Magnificent Delusions (21 page)

Nixon and Kissinger made these remarks during a conversation in the Oval Office that also involved the president's assistant, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. The exchange was being recorded for posterity, and its transcript is now available in the Nixon archives. The president had met Gandhi a day earlier and was scheduled to meet her
again after his meeting with Kissinger and Haldeman. He was reviewing the previous day's discussion.

“I raised my voice a little,” Nixon acknowledged. Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser, advised him to be “a shade cooler today,” explaining that “even though she was a bitch, we shouldn't overlook the fact that we got what we wanted.” The president had warned Gandhi to stay out of West Pakistan even if Pakistan's military collapsed in East Pakistan, and the message had been conveyed, Kissinger pointed out, in such a way that Gandhi could not claim that “the United States kicked her in the teeth.”
²

A few days later Nixon and Kissinger spoke again about trying to prevent an Indian attack on West Pakistan. They discussed plans to send an American aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal as a deterrent to the Indians. “We're in the position,” Kissinger said, “where a Soviet stooge, supported with Soviet arms, is overrunning a country that is an American ally.” Kissinger saw this as an opportunity to find out if America could scare a country like India. “If we can still scare somebody else,” he said, noting that there was less than a fifty-fifty chance of that happening, “it may open the Middle East solution.”
³
Kissinger was testing America's ability to influence medium-sized powers such as India through bluff. If India could be scared, he seemed to suggest, the much smaller countries of the Middle East could also be forced to comply with US demands without using force.

The plan did not work, however, as India calculated correctly that the Americans would not be willing to get into a shooting war. In the same conversation Nixon expressed irritation over China's refusal to get involved. “Boy, I tell you,” he exclaimed, “movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those goddamn Indians to death.” But by the very next day the president had tired of working so hard at intervening on Pakistan's behalf.

Kissinger informed him that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had written a letter proposing negotiations between West and East Pakistan. However, even though mediation could avert bloodshed, Pakistani leaders did not want to be told what to do. Nixon recognized
that “The partition of Pakistan is a fact” and asked, “Now the point is, why then, Henry, are we going through all this agony?” Kissinger replied, “We're going through this agony to prevent the West Pakistan army from being destroyed” because “the world's psychological balance of power” was at stake. The United States could not allow a Soviet ally to defeat an American ally.
⁴

In the end most of Nixon's and Kissinger's exertions proved futile. On December 16, 1971, Indian forces marched triumphantly into Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, where Pakistan's army laid down its arms. Ninety thousand Pakistani troops, civilian officials, and allies became prisoners of war. East Pakistan now proclaimed itself the independent Peoples Republic of Bangladesh, and it soon received international recognition.

After initial hesitation, the United States recognized Bangladesh. But Pakistan refused to recognize Bangladesh for over two years, though it eventually relented. Although the United States, with Soviet help, had prevented India from overrunning West Pakistan as well, it received no gratitude for its efforts. The Indians claimed that they had no plans of doing that anyway, whereas the Pakistanis resented the United States for not stepping in to help save the country's eastern wing.

The chain of events that led to Pakistan's bifurcation had begun with Ayub's removal from power. Although the United States had lost its intelligence base near Peshawar, some Americans still wanted to retain their alliance with Pakistan—Nixon and Kissinger foremost among them. Their attachment to Pakistan, based on an expectation of support in global strategy, is what had led the United States to support West Pakistan's army. But “the tilt”
⁵
brought no advantage to the United States, nor did it serve Pakistan well. American support gave Pakistan a sense of false confidence, which encouraged Pakistani leaders to march into a blunder and then persist with folly. If this had not been the case, Pakistan may have negotiated a settlement with politicians from East Pakistan. But it didn't.

T
HE PROCESS OF
Pakistan's breakup had started much earlier than 1971 and was largely a function of domestic politics. Protests broke out against Ayub's government in the fall of 1968, after he had ruled for a decade. Multiple factors contributed to the unrest: economic growth had stalled after the 1965 war with India, American aid had declined to a third of what it had been, and conditions on loans from the International Financial Institutions became somewhat stringent. As a result, economic disparities between East and West Pakistan and among different classes had become the subject of political agitation. The people were tired of dictatorship and demanded change.

Pakistan's traditional political parties, which Ayub had sidelined, coalesced into an alliance to demand his ouster. The Awami League (AL), led by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, referred to as Mujib because of the commonality of his last name, was gaining ground in the East with its calls for greater rights and autonomy for Bengalis. It drew its strength from Bengalis' widespread resentment over being treated as second-class citizens in a country where they constituted the majority of the population.

In West Pakistan Ayub's former foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had formed the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) with a socialist manifesto, and this tapped into his personal popularity. He also benefited from nationalist sentiment generated in the aftermath of the war against India, especially in the Punjab region, from which most of Pakistan's soldiers and civil servants were traditionally recruited.

Before the outbreak of the street protests Mujib had been jailed over allegations that he had conspired with Indian intelligence to pursue East Pakistani secession. Then, soon after violent protests started in both wings of Pakistan, Bhutto was also imprisoned under preventive detention laws. By the time the two were released, both of them had become heroes in their respective parts of the country.

