The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics
Page 3
September 19651
Nixon: Could you tell the Chinese it would be very helpful if they could move some forces or threaten to move some forces?
Kissinger: Absolutely.
Nixon: They’ve got to threaten or they’ve got to move, one of the two.
…Nixon: This should have been done long ago. The Chinese have not warned the Indians.
Kissinger: Oh, yeah.
Nixon: All they’ve got to do is move something. Move a division. You know, move some trucks. Fly some planes. You know, some symbolic act. We’re not doing a god-damn thing, Henry, you know that.
December 19712
1971
In Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s suite at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, the mood was bleak. “One could see at a glance that it was all up for Pakistan this time,” noted one of the Pakistani officials in attendance.3 Bhutto, recently reappointed as foreign minister and deputy prime minister, had arrived in New York ready for the diplomatic fight of his nation’s life. He knew that the situation in East Pakistan was grim. The Pakistani army had been decimated, would soon run out of fuel in the west, and Indian troops were advancing on Dhaka from all sides. There were fears that India could push on to enforce its territorial claims in Kashmir, leaving only a rump state behind.4 International sympathy for Islamabad’s position was limited. Hundreds of thousands of Bengalis had been killed in the Pakistani military’s futile campaign to prevent Bangladesh from gaining its independence, drawing global outrage. And time was running out. On 9 December 1971, the UN Secretary General received a telegram from Dhaka conveying a message from General Farman Ali, who led the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan: the command was ready to give up and wanted the UN to arrange the withdrawal.5 Bhutto, who was barely off the plane, scrambled to get hold of Pakistan’s president, Yahya Khan, to find out whether this was the government’s position or just freelancing by the general.6 It was clear that his room for manoeuvre was rapidly disappearing.
Bhutto at least hoped to receive support from two powerful backers: the United States and China. Pakistan was still basking in the glow of appreciation for facilitating the rapprochement between Washington and Beijing. Islamabad’s role was notable not only for its success in ensuring the secrecy of communications between the two sides, when any leak could have derailed the whole venture, but its willingness to devote serious attention to the delicate process at the highest levels of government during a time of national crisis. The legendary secret operation that brought Henry Kissinger to China on a PIA jet plane, while the world believed him to be recuperating from a stomach ache at a Pakistani hill station, had been orchestrated that July. Nixon’s own breakthrough visit to China was supposed to take place in a few months’ time. Neither man wanted their treatment of Pakistan to damage Chinese perceptions of US reliability. As Kissinger put it: “We cannot turn on Pakistan and I think it would have disastrous consequences with China that after they gave us an airport we massacre them.”7 Even more importantly, with India supporting the Bengali rebels, and the Soviet Union backing India, Beijing and Washington needed to ensure that Pakistan was not fatally weakened by such a constellation of forces.
What they were actually willing to do about it was another matter. Despite President Nixon’s avowed policy of “tilting” towards Pakistan, there was fierce resistance within the US government to putting any such measures into practice to support a country that many believed was responsible for a near-genocidal level of slaughter.8 Pakistan’s attempt to invoke the 1959 bilateral security agreement between the two countries received short shrift. Bhutto had breakfast with Kissinger at the Waldorf Astoria on 11 December. “Chinese wallpaper and discreet waiters made one nearly forget that eight thousand miles away, the future of my guest’s country hung by a thread,” he recalled in his memoirs.9 Kissinger advised Bhutto that “Pakistan would not be saved by mock-tough rhetoric,” a speciality of his breakfast companion. “It is not that we do not want to help you; it is that we want to preserve you. It is all very well to proclaim principles but finally we have to assure your survival.” He urged him to work out a common position with the Chinese. Bhutto replied that the Chinese “were confused by the evident schism” in the US government: “What should they believe?”10
