The Blood Telegram Page 33

  So as war loomed, and China spat rhetorical venom at India, India’s ambassador raced to Kissinger to find out where he really stood. Kissinger, retreating somewhat from his Delhi promises, now said that if it was not clear who started a war, with Indian irregulars in East Pakistan and Pakistani troops in Kashmir, the United States would not help India against China. But Kissinger declared that, as the ambassador wrote, “in a 1962 type of situation”—meaning a Chinese invasion of India—the United States would give “all-out help to India against China.” If Pakistan attacked India, with China supporting Pakistan, then the United States “would not hesitate to help us with arms, although not with men.”13

  Even after this latest, more conditional pledge, the prospect churned in Kissinger’s prodigious mind. By September, he decided that China’s enduring animosity toward India would make a useful tool of U.S. diplomacy. Despite his own promises to India, he concluded that the United States should avoid making any pledges to defend India against a Chinese attack, since it might encourage India. A few days later, he told the Indian ambassador that if India attacked Pakistan, and that sparked a Chinese invasion of India, it would be hard for the United States to help out.14

  Kissinger had much more in mind than that. If China provoked border incidents, he directed the White House and State Department staffs to leave India to its fate. In the Oval Office, Kissinger told Nixon that “if we could shock the Indians we would—because our judgment is that Chinese almost certainly come in at the Indians.” The president immediately took to the idea. Nixon told Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia that China could not stand by if Pakistan was attacked.15

  India put its trust in two frozen friends: the Soviet Union and the coming winter. First, China might be scared off by India’s treaty with the Soviet Union. Even with war on the horizon, the Indian embassy in Beijing reported a surprising lack of public Chinese support for Pakistan. Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, remembers India’s friendship treaty with the Soviet Union as crucial, allowing his troops to operate.16

  Second, ever since Indira Gandhi had first asked her generals for war plans, they had told her to wait for winter, when the Chinese army would be blocked off from an attack by the coming of the winter snows in the Himalayas. General Jacob says that his superior, General Sam Manekshaw, the chief of the army staff, was obsessed with Chinese intervention. Vice Admiral Mihir Roy, the director of India’s naval intelligence, remembers, “That’s why Manekshaw said, let’s choose the season—where there’s no rain, and there’s snow on the Himalayas.”17

  In late October, Kissinger made a second China trip, hammering out the details for Nixon’s own upcoming visit to Beijing. The city was in the grip of one of the worst leadership crises in the People’s Republic’s history. China was under martial law, with armed troops on the streets and banners at the airport denouncing “running dog” capitalists. But meeting with Zhou Enlai in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, communists and capitalists at least found common ground in excoriating India.18

  “We from the East and you from the West have the most to do with East Pakistan,” said Zhou. Kissinger reminded the Chinese premier that the United States, despite pro-Indian sentiment in Congress, was the only major Western country that had not condemned Pakistan.

  Kissinger said that he had read a book that Zhou had recommended, which blamed the 1962 China-India war on Indian provocations and aggression, and said that the White House believed that now “the Indians are applying essentially the same tactics.” “That is their tradition,” said Zhou. India, said Kissinger, saw the crisis as a chance to smash Pakistan once and for all. Zhou agreed: India “doesn’t believe in the existence of Pakistan.” Kissinger said, “We believe she will try to destroy East Pakistan.” He expected India either to attack in the next month or so, or to provoke Pakistan into attacking. Kissinger reassured Zhou that the United States was completely opposed to Indian military strikes against Pakistan.19

  After returning to Washington, Kissinger privately confided that he preferred working with China to India. Fresh back from the violent convulsions of China in the Cultural Revolution, he still showed no fondness for Indian democracy. Nixon said, “Recently with the Chinese—goddamn it, they talk directly.” Kissinger heartily agreed: “Oh, the Chinese are a joy to deal with compared to the Indians.”20

  “THE BRITISH GOT OUT TOO SOON”

