By Sunil Khilnani
The lost history of one of our lowest moments
Among the many bizarre White House conversations between President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger that Gary Bass cites in his devastating account of America’s role in the creation of Bangladesh, a particularly wrenching one took place in April 1971, a little over two weeks into an onslaught by the Pakistani military upon its own citizens.
Sparking the Nixon-Kissinger exchange was an indignant diplomat named Archer Blood, the U. S. consul general in Dacca, the capital of Pakistan’s eastern half. For a fortnight, Blood had been cabling Washington details, meticulously gathered by his staff, of massacres and expulsions that had left the Bengali city “a ghost town.” Kissinger had downplayed the details of these reports to the president, and made clear to his aides that they should ignore the dispatches, even as three fourths of Dacca’s population fled for their lives.
On April 6, disgusted by Washington’s silence, Blood and his staff transmitted to their superiors in Washington a collectively authored telegram registering official disagreement with American policy: the “Blood telegram” of Bass’s title. It used the word “genocide” to describe the killings in Bengal, which were targeting the Bengalis—and specifically the Hindus among them—of East Pakistan. It was, Bass writes, “as scorching a cable as could be imagined” and “probably the most blistering denunciation of U. S. foreign policy ever sent by its own diplomats.” The five-page cable catalogued the “moral bankruptcy” of America’s Pakistan policy in failing to denounce the atrocities, in condoning the suppression of democracy, and in continuing to support and to arm the fast-dissolving country’s military leader.
Less than a week later, Nixon and Kissinger met in the Oval Office to try to convince themselves of the rightness of their dedication to that military leader, General Yahya Khan. He was a Sandhurst-trained officer straight out of central casting, complete with swagger stick, strut, and slick-backed hair. Nixon admired him and considered him a friend. Kissinger privately judged him a moron, but saw in him a supremely useful instrument to pursue America’s geopolitical interests. Now, as Yahya pressed his American-equipped army into service against Pakistan’s Bengali population, he was becoming an awkward problem for his Washington backers. The contents of Blood’s denunciatory cable had spread fast, winning supporters within the State Department and reaching the press and Democratic leaders. (Blood had taken care to give the telegram a low classification—merely “Confidential.”)
Infuriated by Blood’s insubordination and anxious that his message could derail their Pakistan policy, Nixon and Kissinger stiffened their commitment to Yahya. Biafra, Nixon suggested to Kissinger, had been worse than what was happening in East Pakistan—but the United States had not intervened there. Would it not be moral hypocrisy to intervene in Bengal? Or was Biafra’s neglect justified because it had fewer people? And for that matter, Nixon mused (maybe forgetting that his adviser’s own family had fled Nazi Germany), could it be said that because “there weren’t very many Jews in Germany” perhaps it was “therefore not immoral for Hitler to kill them?”
Even the most morally impaired politicians may sometimes strain toward ethical epiphanies. Through the fog of his geopolitical ambition, Nixon could see that what was happening in East Pakistan bore comparison with Biafra and the Holocaust. Unfortunately his moment of clarity was fleeting. It is the usual, sad fate of most chroniclers of political lives to chart the downward slope from moral perspective and insight into the arid plain of expediency and “realism.” And so the Nixonian moral flicker was quickly extinguished by Kissinger, ever a scourge to inexpedient thoughts. There was no way the United States should put a squeeze on Yahya, Kissinger urged: it would result in leftist extremists coming to rule in Bengal, and weaken the fight against Soviet communism. And there were other, still secret, strategic calculations having to do with China to be factored in. Besides, he argued of intervention, “[i]t’s a disaster. No one else is doing it.” Nixon was already convinced. “I think that if we get in the middle of all this,” he said, “it’s a hell of a mistake.”
In fact, the United States had been intervening squarely in the middle of Pakistan’s affairs from the early years of that country’s inception, with Nixon himself a driver of the American policy. As Eisenhower’s vice president, he visited Pakistan in 1953 and returned convinced that Pakistan could aid America’s efforts to contain communist expansionism. “Pakistan is a country I would like to do everything for,” Nixon said on his return home. Less than six months later, the administration entered into a military pact that over the next decade delivered to Pakistan some $2 billion worth of gleaming American military equipment. Nixon would honor his commitment to Pakistan to the tawdry end of his public life.
It is customary today for Washington officials and foreign-policy experts to rue the fact that, despite many billions of military and economic aid to Pakistan, the United States can do little to shape that country’s policies. That was not the case in the Nixon years. By the time Nixon became president, in 1969, Pakistan’s dependency on American aid and military supplies was deep and appetitive. Six months before Yahya Khan ordered his military onto the streets in East Pakistan, he had visited Nixon to secure promises of more weaponry—jets and bombers, tanks and armored vehicles. “We will try to be as helpful as we can,” Nixon assured the general.
American solicitude for Pakistan’s military regime would, in 1971, culminate in the support of the most violent and disruptive year in South Asia’s history, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and some ten million displaced—an upheaval even greater than the Partition of 1947, when the British scuttled out of India. The violence of 1971 transformed and scarred the Indian subcontinent. The drawn-out bloody birth of Bangladesh decimated the country’s intellectual and institutional capital as well as its economy, and it has never fully recovered. It was India that had to intervene to secure that birth, in a war that left Pakistan defeated and traumatized. Pakistan’s leaders poured their country’s resources into a nuclear program and into the military, which thereafter turned to insurgents and terrorists to instigate proxy wars designed “to bleed India by a thousand cuts.”
Pervez Musharraf, a young officer in the Pakistani army in 1971, would later recall his tears when hearing of his country’s defeat—a humiliation that drove his subsequent career, leading him as Pakistan’s military commander to instigate in 1999 a military operation against India in the high mountains of Kargil, which nearly erupted into a nuclear crisis. For India, the glow of triumph was short-lived. It had to confront a Pakistan cut free from the moderating, syncretic religions of Bengal, and moving rapidly to Islamicize in a bid to transform itself from a South Asian country into a Middle Eastern one; and India’s relations with Bangladesh fast cooled. As for the United States, it would henceforth be mistrusted by all in the region—by India, by Bangladesh, and by Pakistan, too, which blamed its ally for the breakup of the country.