For the United States, the possibility of Beijing intervening militarily was real. Nixon and Kissinger had been talking up the prospect for months as a means of deterring New Delhi’s involvement, Nixon closing his angry meeting in November with the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, by issuing the warning that “it would be impossible to calculate with precision the steps which other great powers might take if India were to initiate hostilities”.11 Kissinger directed the White House and State Department staffs to “leave India to its fate” if China provoked border incidents.12 But the Chinese were keeping their counsel. Since 23 November, China’s ambassador to the UN, Huang Hua, had been conducting secret meetings with Kissinger in CIA safe-houses in New York, the principal channel of communications between the two countries at the time. At the initial meeting, Kissinger and Alexander Haig, his military aide, gave a military briefing that suggested, with a wink, that India had left its northern border with China exposed. As the situation for Pakistan worsened, that wink became a set of explicit messages. Nixon told Kissinger that he “strongly” wanted to encourage Chinese action: “But damnit, I am convinced that if the Chinese start moving the Indians will be petrified”.13 On 8 December, he gave his assent for Kissinger to convey a note to Zhou Enlai stating: “If you are ever going to move, this is the time.”14 Two days later, another meeting took place in the New York safe-house. Kissinger told the Chinese officials that the United States would be moving ships into the vicinity and allowing Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to send American arms to the Pakistanis. But the purpose of the session was laid out starkly: “When I asked for this meeting, I did so to suggest Chinese military help to Pakistan, to be quite honest.”15
When Ambassador Huang sent word on 12 December that he needed to see Kissinger again urgently, which was the first time the Chinese had solicited a meeting, it seemed a fateful moment: “We assumed that only a matter of gravity could induce them into such a departure. We guessed that they were coming to the military assistance of Pakistan.”16 “They’re going to move,” he told Nixon, “No question, they’re going to move”.17 The two men discussed the possibility of a Soviet response to any Chinese action, and Nixon took the dramatic decision that in those circumstances the United States would provide China with military backing. He had already ordered an aircraft carrier task-force to head as far as the Straits of Malacca. Now it was sent into the Bay of Bengal “to give effect to our strategy and to reinforce the message to Moscow”,18 which duly responded by sending a nuclear-armed submarine to tail the task-force. Nixon’s move was a signal to China too, one that brought with it the risk of an all-out superpower war. Nixon made his first use of the Hot Line to Moscow in a message that concluded: “I cannot emphasize too strongly that time is of the essence to avoid consequences neither of us want.”19 Kissinger helpfully noted that if the Soviet Union decided to “wipe out China” then the president’s upcoming visit there would be pointless.20
The Pakistanis were also, at least ostensibly, trying to discern Beijing’s intentions. Following the bleak news about the situation in Dhaka, the Chinese deputy foreign minister had called on Bhutto at Pakistan’s mission to the UN, where he “urged very strongly” that Pakistani forces hold out for another week, claiming that “there could be great benefits”.21 Iqbal Akhund, a senior Pakistani diplomat, relates:
In a delegation meeting in the minister’s hotel room next morning, the question on everyone’s mind was “Will the Chinese? Won’t the Chinese?” Bhutto’s chaperon, the Colonel, said that a massive Chinese intervention was needed without a moment’s notice. Bhutto asked opinions about what, if anything, China was likely to do. He must have known the answer quite well and was probably testing the diplomatic acumen of the dele
gates. Each delegate answered the question in his lights and hopes.22
In fact, he knew the answer perfectly well. Bhutto had been sent to Beijing in November to request Chinese support. There were plenty of signs that something was amiss. China allowed a rare public demonstration during the visit, and he was taken to see the underground shelters the Chinese had built for protection from Soviet attack, as if to signal its own security fears.23 The trip itself was only taking place following China’s decision to decline Yahya Khan’s request for a “morale-boosting” visit from a senior Chinese leader to Pakistan.24 Bhutto’s mission was the second of its sort that year—a delegation headed by Foreign Secretary Sultan Khan and Lt-Gen. Gul Hassan Khan had visited in April. Both drew blanks. “China never, during these or subsequent talks, held out any possibility of coming to Pakistan’s aid with her armed forces,” Sultan Khan later noted.25 In the November talks “there was never any question of active Chinese military involvement and such an eventuality was not even discussed.”26 This was not the message that Bhutto conveyed to the Pakistani public. On returning to Pakistan, he claimed that his visit had been “a complete success” and that the results were “tangible” and “concrete”.27 After meeting Bhutto, Yahya Khan announced that in the event of an Indian attack the Chinese would intervene and help Pakistan as much as they could.28 Yahya Khan had made similar statements even before the Bhutto trip.29 It was bluff. And the Indians were not falling for it.