  In Washington, the first brisk nights of autumn brought more than a seasonal chill. Kissinger’s staff at the White House—using the exact same reasoning as the generals in India—warned that mid-October or November could bring an Indian attack: “The monsoon will be over, and weather in the Himalayas will begin to close in for the winter and make Chinese operations more difficult.”21

  The Indian and Pakistani militaries were bracing for confrontation, with the Indian army in intensive training for war, while the Mukti Bahini intensified its guerrilla campaign. The rebels, more aggressive and popular than ever, fought with automatic weapons and mortars, and had grown skilled at blowing up bridges and mining ships. There was so much Pakistani artillery fire at the rebels that the Indian army was, as General Jacob later wrote, “officially authorized to occupy areas across the border to prevent Pakistani shelling.” The Bangladeshi exile government claimed it now had some seventy thousand trained guerrillas, and privately admitted that the Indian army was giving indispensable artillery cover for the rebels.22

  Pakistan complained of frequent shellings from Indian troops along the border, in defense of the Bengali insurgents. The Indian mission in Islamabad reported anxiously that “a ‘Crush India’ campaign was whipped up all over West Pakistan to produce an artificial war hysteria.” Yahya, indignant at India’s “open hostility and her unabashed support and aid to the miscreants”—his word of choice still for rebellious Bengalis—asked Nixon to dissuade India.23

  Although the United States warned both sides not to attack, Kissinger and his team gloomily wondered not whether war would break out, but how. The CIA director warned that Pakistan might launch a preemptive attack on India in a few weeks.24

  If war came, the Nixon administration knew that Pakistan would be trounced. The U.S. military and the State Department’s intelligence bureau agreed that Pakistan’s defeat was all but inevitable. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the crucial factor in a war would be India’s four-to-one advantage in ground forces. He expected a short war, before both sides began running out of supplies in four to six weeks: “India will prevail because of superior numbers.”25

  There was one remaining big diplomatic chance for the United States to try to prevent a war: Indira Gandhi’s upcoming trip to Washington. Kissinger’s aides told him that this summit, which had been put on Nixon’s schedule several months earlier, would be their last opportunity to restrain India.26

  Nixon dreaded her visit. When Kissinger reminded him that it was on the calendar, he exhaled softly, “Jesus Christ.” The president suspiciously wanted to be sure that “she doesn’t come in here and, frankly, pull our legs.”27

  Kissinger stoked Nixon’s wrath. Declaring that the Indians were plotting to undo Partition by destroying Pakistan, he pushed a stereotype of wily Indian brains: “In their convoluted minds they really believe they can give Pakistan a powerful blow from which it won’t recover and solve everything at once.” Nixon told the British foreign secretary, “All that I can say is that I think the British got out too soon.”28

  In the Oval Office, Nixon angrily told Kissinger, “Well, you let the Indians know, they get their aid stopped when a war starts. They aren’t going to get any aid.” This was a tough threat. The United States gave substantial foreign aid to India—about $220 million annually, plus another $220 million worth of development loans and $65 million in food aid. The State Department recoiled at slashing off India’s aid, noting the “hyper-sensitivity” of Indians to a “neo-colonialist attitude,” and warning of a “new level
of bitterness” that would long poison U.S.-Indian relations. Still, Kissinger told a Situation Room meeting, Nixon was deadly serious about cutting off aid if India went to war: “The Indians must understand that we mean it. The President has said so. In fact, he tells me every day.”29

  India needed to firm up Soviet support for a likely war. So Indira Gandhi flew to Moscow, arriving in the coolness of late September. She was treated to all the baleful tributes that the Soviet state could muster: a military honor guard at the airport, crowds unspontaneously lining the wide avenues, forced accolades in the captive press, lodgings at the Kremlin. She met with Soviet political and military leaders, driving home to them the social pressures that the refugees were causing in India. Afterward, the Soviets unleashed at full blast an official press campaign against Pakistan, led by Pravda, demanding Mujib’s release and an end to the killings. Still, Gandhi could not quite extract a Soviet endorsement for a war. The Soviets emphasized the benefits of peace, arguing that war would only make India’s burdens worse. (While Gandhi was finishing up her rounds at the Kremlin, Nixon and Kissinger were in the Oval Office working over Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, who said that the Soviet Union had urged her not to pick a fight and that she had assured them should would not.) The best that Gandhi could get was a firm statement from Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, calling for a swift political settlement in Pakistan and for the safe return of the refugees.30

