by Gary J. Bass
In fact, Indira Gandhi and her top advisers were coldly calculating strategists, even if their actions served a humane cause. India put itself in a position of breathtaking hypocrisy: demanding freedom for the Bengali people in East Pakistan, while conducting its own repression of restive populations under Indian control in Kashmir, as well as lesser-known groups like the Mizos and Nagas and—with painful irony—leftist Bengalis within India’s own volatile state of West Bengal. While the Indian government emotionally spoke out on behalf of the millions of Bengalis who fled into India, its officials privately worried that these exiles might be radical subversives who would fuel more unrest and revolt in India’s already shaky border states, especially West Bengal. India, in other words, was driven not just by sympathy for Bengalis, but also a certain amount of fear of revolutionary Bengalis.
While Indira Gandhi’s government professed its unwavering desire for peace, she almost immediately turned to aggressive options. From the early days of the Pakistani crackdown, she had the Indian military covertly prepare for a full-scale regular war against Pakistan. India secretly had its army and security forces use bases on Indian soil to support Bengali guerrillas in their fight against the Pakistani state. India devoted enormous resources to covertly sponsoring the Bengali insurgency inside East Pakistan, providing the guerrillas with arms, training, camps, and safe passage back and forth across a porous border. Indian officials, from Gandhi on down, evaded or lied with verve, denying that they were maintaining the insurgency. But in fact, as India’s own secret records prove, this massive clandestine enterprise was approved at the highest levels, involving India’s intelligence services, border security forces, and army.
In the event, Pakistan rashly struck the first blow of a full-scale conventional war, with a surprise air attack in December 1971 that brought fierce combat in both West and East Pakistan. But while Indians today generally remember the war as outright Pakistani aggression, India’s actual path to war shows a great degree of Indian responsibility as well. India knew it had a fearsome military advantage, and Gandhi’s government used that ruthlessly. According to senior Indian generals, Gandhi wanted her forces to go to war not long after the start of Pakistan’s crackdown, and had to be persuaded to wait for cooler fighting weather and more time to train. While the Indian military waited for winter, the Indian-backed insurgency bled the Pakistan army, leaving it demoralized and stretched thin. India’s support for the Bengali rebels led to border clashes with Pakistani troops, and, as winter approached, to several substantial Indian incursions onto Pakistani territory. It is a patriotic delusion to imagine, as some Indian nationalists do today, that Pakistan’s airstrikes were unprovoked. Still, Pakistan’s air attack was a final act of folly for the military dictatorship. The war, fought in just two weeks, ended with a resounding Indian victory, and created the fledgling state of Bangladesh.
The President and the Prime Minister, in Washington and Delhi, were united by their need to grapple with their own democratic societies. As much as Nixon and Gandhi loathed each other, they shared a common exasperation at how their policies could be thwarted by their own people—a frustration that would in time lead both of them down their own different but alarmingly antidemocratic paths. In these two great democracies, it was not just governments but also peoples who had to confront one of the worst events of their century. Americans and Indians were challenged to make policy in a way that expressed their national sense of morality, not just their strategic interests.
The United States and India are radically different societies, in everything from wealth to ethnic composition to sheer size of population; but they do share some basic similarities in their systems of democratic governance. In both, democratic leaders were goaded and prodded by rambunctious elements at home: a free press with an ingrained habit of seeking out inconvenient or embarrassing stories; opposition politicians and partisans waiting to pounce should a president or prime minister stumble; and a public whose moral sensibilities often did not align with the dictates of the state’s cold calculus of strategic interest. In both of these enormous democracies, the people were more moralistic than their governments.10
Americans reacted with disquiet or horror. The country’s far-reaching newspapers and broadcast networks reported in shocking detail about these distant atrocities; ordinary Americans recoiled at what they learned on the news; and politicians in Congress, led by Edward Kennedy, seized the opportunity to politick against the White House. Thus even this White House found itself unable to continue its unstinting support of Pakistan through arms sales, which Kissinger would have liked to escalate, because of pressure from Congress and bureaucratic maneuvering by the State Department. Nixon and Kissinger found themselves boxed in by their country’s liberal and democratic system; they had to moderate their policies, much against their will. As Kissinger complained to the president, “We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.”11
A little further than that, actually. Nixon and Kissinger responded to these legal and democratic constraints on their authority in the classic Nixonian way: by breaking the law. Knowing full well that they were acting illegally, they provided U.S. weapons to Pakistan, which was under a U.S. arms embargo—an unknown scandal that is of a piece with the overall pattern of lawlessness that culminated with Watergate. As recently declassified documents and transcripts prove, Nixon and Kissinger approved a covert supply of sophisticated U.S. fighter airplanes via Jordan and Iran—despite explicit and emphatic warnings from both the State Department and the Defense Department that such arms transfers to Pakistan were illegal under U.S. law. (John Mitchell, the attorney general, was in the room as Nixon and Kissinger decided on this unlawful operation, but made no objections.) Kissinger, not wanting to get caught, made it clear to the president that they were both breaking the law. Nixon went ahead anyway.
