Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  America was a very reluctant warrior in the Great War. President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 in part on the basis of the slogan “He kept us out of war,” and he was not eager to join a battle between rival European colonial empires. When war finally came in 1917, he promised a “war to end all wars,” which would usher in a new era of open diplomacy, ending the world domination of the European great powers, and of self-determination for all peoples—or at least for Europeans and Americans. His Fourteen Points promised freedom, not more imperialism. The British government was appalled. It was determined to use the war to annex more colonies, not to give up the ones already in hand and certainly not the jewel in the crown.

  Indians expected some governance reforms as their right for sending so many troops to fight for the empire, of whom 90,000 had died. But Winston Churchill, the colonial secretary after the war, was determined to give nothing. As a young man Churchill had fought in India on the frontier with Afghanistan. He had deeply held views about India, and he hated Hindu politicians like Gandhi who were pressing for reform, considering them a threat to the survival of the Raj. He dismissed Gandhi as a “fakir” and charlatan. India was not to be given to the Indians; it was to remain the centerpiece of the empire.9 When in 1919 in Amritsar, the Sikh holy city, British troops massacred hundreds of Indians pressing for political change in a peaceful demonstration, London rewarded the commander of the troops responsible. The massacre would prove to be a turning point. Thereafter, Indians understood that reform was a chimera. Independence was essential.

  ROOSEVELT AND PARTITION

  Gandhi would lead the Indian nationalist movement from the end of World War I until his murder in 1948. His nonviolent approach would gain worldwide renown and favor, especially in the United States, where his marches, speeches, and fasts would be followed with rapt attention. Gandhi and his struggle later inspired the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. But Gandhi had little impact on the British before World War II. They imprisoned him for a total of 2,089 days of his life in British jails in either Africa or India. Churchill was determined not to free India, and as a member of both the government and the opposition, he made sure that India remained a colony in the interwar years. He became prime minister in 1940, absolutely determined never to cede India.

  The Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore in 1941 would transform Asia’s history and put the future of India on America’s agenda with England. In the early months of 1942, Japanese armies overran Burma and threatened Calcutta while a Japanese aircraft carrier group raided the Bay of Bengal, sank a Royal Navy carrier, and forced the Royal Navy to retreat to East Africa, leaving India vulnerable to invasion. One of Gandhi’s closest lieutenants, Subhas Chandra Bose, broke with Gandhi and was supported by the Nazi regime. Bose had gone to Berlin, where, in broadcasts over German radio, he urged Indians to join the Axis powers to free India. He denounced the United States as a pawn of the British Empire and declared the United States as well as the United Kingdom as enemies of Indian freedom.10 Then Bose sailed by U-boat to Japan, where he organized an army of Indian prisoners captured by Japan in Singapore to liberate India. The situation was alarming. His charge that America was the enemy of Indian freedom was taken very seriously in Washington, where Bose was seen as a real menace to the stability of India and the Allied war effort there. President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt that the war had to be a war for freedom and that London and Churchill must do something to accommodate India’s legitimate demand for self-determination. India would become the most acrimonious issue between Churchill and FDR during the war.

  The war also transformed average American perceptions of India. For the first time, large numbers of Americans arrived in India, as part of the war effort. A quarter of a million had come to support the air bridge to China over the Himalayas (“the Hump”) or to support the British army in India in fighting Japan; most served in eastern India around Calcutta.11 A young Julia Child served in Ceylon and India with the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. She and her colleagues would bring home new American impressions of life in the subcontinent.12

  Two and a half million Indian soldiers served with the British army during the war, of whom forty received the Victoria Cross, the highest military honor that the British Empire awarded. Indian military forces were critical to British and Allied operations in Burma, the Middle East, and Italy, and India was the most crucial base in supporting Chinese armies fighting the Japanese.13 India’s people, however, would pay a horrendous price for the war. Famine broke out in Bengal in 1943. Sufficient food was available elsewhere in the empire to avert starvation, but the war effort required all the available ocean-going vessels, or so Churchill argued. More famine followed in 1944, and again the ships were said to be needed elsewhere. Estimates of the cost in lives range from half a million to more than 4 million. Some Indian authors have argued that in allowing so many to starve, Churchill was more than negligent; they assert that he wished to punish India.14 His chief of the imperial general staff, Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, blamed the United States for not providing enough ships.15 It was to be the last famine in India. The democratic government that replaced the Raj never allowed its people to die as Britain had.

  Roosevelt pressed Churchill after Pearl Harbor to respond to Indian nationalist demands for greater self-determination. He sent Churchill private letters imploring him to be more open to the Indian nationalist movement and sent an envoy to India to represent American interests. For the British, especially the viceroy in Delhi and Churchill, that constituted interference in the internal affairs of the empire and showed a flagrant disregard for an ally’s independence. Churchill was so angered by Roosevelt’s moves that he even considered resigning as prime minister in protest, the only time during the war that he considered such a step.