  Next, on October 24, Gandhi and Haksar, her top adviser, left India for a three-week Western tour, including stops in Britain, France, and West Germany, with the most important encounter scheduled for Washington on November 4 and 5. As on her prior trips, Gandhi got rhetorical commiseration and some humanitarian aid, but not much more. “Mrs. Gandhi went around the world saying this is a genocide,” says Admiral Mihir Roy of the Indian navy. “Nobody listened to her.” Austria was promoting Kurt Waldheim, a diplomat hiding his Nazi past, to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations, and did not want to alienate the Muslim bloc. Britain still wanted to keep Pakistan united. Gandhi fared better in France, where President Georges Pompidou’s government urged the release of Mujib, the Awami League leader, and saw the independence of Bangladesh as inevitable. (André Malraux, the French novelist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, now offered to take up arms again with the Mukti Bahini—which might have been somewhat more intimidating to Yahya if he had not been seventy years old.) In West Germany, Chancellor Willy Brandt proved refreshingly sympathetic. But none of this would be enough to prevent war.31

  In London, exhausted, Gandhi seemed close to breaking under the strain. She once again went clangingly heavy on the Nazi analogies, saying that she could no more meet with Yahya before the woes of the Bengali refugees were addressed than Winston Churchill could have met with Adolf Hitler before the end of World War II. When a British reporter challenged her for supporting the Mukti Bahini, for a moment she seemed almost overcome with anger and grief, blinking rapidly and swallowing hard, but not faltering. Did quieting the situation “mean we support the genocide?” she shot back with steely fury. “When Hitler was on the rampage, why didn’t you tell us keep quiet and let’s have peace in Germany and let the Jews die, or let Belgium die, let France die?”32

  SMALL STEPS

  As Gandhi’s visit approached, Nixon and Kissinger tried to explain what they had done to forestall war. It was not a long list, but there were some achievements on it. In the late summer and fall, the Nixon administration had belatedly begun to urge Yahya to take some actions to undermine India’s reasons for war. Even the most bullish U.S. officials admitted that these steps only made a grim situation somewhat less grim, while Archer Blood later said they were “all too little and too late, as well as completely out of touch with reality in East Pakistan.” All of them were aimed at mitigating the consequences of worse decisions already made by Pakistani leaders.33

  One success came when Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, urged Yahya to get rid of the reviled Lieutenant General Tikka Khan and appoint a civilian Bengali as governor of East Pakistan. At first Yahya refused, but later he installed a docile Bengali loyalist as governor and replaced the hated Tikka Khan with the somewhat less hated Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, the army commander in East Pakistan. For once, even the Indian government was briefly impressed, but Haksar soon realized that the new regime—still under the military’s thumb—was little different from before. The ostensible civilian administration was, a senior Pakistani official later admitted, “merely to hoodwink public opinion at home and abroad.… Real decisions in all important matters still lay with the army.” As the Pakistan army’s Major General Rao Farman Ali—who worked alongside General Niazi—testified later, “The army virtually continued to control civil administration.”34

  Also, the Nixon administration privately rebuked Yahya when he launched a secret treason trial for Mujib, which seemed likely to end with his execution—and an explosion of Indian outrage, possibly even war. This trial iced any hopes of political reconciliation with the Bengali nationalists. Even Nixon was shocked. “Why did he do that?” he asked Kissinger in amazement. “He’s a big, honorable, stupid man,” said Kissinger. “For Christ sakes,” Nixon said. “He can’t do that.” The next day, Kissinger was more sanguine: “If he won’t shoot him, I think we can survive it.” Nixon asked, “Did you tell him not to shoot him?” Kissinger replied, “I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people”—at this point the tape is bleeped out on purported grounds of national security.35

