Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  Like his successors, Truman wanted to build good relations with both India and Pakistan. But Truman, again like his successors, would find that harder to do than most assumed. Almost from the beginning, India and Pakistan were at war over the future of Kashmir, a princely state ruled by a Hindu maharajah but populated by a Muslim majority. Both Pakistan and India wanted Kashmir to join their respective nations, but the maharajah hesitated, hoping for independence. Pakistan sent in a Pashtun army to annex the province in October 1947, and India responded with an airlift of troops to the capital, Srinagar, to prevent annexation. The war in Kashmir continued until December 31, 1948, costing the lives of about 1,500 soldiers on each side.

  The United Nations, which had brokered the cease-fire, adopted a resolution to bring in observers to help maintain the truce. The UN Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) monitored the 400-mile-long cease-fire line with troops from around the world, although in the early years Americans made up the largest contingent. Pakistan was to withdraw all of its forces—irregular as well as regular—from the province. India was allowed to keep minimum-strength forces to preserve law and order. A plebiscite was to decide the fate of the province. Although both India and Pakistan accepted the UN resolution, neither carried it out. Instead, each held onto the territory that it had acquired in the war, leaving India in possession of two-fifths of the province, including the Valley of Kashmir, the most populated area. Pakistan acquired three-fifths of the province and a border with China. It would later cede territory in Kashmir to China, and today the original province is divided in three parts: 43 percent is held by India, 37 percent by Pakistan, and 20 percent by China.

  The UN then sought to send a delegation to New Delhi and Karachi, Pakistan’s capital until 1958, to arrange a plebiscite and a settlement. Admiral Chester Nimitz, the World War II American naval hero, was to lead the talks, but his mission never materialized.3 The Texas-born Nimitz moved to New York in March 1949 to work with the UN and to set up a staff to arrange the voting procedures. He enthusiastically wrote that India and Pakistan both had an “ardent desire to secure a peaceful solution.”4 He expected to leave for South Asia in April. However, Pakistan soon refused to withdraw its troops, and India refused to hold the plebiscite, which it knew it would lose. UN Secretary General Trygve Lie suggested that Nimitz arbitrate the dispute. Nimitz agreed and again waited for India and Pakistan to set dates for him to visit. Truman and the British prime minister both wrote to the leaders of both countries, urging support for the Nimitz mission.

  It was India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who turned Truman down. Nehru, who felt an emotional and family bond to the province, had made the decision to send troops to Kashmir in 1947, and he was determined not to give it up. After meeting with Nehru when he came to Washington in October 1949, Truman left it to others to push the Kashmir issue with him, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Nimitz met with Nehru to try to change his mind. Nehru insisted that all Pakistani troops had to leave Kashmir first while Indian troops stayed to maintain law and order, implicitly indicating that his troops would ensure the right outcome of the plebiscite. Acheson wrote later that Nehru was “one of the most difficult men with whom I have ever had to deal.” Nimitz tried to budge him in two more meetings but got nowhere.5

  In February 1950 the UN Security Council voted to send a representative to South Asia to try to break the deadlock. Pakistan insisted on Nimitz; India rejected him. The admiral never made it to South Asia, and he went home to California for good. He officially resigned his position only in 1953, but the effort was over long before then. Nehru told the American ambassador that “he was tired of receiving moralistic advice from the United States. So far as Kashmir was concerned, he would not give an inch.”6 Kashmir became a frozen conflict for more than a decade, preventing any real rapprochement between India and Pakistan. Occasional half-hearted efforts to resume a serious dialogue went nowhere.

  Nehru, a hero of the independence struggle, was India’s first prime minister, and he was determined to not take sides in the cold war. He wanted India to become a leader of a new third force, the Non-Aligned Movement. During his visit to Washington in October 1949, he had the first summit-level Indo-American talk with Truman. Kashmir was not the only problem. The personal chemistry between Nehru and Truman was poor, and they did not get along well. When, at the formal state dinner, Truman discussed the virtues of Kentucky bourbons, Nehru was not impressed. Nehru pushed Truman to accept the results of the Chinese civil war and to recognize the new communist government. He also pushed for bringing the communist government into the United Nations and for allowing it to take the Chinese seat on the UN Security Council. Under intense Republican criticism for “losing” China to the communists, Truman resisted.

