Magnificent Delusions (28 page)

Some commentators suggest that Nixon was convinced that Gandhi “hankered for the actual dismemberment of all of Pakistan notably including West Pakistan.” According to this account, the Indian prime minister had once said to Nixon that in the British division of India, “Pakistan had been most unjustly given both Balochistan and Pashtunistan.”

To Nixon this meant that India questioned the inclusion in Pakistan of Balochistan and the Pashtun territories, “the entire area now forming West Pakistan's frontier with both Afghanistan and Tibet and therefore through Tibet, Pakistan's common frontier with China. “He believed he had “conclusive proof” “of India's intention to crush the main body of the Pakistan army, in West Pakistan.”
⁸⁴

Pakistani officials had also convinced Nixon and Kissinger that the Kennedy administration had given Pakistan a written promise to help protect Pakistan in case of foreign aggression. When Congress and the US media criticized the White House for its support of Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis, Kissinger advised the new Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Major General N. A. M. Raza, to invoke the mutual security treaty and its “clarifications used in subsequent years” so as to help justify Nixon's position.
⁸⁵
Kissinger wanted Pakistan to bring to light Kennedy's promise of aid in case of war, which might have silenced the administration's critics amongst Democrats. Nixon could then have claimed that Pakistan's security had been a bipartisan concern and said that he was only keeping Kennedy's commitment.

As it turned out, Pakistan and the United States had never concluded a mutual security treaty. The references to such a treaty and assurances the Kennedy administration offered to Pakistan were based on Nixon's and Kissinger's ignorance. The Pakistanis were misinterpreting the US-Pakistan Agreement of Cooperation signed on March 5, 1959, in the context of Pakistan's membership in the Baghdad Pact. The agreement obligated the United States to take appropriate action “as may be mutually agreed upon” to defend Pakistan against aggression.

The agreement, in turn, cited a March 9, 1957, Joint Resolution of the US Congress that committed the United States to assist nations against aggression by “any country controlled by international communism.” It also explicitly stated that the use of force had to be consonant with the Constitution of the United States.

During India's war with China in 1962 the Kennedy administration had assured Pakistan that, if India misused US military assistance in aggression against Pakistan, the United States would take “immediately, in accordance with constitutional authority, appropriate action to thwart such aggression.” Thus, the United States could not fight a war on Pakistan's behalf without congressional authorization.

By encouraging rumors that the United States was bound by treaty to fight alongside Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger were hoping
to scare India. But Secretary of State Rogers explicitly told Kissinger that “The Aide Memoire of Kennedy's does not commit the U.S. to go to war in the event that Pakistan is attacked by India and we should not say that.” He thought that suggesting the existence of such a commitment amounted to circumventing the US Constitution. “We certainly don't want to tell the American people that we are committed to go to war,” Rogers pointed out.
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Kissinger's dilemma was that Yahya flatly refused to negotiate with Mujib or to accept international mediation between East and West Pakistan. Nixon refused to twist Yahya's arm, a man he considered decent but on a suicide mission. Under such circumstances Kissinger saw psychological pressure on India as the only available option for the United States when trying to prevent all-out war that might result in Pakistan's complete collapse. In their exuberant support of Pakistan Nixon and Kissinger had chosen to overlook repeated assurances from Gandhi, backed by intelligence, that India would not overrun West Pakistan.

The Indian army began military incursions into Pakistan's Eastern wing on November 21 in support of the Mukti Bahini. On December 3, 1971, Pakistan attacked India from the west in the hope of forestalling the fall of East Pakistan. India recognized Bangladesh as a sovereign country three days later and marched into East Pakistan in aid of the Bangladesh government in exile. On December 14, as the Indian forces surrounded Dhaka, the Pakistani High Command told the besieged garrison that “Yellow and White help expected from North and South shortly,” a reference to their imaginary Chinese and American military support.
⁸⁷

At this point Nixon ordered the deployment of an aircraft carrier, the USS
Enterprise
, to the Bay of Bengal. The maneuver was aimed at India, but Indira Gandhi was not intimidated. In response, she directed the Indian navy, if they encountered US vessels, to invite American officers for tea aboard their ships. Further, Nixon's decision disturbed several Western allies. Canada and Britain considered it an unnecessary escalation of a local conflict.
⁸⁸
Thus, the United States was almost as isolated on the issue as Pakistan. Having failed
to find a face-saver for Yahya, Kissinger now sought one for his own president.

Then, a letter from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev provided Nixon the excuse he needed to back down. Brezhnev offered a “guarantee that there would be no attack on West Pakistan” once war had ended in the East.
⁸⁹
Kissinger told Nixon that this meant “We are home.” Nixon had wanted to save Pakistan, and he wanted to believe that he had done so. He did not see the irony that, in the end, a Soviet assurance—and not American arms supplied over two decades—saved only one half of Pakistan.

The United States had seen the conflict in East Pakistan as another battle in the global struggle between superpowers. An early American statement condemning Pakistani military repression in the East might have forced Yahya to reconsider his policy. Independent observers believe that the Pakistan army killed between one and two hundred thousand Bengalis in a nine-month period, whereas Bangladesh puts the figure at three million. Conversely, Pakistani forces suffered only thirteen hundred fatalities in combat operations in the Eastern wing and another fourteen hundred during war along the West Pakistan border.
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Pakistani forces in the Eastern wing surrendered to the Indian military and Mukti Bahini on December 16, 1971. Gandhi then declared once again that India had no territorial ambitions. “Now that the Pakistani armed forces have surrendered in Bangladesh and Bangladesh is free it is pointless in our view to continue the present conflict,” she announced.
⁹¹
But Yahya vowed to continue the war with India. “We shall fight alone if we must,” he said in an address to the nation. The headline of
Dawn
, Pakistan's major English newspaper, on the day of Pakistan's surrender read, “Victory on All Fronts.”