Americans’ sense of outrage circulated within the administration itself. The most vociferous dissenter was Archer Blood, but he had no shortage of company. The ambassador to India, a distinguished former Republican senator named Kenneth Keating, took his opposition all the way to the Oval Office, where he confronted Nixon and Kissinger to their faces over what he called genocide. The middle ranks of the State Department, stationed in Washington, Dacca, Delhi, and even parts of West Pakistan, rose up in open defiance of the policies of the president of the United States. There were even rumblings of discontent within the National Security Council at the White House itself.
Although Nixon and Kissinger frequently sparred with the State Department over all sorts of issues, here the clash was out in the open, with an unsurpassed gulf in views of policy and morality. The State Department outfoxed Nixon and Kissinger, quietly using its bureaucratic power to jam the shipment of U.S. weaponry to Pakistan. In response, Nixon and Kissinger raged against the bureaucracy and tried to fire or demote some of the most influential dissenters, foremost among them Blood and Keating. The president and his national security advisor plowed ahead with their support of Pakistan as best they could, but were impeded by the consciences and the best advice of a surprisingly large chunk of their own administration.
There was no real question of the United States going to war to stop the slaughter. In 1971, there was no American equivalent of today’s debates about humanitarian intervention in places like Bosnia and Darfur. After all, the country was already fighting a major war, trapped in the quagmire of Vietnam; there was no American appetite for another Asian conflict. Thus the leading critics of the Nixon administration, like Kennedy, linked Vietnam with Pakistan: two places where the United States was standing behind illegitimate governments, at a terrible cost to those peoples, and to the good name of the United States. American dissenters like Blood and Keating, as well as outraged political rivals like Kennedy, only wanted to see American influence repurposed to support democracy and human rights. Of course, they expected that a war would put an end to the slaughte
r—but that would be waged by India.
In the United States today, particularly after the disasters of the Iraq war, there are many thoughtful and serious people who criticize the promotion of human rights as arrogance, neoimperialism, and worse. No doubt, there are potent reasons for caution about trying to translate human rights ideals into statecraft. But this largely forgotten crisis, unfolding far from Washington, exemplifies an alternative way of making U.S. foreign policy, one that makes no allowance for human rights. This kind of policy has shown itself in the U.S. war against terror and may well reappear in future diplomacy. For all the very real flaws of human rights politics, Nixon and Kissinger’s support of a military dictatorship engaged in mass murder is a reminder of what the world can easily look like without any concern for the pain of distant strangers.12
The stakes were high for India’s democracy. Sunil Khilnani, a farsighted India expert, argues powerfully that India is the most important experiment in democracy since the American and French revolutions: “its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent.” Nobody would idealize India’s flawed democracy, least of all Indians themselves: this was and is a land of heartbreaking poverty, endemic corruption, collapsing infrastructure, enduring caste fissures, arrogant bureaucratic inefficiency, and shocking social inequality. Some 350 million Indians—roughly a third of the country’s population—today live below the poverty line. But this is also a country of stupendous pluralism and vitality that, against all odds, maintains a democratic system and culture, offering a way for a fractious public to make its multitudinous voices heard and a chance for the government to correct itself.13
Indians were overwhelmingly outraged by the atrocities in East Pakistan. In a factionalized country where popular harmony is a surpassingly rare thing, there was a remarkable consensus: Pakistan was behaving horrifically; the Bengalis were in the right; India had to act in defense of democracy and innocent lives. Almost the entire Indian political spectrum, from Hindu nationalists on the right to socialists and communists on the left, lined up behind the Bengalis. These persecuted foreigners were not Indian citizens, but they were not altogether foreign; Bengalis were a familiar part of the Indian national scene, and India’s own Bengali population rallied to their brethren. Across the country, newspapers ran furious editorials condemning Pakistan and urging the Indian government to recognize Bangladesh’s independence.
Dismissing the niceties of national sovereignty in the cause of saving human beings and of respecting the popular will of the Bengalis, Indians demanded a swift recognition of an independent state of Bangladesh. Of course, since the bloody days of Partition, a great many Indians hated and feared Pakistan; plenty took a kind of angry satisfaction in lambasting Pakistani leaders like Yahya and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto for confirming all the worst things that Indians had ever said about Pakistan. But there was a moral sensibility driving Indian politics that even the gimlet-eyed officials around Indira Gandhi, and the unsentimental Gandhi herself, could not ignore. She abandoned her father Nehru’s traditional anticolonial pronouncements about the sanctity of national sovereignty. Instead, the beleaguered prime minister began to compare the bloodshed in East Pakistan to the Holocaust.