  Gandhi saved Churchill. In August 1942, under pressure from Bose and his radio broadcasts in exile, Gandhi began the “Quit India” movement, demanding immediate independence for a united India and urging peaceful nonviolent resistance to the war effort. For example, Indians were to block convoys or rail trains supplying the British army in India. The British responded with a major crackdown on Gandhi and the Congress Party, and thousands of party activists were arrested and imprisoned for the rest of the war. For a time, India was on the verge of revolt. The viceroy warned Churchill that he faced “the most serious rebellion since that of 1857.”16 In the end the British managed to curb Indian anger and repress the Congress Party.

  But Quit India had a major impact on American thinking about Indian nationalism. The United States was engaged in a “great crusade” to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, one in which “anyone not with us was against us.” After August 1942, it became increasingly difficult for Roosevelt to lobby for Gandhi and India with Churchill and the United Kingdom. Still, in January 1943 FDR sent another envoy to India to press his case one more time for giving India the promise of freedom after the war. William Phillips was a Boston aristocrat, Harvard graduate, and career diplomat who had been ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy. In 1943 he was the chief of station in London for the Office of Strategic Services. Churchill assumed that with his background, Phillips would favor the Raj.

  Instead, Phillips pressed the viceroy for a meeting with the imprisoned Gandhi and urged FDR to convene a conference of Indian politicians to establish an all-party, Muslim and Hindu, administrative body to prepare to take over governance of India after the war. Even Roosevelt thought the proposal “amazingly radical.” Phillips was refused access to Gandhi, who was fasting to protest British policy. He did meet with the leader of the Muslim cause, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. After the meeting, Phillips wrote the president that “the more I studied Jinnah’s Pakistan, the less it appealed to me as the answer to India’s communal problems. To break India into two separate nations would weaken both.”17 The British were not amused, and FDR did not push Churchill again.

  Churchill w
as determined not to relinquish the Raj, but in 1945 he lost his reelection bid. The British Empire had been devastated by the war, Britain was deeply in debt to America, and times were very hard in London. British policymakers began to look for a new way to preserve British influence in South Asia, and they chose partition. Behind the scenes, in correspondence with Jinnah, the leader of the Pakistan movement, Churchill encouraged the drive for a Muslim state in the subcontinent. Jinnah’s private correspondence with Churchill has never been made public.

  Jinnah was British educated. He dressed like a well-to-do English gentleman and savored English style. Earlier in life, he had been a supporter of the Congress Party and a united India, but in the 1930s he embraced the new idea of a state for Muslims in South Asia. That idea was given a name by a group of Muslim students from the subcontinent at Cambridge University, who proposed Pakistan, to stand for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. The word also means “land of the pure” in Persian and Urdu.

  Jinnah was the driving force behind Pakistan’s creation. He refused any compromise that would fall short of independence. He understood that Gandhi’s Quit India movement had damaged the ties between the nationalist Hindus and America and England. He also understood that the British wanted to maintain their strategic position in South Asia somehow and that promises of a close alliance with Pakistan after independence would appeal to British policymakers. He gauged correctly that London would back partition, despite the wish of the majority of the people of the subcontinent for a unified state. Jinnah remains a divisive figure in South Asia today. His portrait can be found in every office in Pakistan, his expression usually one of stern defiance. In India he is the symbol of partition. When Jaswant Singh, a prominent member of the Bharatiya Janata Party and former foreign minister, published a massive biography of Jinnah that was a fair portrait of his strengths and weaknesses, Singh was expelled from the party and vilified as soft on Pakistan.

  On August 14, 1947, Pakistan became the first country to become independent of the British Empire after World War II and the first country created as a homeland for Muslims. India followed the next day. Two future world powers were born. The Raj, however, left a tremendous legacy to both India and Pakistan. India emerged from centuries of British rule determined to maintain its independence at all costs; it was never again going to be told what to do by a foreign power. It would make any decision to go to war, not London or Washington. It would pursue a third way during the cold war and beyond. It would be friends with all powers, the ally of none. The closing years of the Raj had been especially bitter for India, with the threat of Japanese invasion, massive famines, and draconian political crackdowns. Indians admired much about the British, but they were happy to see them go. Pakistanis were equally determined to keep their newfound independence, but they were convinced that they needed an ally against their bigger rival next door. They wanted to be part of a global alliance with a major power to protect them from the perceived Indian threat. America would be that ally. When America disappointed Pakistan, Pakistan would turn to China.

  It is, of course, deeply ironic that today the largest manufacturer in the United Kingdom is an Indian firm, Tata, which began as a small company in Bombay under the Raj and now owns the largest steel mill in England and the country’s premier automobile company, Jaguar.18

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE COLD WAR: THE FIRST FORTY YEARS

  HAWAII WAS AN unlikely place to meet with the Pakistani minister of defense and the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II was an unlikely occasion for the meeting. But in 1995 Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and I were in a conference room of a five-star hotel there to honor Pakistan’s role in Japan’s defeat and to discuss the future of U.S. relations with Pakistan after the cold war. It was all a bit absurd. Pakistan had not existed in World War II, but it was invited to the commemoration ceremony to represent the Indian soldiers who fought for the Raj. India was invited too, but New Delhi declined since it did not have warm memories of Churchill’s war or of being an instrument of the Raj’s other wars.