Initially Ayub's administration tried to put the demonstrations down with force. However, Ayub had suffered a stroke, which his subordinates had chosen not to reveal to the public, and by the time he was well enough to start making decisions himself, the situation had spiraled out of control.

A CIA assessment noted “a steady deterioration of Ayub's political base” by February 1969, shortly after Nixon's inauguration. The Pakistani president had previously relied on the military, the Civil Service, the business community, and the landowners for support, providing an aura of stability after years of political chaos, contributing to Ayub's political longevity. Now, however, widespread rioting had damaged that aura beyond repair.

According to the US appraisal, Ayub had justified “his highly centralized and at times dictatorial rule” by making “frequent use of the widespread fear that India will try to reincorporate Pakistan into the Indian Union.” This tactic was still “one of Ayub's few remaining psychological weapons,” but his survival depended solely on “the loyalty to the regime of the nation's armed forces.”
⁶
A few days later another intelligence assessment said that the army did not seem to “have the stomach for the violence that would seem necessary to restore order.”
⁷
Pakistan was in for a “prolonged period of adjustment,” the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research predicted, and “the country will be fortunate if it emerges from this period of stress as a single entity.”
⁸

Finally, Ayub resigned on March 25, but not until after imposing martial law and handing power over to army commander General Yahya Khan. Both men claimed that the military had a legal and constitutional responsibility to defend the country not only against external aggression but also from internal disorder and chaos.
⁹
This transfer of power from one general to another thus amounted to a determination that the Pakistani military was the final arbiter in political matters. The
Economist
magazine described Ayub's ouster and replacement by Yahya Khan in an editorial titled “Tweedle Khan Takes Over.”
¹⁰
Most international observers saw Yahya's regime as a continuation of Ayub's. Yahya did not change the foreign and domestic policies that Ayub had pursued for over a decade, and the West Pakistani elite, mostly ethnic Punjabis, continued to dominate the new government as they had the previous one.

The chaos that led to Ayub's ouster was related exclusively to Pakistan's internal politics. Although he had been a good friend to the United States until toward the end of his regime, Ayub had erred
when he sought domestic strength solely through external relations. He failed to understand his diverse people's aspirations, imposing unity rather than nurturing it by recognizing his nation's differences. Obsessed with his belief in West Pakistan's martial races being superior to the Bengalis, Ayub treated East Pakistan particularly badly.

Conversely, Yahya did not fully follow in Ayub's footsteps by presenting himself as a savior for Pakistan; instead, he announced his intention to hold elections for an Assembly, open to all political parties, that would write a new constitution for the country. He wanted the politicians to maintain “the integrity of Pakistan and the glory of Islam”
¹¹
—an allusion to the national ideology that had evolved since the days of Liaquat. He also said that he wanted to retire after transferring power to civilians, which blunted opposition that he might otherwise have faced for being Pakistan's second successive military dictator.

It would have made sense for the United States to take a step back so Pakistan could resolve its internal discord on its own, but some US policy makers still saw Pakistan solely through the prism of the Cold War. In particular, Kissinger told Nixon that the return to normalcy in Pakistan after Ayub's resignation depended on East Pakistanis accepting martial law.

According to Kissinger, violent reaction in East Pakistan to “a virtual coup by the West Pakistani establishment which has long dominated the country” could make the situation in the east wing dangerous. Although evidence did not suggest that any foreign country played a role in the recent internal disturbances, the national security adviser nonetheless concluded that opportunities for foreign meddling, “especially by the Communist Chinese,” would increase.
¹²

The Pakistani military also made no effort to pause, reflect, and change the basis of Pakistan's ties with the United States and deliberated even less over what had caused the country's disharmony. Within days of Yahya's ascent to power, Pakistan's military was pressing the United States to restore military assistance. The deputy martial law administrator and commander of the navy, Vice-Admiral Syed Muhammad Ahsan, represented Pakistan at President Eisenhower's funeral in April, using the opportunity to explain to US of
ficials the circumstances of imposing martial law and the new junta's intentions as well as to plead for renewed military aid.

Ahsan told State Department officials that it would be dangerous for the United States to withhold arms from Pakistan because doing so might force the country to “get involved with others” who might be “inimical to U.S. interests.” Pakistan could not afford “expensive purchases in Western Europe,” Ahsan said, going on to argue that this was a psychologically important time for the United States to invest in Pakistan's new leaders, who needed weapons for internal security and to “keep their troops from becoming disgruntled.”
¹³

But the US embassy in Pakistan was not sure which way the wind was blowing. It asked Washington to weigh the advantages or otherwise of supporting the new government that “may or may not win support of [the] populace and may or may not become [a] repressive force” in order to maintain a strong central government. Although West Pakistanis, especially those from the Punjabi ethnic group, dominated the country, the Bengalis from East Pakistan constituted a majority of Pakistan's population. US diplomats from Dhaka, in East Pakistan, were already reporting the wide gulf that had opened between the two wings of the country.