Magnificent Delusions (30 page)

When Nixon asked Bhutto what he thought the future held for Pakistan, the Pakistani president-in-waiting said he would take “thirty days to assess the will of the people” before establishing a series of domestic reforms. But he had already laid out his country's future foreign policy. Like before, one of its pillars would be to seek money and arms from the United States to maintain military parity with India.

On his return to Pakistan and after taking over as president, Bhutto continued his effort to charm the Americans. He had met the US president and secretary of state on Friday, December 17, and the US ambassador to Pakistan immediately after his arrival in Islamabad on Monday, December 20. On Wednesday, December 22, he visited Farland at the ambassador's residence, breaking protocol that required ambassadors to call on presidents rather than the other way around. Bhutto made it clear that he had deliberately ignored custom so as to signal strongly his “reaffirmation of a whole new period of close and effective relations with the United States.”

As foreign minister, Bhutto knew how Ayub's personal connection with US leaders and diplomats worked to Pakistan's advantage. If positive personal relations worked in favor of close ties between the two countries, he worried that negative views about him might have the opposite effect. He told Farland that whatever criticism the United States may have had regarding his “past posture,” he now hoped that this would be forgotten. Thus, within a period of one week he had made that point to the US president and secretary of state, and he was now repeating it to an ambassador he had lambasted not long ago during the election campaign.

The conversation with Farland during this unconventional visit reflected Bhutto's state of mind at the time. At age forty-three, he carried the burden of reorganizing and running a country that was only twenty-three years old. He was popular and charismatic, with education from the University of California at Berkeley as well as Oxford University. He had some experience as a cabinet minister. But the challenges Pakistan faced at the time were staggering. Pakistan had partially disintegrated, and Western scholars and journalists again expressed fears about its viability. Bhutto had taken over a militarily defeated, emotionally shattered, and economically bankrupt country. He wanted to line up America's support behind him for the monumental task ahead of him.

“Bhutto seems to have a far better chance of building a new nation than any of his predecessors,” Browne wrote in the
New York Times
within a week of his assuming office. “The army is dispirited and sick of governing. The new President has a genuine popular mandate,” he pointed out. “Without the dead weight of East Pakistan,” the journalist calculated, “the industrial development of the west is likely to move rapidly, especially since massive aid from the US and other Western nations will probably resume soon.” In his opinion Bhutto was “probably the most powerful leader Pakistan has had since the founding of the nation by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1947.”

But Browne also foresaw Bhutto's problems. Pakistan had come into being as a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, and Islam was the glue that was supposed to hold everything together. He recognized that Bhutto's “interests are more secular than religious.” Still, Bhutto would have to “walk a tightrope between religious fundamentalism and the needs of practical politics, between socialism and the feudal structure of Pakistan's society, between the urbane wealth of the class that produced him and the wretched poverty of the masses he now commands.”
¹⁵

Aware of these contradictions, Bhutto told Farland that Pakistan needed “a substantial influx of capital into the country” to rise out of destitution. He clarified that, by capital, he meant both private investment and government-to-government aid. He wished to assure the US government that he would make investment in Pakistan
both convenient and worthwhile for foreign investors. He also spoke of wanting democracy to flourish and the need for resolving the issues among Pakistan's provinces and disparate ethnic groups. Bhutto still wanted to reach out to East Pakistan, and the idea of a confederation, which he mooted with Rogers in Washington, was still very much alive.

Farland asked Bhutto about the demand in the press that Yahya be put on trial, wondering aloud “whether this was a salutary move at a time when the climate called for reconciliation and a play-down of emotions.” Apparently, Kissinger had noticed the press reports about Yahya's possible trial. He had instructed Farland to inform Bhutto the United States would have difficulty understanding the decision to do so. Bhutto said that he most certainly did not want “Yahya's head” nor was he vindictive. He added that there was a great deal of public clamor, which he found difficult to stifle. But, he noted, with the passage of time this clamor could be expected to lessen.