  The conversation with the Pakistanis went nowhere. By 1995 America and Pakistan were caught in their deadly embrace, prisoners of their history of seduction and betrayal throughout the cold war. The Pakistani team was headed by the minister of defense, a civilian who had only the most nominal influence and no control over the military. The Pakistani military does not let civilians interfere in its affairs and certainly not on important issues like nuclear weapons. The Pakistani team in Hawaii was there only to complain. They spent forty-five minutes railing against America’s betrayal of Pakistan in 1990, when, under the Pressler amendment, America had cut off Pakistan’s supply of military equipment. The amendment was named after the South Dakota senator who sponsored the bill in 1985, whose name is better known in Pakistan than it is in any town in the Dakotas today. Not only had the United States refused to deliver the F-16s that Pakistan bought in the 1980s, it refused to return Pakistan’s money and was charging them for the maintenance of their aircraft! It was unfair and arrogant, the Pakistanis charged; America was the global bully. Perry was ready for the tirade; he had heard it all many times before. His goal was to try to get beyond that issue, on which his hands were tied, to see whether better military-to-military relations were possible despite the Pressler amendment. It was a worthy effort, but a futile one.

  Honolulu is home to the Pacific Command (PACOM), the regional military command that includes India (but not Pakistan) in its area of operations (AOR). Since World War II the American military has seen India largely from the perspective of the Pacific and East Asia. In PACOM’s plans, India, which sits at the remote far end of the AOR, is often seen more as a potential counterbalance to China than anything else. But just as India did not want to attend the 1995 ceremony, it generally does not want to be seen as a counterbalance to China or as a player in Washington’s grand geopolitical strategies. It has serious concerns about China—it was, after all, attacked by China in 1962—but it does not want to be stuck in American-made alliances. It is determined to keep the independence that it fought so long to gain from the British.

  The United States played little part in the historic transformation of South Asia that followed the end of the Raj; Washington left partition to the British to execute and watched from the sidelines. The last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, would become a household name in America for his role in presiding over the mass violence and huge refugee flows that followed partition, but American diplomacy stayed on the margins as this catastrophic human tragedy played out. For the next fifty years, American strategic thinking about the subcontinent was always a function of a larger conflict, the cold war with the Soviet Union and Communist China. The cold war dynamic drew the United States into an alliance with Pakistan and into an adversarial relationship with India. The alliance with Pakistan, however, was deeply troubled by the divergent goals of the two parties. America wanted an alliance to contain Russia; Pakistan wanted an alliance to confront India. The resulting tension would bedevil the allies for decades. The United States also was uncomfortable with being an adversary of India, which it considered too big and too democratic to divorce. So several presidents tried to have it both ways—maintaining an alliance with Islamabad as well as pursuing good relations with New Delhi. Their efforts consistently failed, a fact that should serve as a lesson for today’s policymakers.

  India and Pakistan went to war almost at their birth as independent states, in a conflict centered in Kashmir, at the northern tip of the subcontinent. The first war ended in the division of Kashmir, a division that endures to this day. The two states also evolved differently internally. Pakistan was a divided state from the start, with 42 million people in East Pakistan and 33 million in West Pakistan, 1,000 miles away.1 The military officer corps came from the west. Pakistan’s democratic government was overthrown in a military coup in 1958; four army dictators would follow, with brief per
iods of weak civilian government. India would remain a vibrant democracy with not one coup attempt by the army and only a brief period of undemocratic government imposed by a prime minister. Pakistan would become an increasingly dysfunctional state, unable to address its poverty and illiteracy; India would make slow progress on eliminating both, setting the stage for more rapid progress after the cold war.

  The unresolved Kashmir conflict is central to the fate of both countries. India and Pakistan were born with a wound, and the wound has not healed in the decades since; instead it has become more infected, giving rise to terror and violence. Kashmir is not the only reason for Indo-Pakistani enmity, but it is the most obvious and the most subject to resolution. It is a concrete dispute at heart, even if it has taken on many symbolic and ideological aspects. American policymakers from Truman to Kennedy recognized this reality and tried hard to advance a solution to bring peace to South Asia. They failed for a variety of reasons, and their failures led their successors to give up trying. That was the wrong answer.

  TRUMAN AND EISENHOWER

  India and Pakistan were born in great violence and misery. More than 1 million died and another 10 million became refugees as the two new states were torn out of the Raj.2 Partition, Britain’s solution to the end of its empire, left a legacy of hatred and violence that endures to this day and may someday lead to even greater disaster. Harry Truman would be the first American president to deal with this situation. Washington recognized both countries upon independence and dispatched ambassadors to their respective capitals. But for Truman, South Asia was still a British preserve and a backwater for America. The president’s focus was on the emerging cold war with Russia, the takeover of Eastern Europe by the Soviets, and the civil war in China, which ended in communist victory. Truman responded with the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, created NATO to defend it, and initiated U.S. alliances with Japan, Australia, and New Zealand in the Pacific.