  Two years later Nehru tried to warn Truman that moving American and UN forces deep into North Korea to the Yalu River dividing Korea and China would spark a Chinese reaction. The Indian ambassador in Beijing, who was the only noncommunist envoy who had access to the leadership and to Mao, was told to warn the Americans not to get close to the Yalu. Truman refused to listen to Nehru, and Nehru was proven right. Thousands of American GIs and marines were killed or wounded as a consequence, and the war dragged on for two more years. Relations between India and the United States were cordial but not close. China was one stumbling block, and another, U.S. ties with Pakistan, quickly arose.

  Pakistani-American relations were an altogether different matter. Muhammad Ali Jinnah died within a year of Pakistan’s independence, and his successors were eager to find an ally to offset India’s natural advantages of size and population. With the United Kingdom in decline, America was the obvious choice. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan came to Washington in May 1950, on the eve of the Korean War, to seek military aid. Once the war began, Pakistan supported the Americans; although it did not send troops, it did send 5,000 tons of rice. Unlike with Nehru, Truman hit it off with the Pakistanis, and he was open to developing a close relationship with them. But the Truman team did not agree to provide arms to Pakistan, and repeated Pakistani requests were softly rebuffed. Liaquat was assassinated on October 16, 1951, the first in a very long series of violent deaths of senior Pakistani leaders. His assassination has never been fully resolved; like many of those that followed, it is still a mystery today, surrounded by elaborate conspiracy theories. At the time, the British were widely blamed for his assassination because he allegedly wanted Pakistan to leave the Commonwealth, but that was a canard.7

  Washington paid little attention to Pakistan at first. Since America was stretched thin in Europe and East Asia, Truman was not really interested in helping the former British colony and spreading American assistance even further into the subcontinent. While Jinnah had sent a top aide to be ambassador in Washington in 1947, the first American ambassador to Pakistan arrived in April 1948. However, he left almost immediately because of poor health, and his successor did not arrive until February 1950.8

  The Korean War dominated the last years of Truman’s presidency. As the conflict bogged down in a stalemate with China, South Asia got little attention in Washington. By 1952 the American people were tired of the war and eager for a change. The Republicans took the White House in the November presidential elections, and Dwight David Eisenhower became president. Like Truman, Eisenhower would try to be friends to both states, but in the end he would build an alliance with Pakistan alone. Eisenhower brought to the job a very impressive resume as the wartime Allied commander in Western Europe and the first military commander of NATO. He had a solid understanding of geopolitics and was much less ideological than most of his cabinet. His vice president, Richard Nixon; his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles; and his CIA director, Allen Dulles, were more extreme in their cold war views and thus less likely to try to court India. Nixon developed an extreme dislike of India over the course of his career. The two Dulles brothers were influenced in their thinking by the writings of their grandfather, who had
been a missionary in India under the Raj and was an enthusiastic supporter of British imperialism and an opponent of Indian independence. John Welsh Dulles’s Life in India was not a book that Nehru would have recommended to the secretary if he wished to understand the country.

  Nehru wanted to preserve Indian neutrality in the cold war. He wanted India to lead a third way, nonalignment, which would create from the newly decolonized countries of the world a powerful bloc between Moscow and Washington that would focus on further decolonization and economic growth. For Nixon and Dulles that was heresy. They wanted to build an alliance of states to contain communism and roll back its gains. In their view, democracies like India should recognize that the cold war was a conflict between good and evil and honor their moral obligation to choose good. In May 1953, Dulles became the first American secretary of state to visit South Asia. He was disappointed by Nehru’s neutral stance and entranced by Pakistan’s eager embrace of anticommunism. Nixon followed Dulles in December 1953, and an initial arms package agreement followed Nixon in early 1954. It was much less than Pakistan wanted, but it marked the beginning of a military relationship. Nehru was not pleased. He told the UN that the American observers in UNMOGIP had to leave, and in December 1954 they were replaced with military officers from other countries.