Having made the pitch for US investment and allaying concerns about Nixon's friend Yahya, Bhutto addressed the all-important topic of India-Pakistan relations. He said he was convinced that India had “nurtured the definite intention of liquidating West Pakistan.” India, he said, had never truly recognized the 1947 partition nor, in fact, had been reconciled to it. According to Bhutto, because of India's antagonism, the future of Pakistan was closely tied to two great powers: China and the United States. He expressed the hope that his negotiations with India would provide a harmony that would allow Pakistan to exist in peace.
¹⁶

Farland later told the State Department that “Bhutto faces difficulties in virtually every area of national activity: political, international and domestic; economic; military; and social.” In foreign affairs his most pressing problem was the return to Pakistan of the ninety thousand–odd POWs and civilian internees from erstwhile East Pakistan. “India is unlikely to return them until the state of war is ended and a durable truce replaces the cease-fire,” the US ambassador observed.

A settlement with India to end the state of war in the west meant negotiating territorial adjustments, he noted. This, in turn, was
linked to the problem of settling with Bangladesh the issues created by secession, including a division of assets and debts as well as a possible exchange of population between Bengalis living in West Pakistan and non-Bengalis in the East. Farland said that all these outstanding questions were related to the parallel question of third countries and, eventually, Pakistan itself recognizing Bangladesh.
¹⁷

But before anything else Bhutto had to revive Pakistani self-confidence. A few days after his visit to Farland's residence he undertook a whirlwind tour of all parts of West Pakistan in an effort to rally a shattered nation. This was the thirty-day trip he had spoken to Nixon about. In addition to exhorting Pakistanis to claim their destiny, Bhutto also wanted to ascertain the mood of the people. He blended “the styles of shrewd diplomat, benevolent despot, and circus barker,” said the
New York Times
about the tour.

“Bhutto has showered a glittering tail of oratory across Pakistan during his first month as President hoping to breathe life into a demoralized nation,” the story went on. He had “succeeded in keeping so close to everyone—Pakistanis of all classes, foreign diplomats and newsmen—that it is hard to view him with detached perspective.” Bhutto had targeted his “gifted rhetoric” at diplomats and foreign journalists in order to change Pakistan's “dismal image” abroad. He seemed aware that “this image is a cardinal reason for Pakistan's present financial insolvency and lack of foreign diplomatic support, affecting even the bankers of the world.”

According to Browne, the newspaper's correspondent, Bhutto wanted “to mollify world criticism” by treating visitors to roast venison, folk dancing, a visit to archaeological relics, or a duck hunt. He had released Mujib, proclaimed amnesty for all political prisoners, and abolished capital and corporal punishment. He had “moved to break the power of Pakistan's financial oligarchy” and had assured his people of “rapid movement toward the establishment of democratic institutions.” Thus, Bhutto took pains every day “to reassure the vast Moslem congregations that no laws repugnant to Islam will be enacted by his administration. The mullahs and tribal leaders are not at all sure about him,” Browne wrote.
¹⁸

It seemed that Bhutto was succeeding in his purpose: Pakistanis determined that he was the leader to preside over the country's revival, and world leaders, including Nixon, offered help in enabling Pakistan to get over the trauma of a second partition.

Within a couple of months of the surrender in Dhaka Pakistanis were beginning to overcome the shock of that monumental fiasco. They felt that the remainder of their country would survive and muddle through even after losing more than half its population and a large part of its territory. Just as Jinnah was once called Quaid-e-Azam (the Great Leader), Bhutto was now acclaimed as Quaid-e-Awam (the Leader of the People).

As a practical politician, Bhutto eschewed the path of national introspection. He had mustered support by appealing to the Pakistani sentiment of being victims. He spoke of “international conspiracies” while befriending individual foreigners from whom he sought help for his country. He promised that “this stigma” of defeat would be “wiped out even if it has to be done by our children's children.”
¹⁹
He called upon critics to “get off our back.” He did all this, but he did not encourage debate over why Pakistan broke up so soon. Pakistan's own intelligentsia likewise showed little interest in finding answers to that question.