Perhaps the most striking Indian policy was something that it did not do. India did not stop masses of Bengali refugees from flooding into India. Unimaginably huge numbers of Bengalis escaped into safety on Indian soil, eventually totaling as many as ten million—five times the number of people displaced in Bosnia in the 1990s. The needs of this new, desperate population were far beyond the capacities of the feeble governments of India’s border states, and Indira Gandhi’s government at the center. But at that overcharged moment, the Indian public would have found it hard to accept the sight of its own soldiers and border troops opening fire to keep out these desperate and terrified people. Here, at least, was something like real humanitarianism. As payment for this kindness, India found itself crushed under the unsustainable burden of one of the biggest refugee flows in world history—which galvanized the public and the government to new heights of self-righteous fury against Pakistan.
India was left alone. Despite pleas to the rest of the world, India was given only a tiny amount of money to cope with the refugees. China was bitterly hostile; the United States only somewhat less so; the Non-Aligned Movement was, in the clutch, of no help; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab states were fiercely pro-Pakistan; even the United Nations seemed tilted toward Pakistan. India was forced into a tighter alignment with the Soviet Union, to the delight of leftists around Gandhi, but to the dismay of other Indians. Having been shoved aside by the democratic superpower, India cozied up to the other one.
As India grows into a world power, the story of the birth of Bangladesh has never been more important. It stands as an awful but crucial case for better understanding the politics of human rights, in a world where the duty of defending the vulnerable is not something that the West arrogates for itself alone. Today, at the advent of an Asian era in world politics, the future of human rights will increasingly depend on the ideologies, institutions, and cultures of ascendant Asian great powers like China and India. Thus India’s democratic response to the plight of the Bengalis marks not just a pivotal moment for the history of the subcontinent, but for how the world’s biggest democracy makes its foreign policy—and what weight it gives to human rights.
For Pakistan, the crisis of 1971 is mourned as a supreme national trauma: not just the loss of one of the country’s two wings and the majority of its population, but a heightening of a truncated state’s dread of the much larger and stronger Indian enemy. And the bloodletting of 1971 marks an important chapter of a U.S. embrace of military dictators at their worst. Although American popular memory about Pakistan tends to start in September 2001, it was Nixon’s embrace of Yahya that helped to define a U.S. relationship with Pakistan based overwhelmingly on the military, even in its most repugnant hour. Nixon and Kissinger set the stage for an ongoing decimation of Pakistan’s democratic opposition, giving time and space to Islamicize the country more and more. This pattern of U.S. antidemocratic engagement—with origins going back far beyond Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s most recent U.S.-backed military dictator—has helped convince so many Pakistanis that the United States coldly pursues its own realpolitik interests and cares nothing for them.
Bangladeshis still mourn their losses from not so long ago. This book is not—and does not purport to be—anything like a comprehensive account of these crimes against humanity. It mostly documents the American eyewitness perspective on them, which is obviously only a part of the complete record of horrors. Still, this is an important portion, because it is the true local viewpoint of the Pakistani government’s superpower ally. After all, Archer Blood and the other U.S. officials reporting back to the Nixon administration knew they had every career incentive to downplay the enormity of what they saw; their stark reporting thus stands as a crucial and credible part of that wider story.
Today we still face the legacy of Nixon and Kissinger’s actions. Bangladesh, traumatized by its founding ordeal, now has the eighth-largest population on earth, bigger than Russia or Japan. With India creakily becoming a great power, and with ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and Kashmir that directly affects the United States in its war against Islamist terror, it’s widely understood that South Asia has never been more important to Americans. But there is a gulf between what Americans remember of the Cold War and what its victims remember of it. Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis have not forgotten 1971—although they may be surprised by the newly declassified scope of the United States’ dark record.14
Nixon and Kissinger have put extraordinary effort into magnifying their foreign policy achievements, so that the horrors of Watergate would appear as a smallish blot on their overall record. Today, Nixon and Kissinger’s
biggest success in promoting themselves as foreign policy heroes has been the historical oblivion that surrounds the killing campaign in Bangladesh. It is high time for Americans to confront what Nixon and Kissinger did in those terrible days.15
Chapter 1
The Tilt
On a hushed Saturday over the Thanksgiving weekend in November 1970, Richard Nixon was alone in the wooded seclusion of Camp David. Restless and keen for the new year, the president drew up a list of his aspirations, entitled “Goals for ’71–’72.” His list began: “1. President as moral leader—conscience of the nation.”1
This high-minded vision did not extend as far as India. Nixon had never liked the country. “My God, South Asia is just unbelievable,” he once said. “You go down there and you see it in the poverty, the hopelessness.” He first visited the subcontinent in December 1953, on an Asian tour as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower. It was, by his own account, a foundational experience.2
Nixon was appalled by India’s policy of nonalignment in the Cold War, an ostensible neutrality that seemed to him to really mean siding with the Soviet Union. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s founding prime minister, railed “obsessively and interminably” against Pakistan, to Nixon’s horror: “I was convinced that his objection owed much to his personal thirst for influence, if not control, over South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.” On top of that, he and Nehru immediately disliked each other. Nixon, not much more partial to actual Brahmins than to Boston Brahmins, seemed nettled by Nehru’s “softly modulated British English.” He later called him “arrogant, abrasive, and suffocatingly self-righteous.”3