  Eisenhower was more subtle in his thinking, but he let Nixon and Dulles pursue their alliance policy. At the same time, he sought to keep the lines open to Nehru and New Delhi. In 1956 Nehru was invited to stay at Ike’s farm outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Nehru’s photo can still be seen today. But just before the visit, two crises rocked the world. Israel, France, and Great Britain attacked Egypt to stop it from taking control of the Suez Canal, and Russia invaded Hungary to suppress an anticommunist uprising. While the United States condemned both actions, India was harder on the Suez aggression than the invasion of Hungary. The U.S.-India relationship remained cool and distant despite Ike’s personal connection to Nehru. Indian suspicion of American intentions toward India was rife. Washington was often blamed for anything that went wrong in India or elsewhere in the world. In 1959 Nehru’s private secretary, M. O. Mathai, who had worked for him since 1946, was hounded out of his position as private secretary for allegedly spying for the Central Intelligence Agency.9 Eisenhower, in his second term, briefly flirted with the idea of mediating the Kashmir issue but gave it up when Nehru made it clear that he was not open to the idea. Ike instead supported a World Bank effort to broker a water-sharing agreement between the two countries, which worked out successfully.

  In contrast, ties with Pakistan flourished on Eisenhower’s beat. The key figure in the relationship would be Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who was born in 1907 near Abbottabad, the city where Osama bin Laden hid out for more than five years before he was killed in 2011. Khan was a graduate of the elite Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, England, and he served as a battalion commander with the British 14th Army in Burma in World War II. He opted to join Pakistan in 1947 and in 1948 became commander of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh, helping to consolidate Pakistani control over the Bengali half of the country. In 1951 he became the first native commander in chief of the army, replacing a British holdover from the Raj. He was a tall, physically imposing figure, the epitome of an officer in the British, now Pakistani, army. Shortly after Eisenhower took office, Khan sent a top secret memo to the State Department, making the case for sending aid to Pakistan to stop the Soviets from invading the subcontinent to grab a “ripe but undamaged plum into the Soviet paw.” Ayub argued that Nehru did not understand the Russian menace.10 In 1954, as chief of army staff, Ayub visited Washington, where he made a very good impression on the Eisenhower team, and while there he pressed for military assistance. With the Korean War over, the question of sending Pakistani troops to Korea was moot. Military assistance began to flow in ever-larger quantities to Pakistan. Vice President Richard Nixon, who became Pakistan’s strongest advocate in the administration, would say that Pakistan “is a country I would do anything for. They have less complexes than the Indians.”11 It was the start of a long Nixon romance with Pakistan.

  Pakistan, unlike India, wanted to form cold war alliances, and it soon became America’s “most allied ally.” First it signed a defense agreement with Turkey, a NATO ally. Then it joined both the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), in 1954, and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), in 1955, becoming the critical South Asia link in a global chain of alliances stretching from Norway to Japan and encircling the Soviet Union. In joining SEATO, Pakistan argued that East Pakistan was a Southeast Asian nation; in joining CENTO, it argued that West Pakistan was a Middle Eastern nation. Since Dulles was concerned that both regions were at grave risk after the French defeat in Indochina and the British collapse in the Middle East, Pakistan won key points with the secretary. Dulles was so proud of the alliances that he told a journalist that he had brought “the only Asians who can really fight, the Pakistanis, in the alliance. We could never get along without the Gurkhas.” When Walter Lippman, the journalist, reminded Dulles that the Gurkhas are not Pakistanis, Dulles said that he was “nit picking.”12

  While Pakistan was seeking an external ally, Pakistani domestic politics was consumed by the struggle between West and East Pakistan. West Pakistan was controlled by the Punjabi majority there, which dominated the officer corps; East Pakistan felt like a second-class colony and resented West Pakistan’s control of politics. Since more people lived in Bengal, East Pakistan would win in any truly free election. Consequently, Pakistani political leaders in West Pakistan dragged their feet on conducting truly free elections.