Pakistanis were sheltered even from global reflections on their country. The international media was full of reports about the debris the Pakistan army had left behind in Bangladesh. Bodies had been discovered of Bengali intellectuals rounded up and killed the night before the end of war. There were calls for Pakistani officers to be tried for war crimes. Scholars in Europe and North America analyzed the impracticalities of the idea of Pakistan. But Pakistanis sought security in isolation from these discussions and the notion that in Bhutto they had found another savior.

Just as Americans had questioned the rationale for Pakistan's creation, they also examined in considerable detail the reasons for its breakup. For some, “the idea of Pakistan as the homeland for Muslims in South Asia no longer appeared valid.”
²⁰
After all, the majority of South Asia's Muslims no longer lived in Pakistan. Others wondered
whether a nation basing its identity only on religion would ever find peace and prosperity.

In an essay titled, “A Lament for Pakistan,” author James Michener wondered how people bound together by religion could descend into the orgy of violence witnessed in Bangladesh. “I cannot comprehend how the soldiers I knew in the Punjab could have behaved as they did in East Bengal,” he wrote. “I cannot explain how a nation which was bound together by religion—and that alone—could have so swiftly degenerated to the point where the average Punjabi not only hated the Bengali but also wanted to kill and mutilate him. And yet I know this happened.”
²¹

In Michener's judgment, “Pakistan was the impossible dream that failed.” It attempted to overcome differences of language, custom, economics, politics, and tradition, he wrote, pointing out the huge differences between Punjabis and Bengalis. “The Punjabi,” he said, were direct and blunt but “not fond of books or philosophical discussion.” Conversely, the Bengali were “the Irishman of Asia, a fiery brilliant orator given to endless disputation.” The only cement that Pakistan could rely upon was religion. “And in less than 25 years religion proved unequal to the task,” he affirmed.

There were many other essays and editorials that made points similar to Michener's as well as calls for Pakistanis to transform the remaining part of their country into a practical rather than an ideological state. Some argued that Pakistani militarism had failed, that the country needed to give up its cult of the warriors and focus instead on dealing with economic fundamentals. “Decisive defeat at the hands of the Indians is a bitter pill to swallow for the Pakistanis, steeped as they are in military tradition,” observed one editorial in the
New York Times
. But this defeat should lead “the new leadership to abandon the myth of military invincibility.” Pakistan needed “to come to terms with its Indian neighbors” and to shift the human and material resources it had “squandered on an excessive military establishment to urgent development tasks.”
²²

But these ideas found little resonance in Pakistan. Instead of swallowing the “bitter pill” of military defeat, Pakistanis started preparing to avenge it. Less than eight weeks after becoming president, Bhutto
sat down for an interview with foreign affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger and proposed a renewed defense pact with the United States. Bhutto said that he was ready “to start talks tomorrow” to obtain “American arms to replace the equipment lost by Pakistan during her war with India last December.”

According to Sulzberger, Bhutto praised US actions during the conflict with India, crediting them with preventing an all-out assault on West Pakistan and the Pakistan-held portion of Kashmir. He credited the US ultimatum and moving the USS
Enterprise
into the Bay of Bengal with saving West Pakistan. “The Soviet Union understood the signal and then pressed India to accept a ceasefire,” he said.

But there was nothing about reconciliation with India in the interview. Sulzberger noted that Bhutto “spoke gloomily of India” and implied that “India was behaving like a virtual satellite of Moscow.” He made predictions similar to those Ayub made about the Soviet Union gaining ground in the subcontinent and about India being on the verge of breaking up. “By sponsoring Bangladesh you will see that India will lose West Bengal and Assam,” he declared.