India had been aware of the Chinese position throughout. In January, Indian intelligence had assessed that Beijing was unlikely to fight for Pakistan but would “adopt a threatening posture on the Sino-Indian border and even stage some border incidents and clashes”.30 But by June, they had obtained a detailed read-out of the Pakistanis’ April visit to Beijing.31 More importantly, they concluded that China had not undertaken the necessary build-up of forces and supplies for a military intervention.32 India demonstrated its confidence with the decision to move three of the six divisions assigned to the Chinese border in the eastern and western Himalayas to the East Pakistani front.33 India’s position was reinforced by the August agreement with the Soviet Union, the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty, which implied the strong threat of a response from Moscow to any Chinese military action. Privately, the Soviets had pledged that they would open diversionary action if China tried to involve itself.34 The possibility of China’s intervention still informed the timing of the war—prosecuting it in winter would make it harder for Chinese troops to cross the snow-covered passes on the border.35 But by the time India was drawing up its contingency plans, it had already concluded that Beijing would be unwilling and unready to act. Although it is omitted from Kissinger’s own dramatic recounting of the events, US intelligence assessments had reached the same conclusion.36
In New York, Bhutto responded angrily to General Farman Ali’s surrender message. In a telegram to Yahya Khan, he insisted that “we must fight to the bitter end…otherwise we will suffer final disgrace, be rendered friendless and ultimately finished. The Chinese must intervene physically and immediately.”37 The next day, Yahya Khan would ask China to do exactly this, telling the Chinese ambassador that “he would rather the Chinese than the Russians took over East Pakistan”.38 On 12 December, the answer came back from Beijing, reinforcing what both Yahya Khan and Bhutto must already have known: China would “continue to support Pakistan morally, economically, and politically, but its capability to intervene was limited and ‘please do not pin much hope on it’.”39 This did not stop General Headquarters in Rawalpindi from sending one last, desperate message to officers in the East on 13 December, telling them to hold out because support was on its way: “Yellow from the north and white from the south”.40 It was soon clear to the temporarily heartened troops that neither the Chinese nor the Americans were in fact riding to the rescue, though at one point they believed that a contingent of Indian commandos was the Chinese coming to save them.41 Pakistan’s final surrender would come four days later.
If there had been any thought to step in on China’s part, the timing could not have been worse. The Chinese military was in state of turmoil. Mao had removed virtually the entire high command following Lin Biao’s fatal flight in September: China’s military chief and Mao’s chosen successor had died in highly suspicious circumstances, his plane crashing over the Mongolian desert as he fled the country after what Mao claimed was a “coup attempt”.42 Over a thousand senior Chinese military officials were purged, the air force was grounded, the PLA itself was in disgrace, and Beijing was gripped by a sense of political crisis. In the meantime, China still had to sustain its military support to the North Vietnamese, and was seriously concerned about the risks of a major clash with the Soviet Union.43 Following the Sino-Soviet border altercations in 1969—in which a series of low level conflicts over disputed territory threatened the prospect of full-scale war—the Soviets had moved 45 divisions to China’s northern border.44 Bhutto himself was a witness to a massive Chinese civil defence programme put in place to prepare for the possibility of nuclear strikes.45 But it was not military disarray or fear of war with the Russians that was decisive. Nor was it simply the snowy passes—if they had wanted to, the Chinese could have made the necessary preparations at least to make threatening gestures on the Sikkim and Kashmir fronts, as they belatedly hinted they might do in December 1971.46 Rather, it was a political judgement that would foreshadow many other crucial episodes in the relationship between the two countries over the decades to come: China would not pull Pakistan out of the holes it insisted on digging for itself.