  On October 7, 1958, Ayub Khan seized power in a coup, becoming chief marital law administrator. Two weeks later he dismissed the remnants of the civilian government and sent the president off to exile in London. Within two years Field Marshal Khan held a rigged referendum and was confirmed in office with a resounding 95.6 percent of the vote. Pakistan’s democracy had died, and its first military dictatorship had begun. (In another fixed election in 1965, Jinnah’s sister, Fatima, ran against Ayub and lost, although she won in Karachi and almost won in East Pakistan.) To cement his control of the country, Ayub decided to move the capital from Karachi, in the Sindh, to a new city, Islamabad, in the Punjab. He wanted to escape the influence of the “mob”; therefore “the capital must be moved out of Karachi.”13 Although there is no solid evidence that the CIA or any part of the U.S. government pushed Khan to stage the coup, there is also no evidence that Washington tried very hard to discourage him. The U.S. ambassador urged Khan, if possible, to make any military interregnum short. In July 1958 the pro-American government in Iraq had been toppled in a very bloody coup, ushering in a more radical pro-Soviet government and undermining CENTO. The Eisenhower team did not want a repeat in Pakistan, so it went along with Khan’s coup and embraced the new strongman.

  Pakistan now became a base for American secret operations on a grand scale. The CIA director, Allen Dulles, had been working with Khan behind the scenes for several years to cement a strong intelligence relationship with Pakistan. Construction of a secret base for the 6937 Communications Group began in mid-1958. Top secret U-2 aircraft began regularly overflying the Soviet Union from an airbase near Peshawar. A small town grew up around the base to provide the comforts of home to the American pilots and maintenance crews. In addition, the National Security Agency set up a listening post at Badaber, near Peshawar, to spy on Soviet and Chinese communications, gathering intelligence that was essential to the United States in the era before satellites. Pakistan became a vital ally and Ayub Khan a vital friend. Even after the Russians shot down a U-2 aircraft in 1960, exposing the entire secret project, Pakistan remained essential to American intelligence operations during the cold war.14 Allen Dulles was the father of the CIA’s critical alliance with Pakistan and its intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.

  In December 1959 Eisenhower became the first sitti
ng American president to visit South Asia. The trip was also the maiden voyage for his jet, the first Air Force One. He flew to Italy and then to Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Greece, Tunisia, France, Spain, and Morocco, visiting eleven countries in nineteen days. Ike was warmly greeted during all three South Asia stops, and his reception in Karachi on December 7 was especially warm. But he went as a lame duck president, and the U-2 crisis, which followed in March 1960, quickly overshadowed the goodwill that emerged from his trip. Moreover, the Russians had beaten him to India. Nikita Khrushchev had visited India in 1955, staying almost a month—much longer than any American president except Grant, who had left office in 1876.

  As a parting gift to Ayub, in March 1960 the Eisenhower administration agreed to sell to Pakistan what was at the time one of America’s most sophisticated combat jet aircraft, the F-104 Starfighter. It had just entered service with the U.S. air force in 1958, and its sale signified that Pakistan had indeed become America’s “most allied ally” and Ayub Khan America’s man in South Asia.

  JFK AND INDIA

  Nixon lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy, who promised a more vigorous, anti-colonial, and enlightened foreign policy than his Republican predecessor had adopted. Kennedy was a cold warrior, but he also recognized the winds of change in the world. He believed that the era of colonial empires was over—he had been an early critic of the French colonial war in Algeria—and he felt that America needed to understand that the new postcolonial countries did not always want to join one cold war bloc or another. So Kennedy, who as a senator had sponsored legislation to increase food aid to India, embarked on trying to woo India and Nehru into a closer relationship with Washington, without any formal anticommunist alliance. He sent a trusted close adviser, John Kenneth Galbraith, to be his ambassador in New Delhi. Galbraith frequently wrote JFK long letters from India in which he commented not only on India and South Asia but on global developments, domestic issues, economics, and especially the growing conflict in South Vietnam, where he was an early and prescient critic of the war. His letters and diary have been published, providing unique insight into this period.