because of Pakistan's attempt to militarily change the status quo in Kashmir.

The United States, Komer pointed out, had helped Pakistan build its independent position through $5 billion in support. It stopped a war Ayub started “just in time to save the Paks.” But all that the United States got in return was “a bit of quite valuable real estate”—a reference to intelligence listening posts. Pakistan had shut down some of these installations, and four were still closed at the time of Komer's comments. Apparently Pakistan had not informed the Americans about getting MIG aircraft and tanks from China before the war. Komer concluded that “if there's any history of broken moral commitments, it's on the Pak side—not ours.”
¹¹³

In less than two years Johnson's personally favorable disposition resulted in Pakistan's military approaching the American embassy with a fresh request for arms and munitions. Defense Minister Admiral Afzal Rahman Khan spoke at length on the subject with Benjamin Oehlert, a former Coca-Cola executive who had arrived as ambassador in July 1967. “Next to President Ayub,” the admiral told Oehlert, “the military establishment” was America's best friend in Pakistan. The country's economic circumstances did not permit buying tanks and other much-needed equipment for the military. The army badly needed two hundred new tanks, he said, so it would be a good idea if the US ambassador sat down “in cool of evening over couple of scotch-and-sodas” with Ayub to discuss how the Americans could resume military supplies in return for retaining the Badaber base.
¹¹⁴

After the war with India Ayub had tried to obtain arms from several sources, including the Soviet Union and France, but no one seemed to be able to meet Pakistan's military needs on the type of terms on which Pakistan had become accustomed with the Americans. The Pakistanis had found that the global arms market was a tough place. No one, except the Americans, offered weapons as aid or on relatively easy financial terms. Although the United States had resumed the supply of ammunition and spare parts in April 1967, Pakistan was having difficulty buying major items like tanks and planes.

For the United States, the decision was difficult. It had armed Pakistan in the past after Ayub's assurance that the Pakistan army would
become theirs. But the Pakistanis had not used those weapons to fight any American enemy; instead, they had gone to war against a friend of the United States, India. Removing the arms embargo without a change in Pakistan's policy sent the wrong message to all American allies, many of whom had their own local disputes to settle.

Rusk realized “the temptation to try to ‘buy' an assured future for the Peshawar facility with one or two hundred tanks.” But he also knew that linking “military supply policy with Peshawar” would encourage “intolerable pressures from Government of Pakistan for more and more hardware.”
¹¹⁵
Thus, the Pakistani officials' request was politely turned down. When Johnson stopped over in Karachi for refueling while on his way back from a trip to Australia and Thailand, Ayub reiterated the request along with a plea for vegetable oil and wheat. Johnson immediately agreed to the food aid and promised to help Pakistan get the tanks from a third party, possibly Turkey.
¹¹⁶

The United States delivered on the food aid, but getting the tanks through third parties proved difficult. The Pakistanis decided to up the ante and served notice on April 6, 1968, for vacating the Badaber Intelligence Facility upon the expiration of its lease on July 17, 1969. The formal notice of termination did not surprise the Americans; it was the likely way for Pakistan to open negotiations about possibly renewing the lease. But the notice was delivered shortly before the expected arrival in Pakistan of Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, a coincidence the Americans found interesting.

The Pakistani officials who delivered the notice gave the US ambassador a long speech about how the base disrupted Pakistan's relations with China and the Soviet Union without bringing any significant benefit to Pakistan.
¹¹⁷
Although the agreement to grant the base to the United States had been kept secret from the Pakistani public, the decision to end the lease was made public even before discussions between the two sides had been completed.

Johnson, still confident that his personal ties with Ayub could change things, wrote a personal letter to the Pakistani president seeking continuation of the intelligence facility. The letter said that the Pakistani decision to prematurely announce its position had
“surprised and disturbed” him and that, too, “because of threats and demands by another power.” It pointed out that the intelligence facility helped US security “as well as the security of many other nations” and reminded Ayub of “the close relationship that has existed for so many years between our two countries.”

This relationship, Johnson said, had been manifested in America's “contribution of more than $3,500,000,000 in aid to Pakistan.” He had obviously used the numerals for effect before asking for “a reasonable withdrawal period” to lessen the impact of the facility's closure. Johnson ended the letter with the words: “I do not think, old friend, this is too much to ask.”
¹¹⁸
Ayub wrote back, and there was some further discussion, including the possibility of giving the Americans some more time in return for the two hundred Patton tanks. In the end, however, the Badaber Communications Intercept Facility stopped being operational well before its lease expired. The base was formally handed back on the day of the expiration of its lease.

The US alliance with Pakistan, beginning with SEATO, had satisfied neither country. The reason Pakistan accepted the arrangement was obvious to everyone: the country was short of resources and it had inherited a large military establishment that it sought not only to retain but also to expand. American critics of the relationship objected more to what journalist Selig Harrison described as the American decision to “subsidize Pakistan as a permanent garrison state with a military capability swollen out of all proportion to her size.”
¹¹⁹

Chester Bowles, the American ambassador to India, offered a plausible explanation for US decision making in relation to Pakistan. He attributed American policy toward South Asia as the product of “sending important personages to this area who have no knowledge of the forces at work here.” Unfamiliar Americans, Bowles said, “come convinced that all Asians are ‘inscrutable' products of the ‘inscrutable East'!”

But Pakistan's British-trained elite were “Asians who argue the advantages of an olive over an onion in a martini and who know friends they know in London,” he argued. This created a mirage for
American policy makers. “Here at last are Asians who make sense, who understand our problems, who face up to the realities, who understand the menace of whatever may worry us at the moment,” Bowles observed critically. “And so we agree to more F-104S or C130S or whatever may be currently required as political therapy to ease wounded Pakistani feelings.”
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A
YUB RESIGNED FROM
the presidency in March 1969 after several months of violent demonstrations against his government. Instead of transferring power to the speaker of the National Assembly, a Bengali, as was required by the constitution he himself had imposed seven years earlier, Ayub returned the country to martial law. The army chief, General Yahya Khan, became Pakistan's president and chief martial law administrator, ruling by decree and without a constitution.

Yahya organized Pakistan's first open elections in December 1970, and these were followed by a brutal civil war in East Pakistan.

Chapter Three

A Split and a Tilt

D
uring Richard M. Nixon's successful campaign to become the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Pakistan was not mentioned at all; the Vietnam War was the major foreign policy issue during the 1968 elections. But Nixon did feel a strong attachment to Pakistan, so much so that he visited Pakistan within the first few months of his presidency. Pakistan was also his country of choice as the intermediary when opening relations with China. And it was in defense of Pakistan that he described Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as “a bitch” and an “old witch.” Not to be left out, Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, likewise made the unusual remark: “The Indians are bastards anyway.”
¹

These remarks came about in response to Gandhi's visit to Washington in November 1971, at the height of the East Pakistan crisis. At that time Pakistan's military was forcefully suppressing protests following the country's first election. The Bengali-led Awami League had won the election, but the West Pakistan–based military regime had accused the party of seeking secession with Indian help. After much brutality in East Pakistan, international opinion had aligned against Pakistan. Threat of another India-Pakistan war loomed.