It was clear to virtually every Pakistani visitor who passed through Beijing how uncomfortable China was with the crackdown in East Pakistan. Zhou Enlai, in his meetings with the Pakistani delegation in April, made several pointed “suggestions” about the handling of the situation; advice that came “after great deliberation and consultations with Chairman Mao”.47 “Participation by the army is only the first step, and the major problem of winning the hearts of the people through economic and political measures should be tackled quickly,” he advised.48 He would later state in public that China did not “provide arms [to a country] to be used against its own people”.49 The fact that pro-Chinese political factions were a target didn’t help either. Of even greater concern was the fact that Beijing saw a Pakistani strategy that was heading for defeat on all fronts: voiding public support in East Pakistan, shredding international sympathy, and creating a pretext for Indian intervention.50 Zhou stressed the need for “a speedy solution that would take into account the wishes of the majority of the people in East Pakistan”, but he didn’t see one coming.51 Neither did China see a viable military solution once India was engaged. The Chinese military attaché, on a visit to the Pakistani army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, saw the map showing Pakistani and Indian positions in the first week, and remarked that the fighting on the western front was more or less over.52 By the time Zhou Enlai delivered his strident speech against India after the fall of Dhaka, Indian diplomats were comfortable enough to dismiss it as “impotent rage”.53
Chinese support to Pakistan did have its value. While at times Beijing moved slowly with some of Islamabad’s emergency requests, it maintained its economic and military aid throughout the year.54 This included a large shipment of arms to the Pakistani army in East Pakistan, the training and equipping of two additional divisions, and a further $100 million of assistance. It scrapped at the UN Security Council on Pakistan’s behalf and, in the aftermath of the war, vetoed Bangladesh’s application for UN membership until the withdrawal of Indian troops had been confirmed and Pakistani POWs had been returned, despite the reputational costs. China’s public expressions of support were valued at a time when these were thin on the ground, and provided some cover for Pakistani leaders to pretend that private reassurances went further.55 But it fell well short of what many in Pakistan had hoped for and, in some cases, even expected. As the end of the war grew ever nearer, a Chinese intervention lo
oked more and more like Pakistan’s only possible escape route from self-inflicted disaster. But ultimately Pakistan would lose half its population, a fifth of its territory, and see ninety-three thousand of its soldiers become prisoners of war without even a token skirmish on the Sino-Indian border.
China’s role in the 1971 war captures much about the relationship: the oscillation between hope, self-deception, public exaggeration, and resigned realism on Pakistan’s part, and on China’s, a blend of tempered support, gentle scolding and steely pragmatism. The Washington-Beijing liaisons have since become a feature of almost every Pakistani crisis. It is not difficult to trace a line straight through to Sino-Pakistani-US relations around the Kargil crisis or the aftermath of the Bin Laden killing: Bhutto’s disappointing visit to China in November 1971 would be mirrored by Nawaz Sharif in June 1999 and Yousuf Gilani in May 2011, episodes that will be dealt with in later chapters. Over the decades to come, China would become Pakistan’s only reliable diplomatic, economic and military backer. But would it be there for Pakistan in its hour of need? The answer in 1971, and ever since, has been: only up to a point. As a Dawn editorial in February 1972 put it:
Had we…not presumed that we would get unlimited Chinese support, regardless of our objectives and conduct, the country might have been saved from humiliation and defeat. The People’s Republic of China has been a great friend of Pakistan. Let us honour this friendship by being rational and realistic and by not imposing unnecessary burdens and strains on the friendship. Objective reality must be measured by its own size and not by the length of its shadow.56
1965
The seeds of the Pakistanis’ misplaced hopes had been sown six years earlier. The Indo-Pakistani war in September 1965 did not involve a great deal more Chinese military activity than in 1971, and the war itself was a disaster for Pakistan, from the first failed attempts by Pakistani troops to precipitate an insurgency in Kashmir to the appearance of Indian artillery within range of Lahore International Airport. But the effect of China’s stance during the conflict on public opinion in Pakistan was profound.