In the prelude to war West Pakistanis had been fed false propaganda, and after the war's end Yahya made it clear that he did not intend to stop the hype. “No sacrifice will be too great to preserve this Islamic homeland of the 120 million people of Pakistan,” he said. He then announced plans to introduce a new constitution that would provide greater autonomy to East Pakistan, as though its loss
was temporary. Yahya described the army's conduct as “reminiscent of the highest traditions of the soldiers of Islam.” He also thanked China and the United States for their support for “the cause of peace and justice.”
⁹²

Following Pakistan army's surrender, around ninety thousand West Pakistani soldiers and civilians were transported to India as prisoners of war. Indian troops helped the establishment of the new government of Bangladesh and then withdrew completely after three months. Four days after the surrender, on December 20, 1971, Yahya was removed from power by his own commanders. Bhutto took over as president and chief martial law administrator, the latter a temporary transitional measure. Bhutto then freed Mujib, who returned to Dhaka in triumph to become prime minister of Bangladesh.

The US “tilt” had failed to save Pakistan from a split, and it did not help Pakistan or the United States in any other way. Pakistan's army continued to promote hatred of “Hindu India” and trained its men to avenge the humiliation in Bangladesh. The Pakistani people were never fully told about America's support, and many still complain that the United States failed to save its ally from division and military defeat. As a result, although Pakistan still sought American economic and military assistance, its leaders decided neither to depend on the United States nor to trust it.

Chapter Four

Picking Up the Pieces

F
our months after Pakistan's eastern half severed to become Bangladesh, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto received Sidney Sober at his elegant private home at 70 Clifton in Karachi. As president, Bhutto was still picking up the pieces of a dismembered country. West Pakistanis were slowly accepting the fact that their country had been reduced to half its former size. Parliament had been convened, an interim constitution would soon replace martial law, and work had begun on a permanent constitution. Bhutto was anxious to restructure Pakistan's economy and reconstruct its foreign policy.

Sober was a US career diplomat heading the embassy in Islamabad as charge d'affaires. Farland's tenure as ambassador was drawing to an end, and a new ambassador had not yet been named. In any case, Farland and Bhutto did not like each other. During the 1970 election campaign Bhutto had accused Farland of working for the CIA and being involved in toppling third-world governments. For his part, Farland had limited his embassy's contacts with Bhutto, accusing him of being a “U.S. Baiter.”

The day he took over as president on December 20, 1971, Bhutto had met Farland to make the point, in Sober's presence, that he valued Pakistan's relations with the United States. In that meeting Bhutto had declared that “We are in one hell of a mess” before saying that “Pakistan had a real reason for coming into being” and that “this very reason justified its survival.”
¹
Bhutto wanted the Americans to do everything within their capacity “to assist in the monumental
effort which lay ahead.” Farland had wished him well, expressed hopes of seeing him frequently, and then designated Sober as the “secondary” link between Bhutto and the embassy.

Since Bhutto's rise to the presidency Sober had effectively been Bhutto's principal point of contact with the US government. The two met often. During the meeting at Bhutto's Karachi home on April 3, 1972, Sober wanted to review Bhutto's persistent proposal for closer defense ties. Pakistan's defense secretary had offered the Americans a naval base along the Arabian Sea coast, and Pakistani officers had dropped “casual hints” to diplomats that it was now prepared for a US military presence. Sober informed Washington that his firm policy had been “to listen politely on such occasions and to be entirely noncommittal.”
²

Pakistan's ambassador in Washington, General N. A. M. Raza, had written a letter to the State Department providing a list of equipment Pakistan urgently needed for its armed forces. He sought “agreement in principle for release of lethal sophisticated equipment such as artillery and anti-aircraft weapons, aircraft, ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missiles, missile-carrying boats, submarines, etc. at reduced price and on deferred payment.”

Attachments to Raza's letter included new requests for a hundred M-47/48 tanks, four submarines, twelve B-57 bombers, twenty-five F-5 aircraft, one thousand M-601 trucks, and some artillery and communications equipment. Pakistan also wanted the three hundred armored personnel carriers that the United States had earlier agreed to sell. It also wanted the United States to replace equipment, including seventy-four tanks, twenty-five F-86s, four B-57s, and three F-104s that had been lost in the December 1971 war with India.
³

As he sat down with Bhutto at his Karachi home, Sober expressed concern that Pakistan had once again started asking for a substantial quantity of US arms on soft terms. This did not fit with Bhutto's emphasis on the need for normalization of relations with India. Sober referred to a visit to Washington by Pakistan's secretary general for foreign affairs, Aziz Ahmed. He noted that Ahmed had made a rather hard-line presentation on Soviet intentions in the subcontinent and, based on that, had expressed an urgent need for
American weapons. He also cited Raza's laundry list for military equipment.

Sober knew that Pakistan was not seeking weapons to defend against an impending Soviet attack. He also felt that immediate rearmament should not be the first priority for a country that had so recently suffered military humiliation. After all, Pakistan's economy was hardly back on its feet, tens of thousands of its soldiers and civilians were prisoners of war, and it had yet to recognize Bangladesh and settle issues that the Eastern wing's secession had created. Why then, Sober asked, was Pakistan requesting that the United States resume supplying military aid?

Bhutto replied that his senior military leaders were pointing to “some obvious gaps in defense structure” and wanted him to acquire some sophisticated weapons for them. He was not in a position to ignore the military, which remained powerful even after its defeat. He had forwarded the requests for defense equipment to the United States because it was the “only logical source for some types of equipment.” Bhutto also voiced the hope that the United States would “loosen up soon in supply of spare parts” so as to keep operational the equipment that had been previously provided.