  So the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan told Yahya “as a friend” that while this was “completely an internal affair,” executing Mujib could “definitely and decisively affect virtually all assistance, humanitarian and economic.” Yahya, while still putting Mujib on trial and leaving the political process in tatters, replied that “you can stop worrying because I am not going to execute the man even though he is a traitor.”36

  Perhaps the most important U.S. pressure came in response to reports that East Pakistan, ravaged by civil war, was facing a risk of famine. The Dacca consulate warned of a latter-day version of the notorious 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died, while the CIA director said, “This will make Biafra look like a cocktail party.” Kissinger worried that famine would produce a new wave of refugees, which could be the last straw for India. Thus he explained to Nixon that by preventing a famine they would deprive India of an excuse to attack Pakistan.37

  This time, the United States acted. “I’m talking about Pakistan,” Kissinger told a Situation Room meeting. “We’re not so eager to do things for India. We want to make a demonstrable case to prevent famine in East Pakistan.” Nixon wrote to Yahya, asking him to make a big effort to avert famine, thereby undercutting India’s “pretext for interference.”38

  But the White House staff, the State Department, and the U.S. embassy in Islamabad all warned that Pakistan’s government—indifferent, incompetent, and corrupt—was botching the relief efforts. The Nixon administration urged Yahya to get his act together, and donated almost $10 million in food and $3 million in vessels for inland transportation, helping United Nations relief workers. The United States single-handedly spent slightly more for Pakistan than the rest of the world. The distribution of food, Kissinger told Nixon, “has been handicapped again by the goddamned Indians because most of the roads run parallel to the frontier and very close to the frontier, and they’re blowing them up every night.” Nixon said, “Let’s stay out of this damn thing and just help refugees, stay out of the fight between the two.”39

  The threat of famine receded. The food situation there was still dire, and would require more aid, but should hold until the spring. The United States and the United Nations could claim true lifesaving credit, although there was another, uglier factor in this success, as the White House staff noted: nine million people had already fled from East Pakistan into India. Still, Kissinger correctly told Nixon, this was a big U.S. contribution to region
al peace, preventing “many millions more” Bengali refugees from rushing into India. “It is hard to prove, but the situation could have been a great deal worse by now.”40

  But while alleviating some symptoms, belated U.S. pressure did little to end the fundamental crisis. These were all partial retreats from calamitous decisions by Yahya: while good not to have a famine, it would have been better still not to have created the conditions for one; while preferable to be rid of Tikka Khan, better not to have installed him to terrorize the Bengalis in the first place; and while it was a relief that Mujib was not executed, the winner of a democratic election might have been at a negotiating table rather than in a secret military jail. These were all faint hints of a better future that could have been—without civil war, fierce military rule, or the quashing of democratic leadership.41

  The inadequacy was perfectly plain from Washington. Both Nixon and Kissinger were informed that huge numbers of refugees were still fleeing, and almost none returning. As U.S. officials in Dacca explained, the Pakistani government’s efforts to win over the Bengalis had failed. Some middle-class Bengalis in the cities wanted peace no matter what, but younger Bengalis, especially in the countryside, were fixed in their bitterness against Pakistan’s government and army. This loathing was intensified by persistent reports of atrocities, convincing even many conservative Bengalis that the Pakistan army had to be forced out.42

  A top U.S. development official, after visiting Pakistan, wrote, “Elections, political accommodation, welcoming the return of all refugees, amnesty—these are fine policy pronouncements, but their implementation is in the hands of the Army commanders who govern the Eastern Province, and these Army commanders do not as yet appear subject to foreign influences.” When Yahya made showy policy statements, it was an illusory “public relations diplomacy.”43