Raghavan’s account starts with the fall of Pakistan’s ruler
Ayub Khan in early 1969 and his replacement by a military regime led by Gen. Yahya
Khan. The catalyst for Ayub’s departure
was student-led protests, part of the global wave of protests in 1968. The protests “not only deposed Ayub Khan but
also radicalized the movement for autonomy” in East Pakistan (266). In December 1970, Mujibur Rahman’s Awami
League, running on an autonomy platform, won a majority in parliamentary
elections, including all but two seats in the East.
Negotiations on forming a new government ensued between the Awami
League and Yahya Khan. When the
negotiations broke down despite the League’s willingness to be flexible on some
key points, the Pakistani army launched its crackdown in East Pakistan on March
25, 1971. A description of the initial
assault, written by a UN Development Program official in Dacca (the capital of
E. Pakistan), referred to “Army trucks loaded with the dead bodies of
civilians” (quoted, 148). The army shot
students in the halls at the university in Dacca (now Dhaka) and also hit Old
Dacca (52). Estimates of the dead from
the initial attack varied from 5,000 to 25,000 (149). Subsequent continued brutality by the
Pakistani army led millions of Bengalis to flee into India.
Had India decided quickly to intervene militarily, the
crisis would not have lasted long. However,
for reasons Raghavan details in chapter 3 India did not intervene early, and
the episode unfolded over a period of nine months: April-December 1971. When India did decide to launch full-scale
operations, the war was short: it “formally began” (234) in the early hours of December
4 (though Pakistan launched a preemptive air strike in the west on Dec. 3), and
it ended when the Pakistani army in the east surrendered on Dec. 16.
Maneuvering in the Whirlwind
The birth of Bangladesh, as this book makes clear, occurred
at a turbulent time in world politics.
The intense Cold War crises of the early 1960s – the Berlin crisis and the
Cuban missile crisis – were in the past, but parts of the Third World (as it
was then called) had become an arena in the superpower contest. The U.S. was still mired in the Vietnam War
(and had expanded its operations into Cambodia), while the Soviet Union and
China had barely been on speaking terms since 1961 and had come to blows on the
Ussuri River in 1969. China was reeling
internally from the effects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Prague Spring had
been suppressed by the Soviets, and, particularly in the West, non-state actors
and the emergence of human rights as an international-political issue both were
having an increasing if uneven impact on the conduct of foreign policy. At the same time the relatively new
postcolonial states generally opposed secessionist movements wherever they occurred.
The Sino-Soviet split and the U.S. determination to capitalize
on it by a rapprochement with China provide the backdrop for much of the diplomatic
maneuvering that surrounded the East Pakistan crisis. The superpowers, Raghavan writes, took
fundamentally different approaches to it: Nixon and Kissinger viewed the events
through the lens of their grand geopolitical plans, whereas the USSR’s
perspective was primarily regional (115).
The Soviets, having mediated in Tashkent the settlement that
restored the status quo after the 1965 Pakistan/India war over Kashmir, saw
themselves as peacemakers on the subcontinent (and for a brief period they sold
arms to Pakistan and India at the same time).
Premier Alexei Kosygin, for example, favored a “‘trade and transit agreement’
between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan which would be ‘beneficial for the
whole region’” (114). In line with this
approach the Soviets, at least through most of the crisis, sought to discourage
Indian military intervention in East Pakistan and to push Yahya Khan “toward a
peaceful, political resolution of the problem” (116). It was only toward the end of the crisis that
the Soviets gave up hope that Yahya might release Mujibur Rahman from jail and
negotiate a resolution with him (see below).
The USSR and India signed a “friendship and cooperation” treaty
on August 9, 1971. According to Raghavan,
it was a statement by Kissinger that finally pushed India to sign the treaty. Having returned from his secret trip to China
(see below), Kissinger informed the Indian ambassador to the U.S. on July 17
“that if China intervened in an India-Pakistan war, the United States would be
unable to help India”; this led Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had
been hesitating, to move to finalize the treaty with the USSR (127). The treaty’s key provision, Art. IX, called
for “mutual consultations” between the parties with a view to “remov[ing]” any
threat of an attack on either one; it also, in effect, ruled out Soviet
assistance to Pakistan if India-Pakistan hostilities broke out.
However, a gap remained between the USSR and India on the
proper approach to the crisis, since the Soviets for some time thought that the
refugee issue could be resolved separately from the political issue of East
Pakistan’s future (124) and were reluctant to give even conditional approval
for Indian military action or to confer about “contingencies.” The day after the treaty was signed, Soviet
foreign minister Gromyko urged Mrs. Gandhi to view “the situation in a cold
blooded way…The heart should be warm but the mind should be cool as we say”
(quoted, 130). It was only later,
specifically in late September, that the Soviet leadership, having concluded
that Yahya Khan “was unwilling to work toward any reasonable solution,…decided
to throw its weight behind India” (226).
By late October, the Indian foreign minister was able to tell a parliamentary
committee “that India could count on ‘total support’ from the Soviet Union”
(226). To the end, however, the Soviets
remained determined not to become directly involved militarily in the crisis
and worried about the possibilities of an escalation that would drag them into
a great-power confrontation.
Tilting at Windmills
Now to the matter of the U.S. stance. Although “Nixon wheeled with him to office a
trolley of biases against India and in favor of Pakistan” (82), Raghavan contends
that it was not these prejudices, for the most part, but rather the planned
opening to China, and Pakistan’s role in it, that dominated Nixon’s and Kissinger’s
calculations. As the crisis erupted,
Nixon ordered his people not to “squeeze” Yahya Khan (81). The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, had suggested
that Yahya Khan’s good offices could be used to facilitate the China opening,
and “[i]n this context, Nixon and Kissinger’s desire to refrain from squeezing
Yahya…was understandable” (92), at least until after Kissinger’s secret trip to
China in early July. Incidentally, contrary
to Kissinger’s claim in his memoir White
House Years that “Pakistan’s leaders…never sought any reciprocity” (quoted,
87) for their role as conduit to China, Pakistan pressed for a resumption of
arms sales, which the U.S. did resume on a one-time basis in October 1970 (84,
87).
Nixon and Kissinger’s refusal to pressure Yahya Khan elicited
a strong protest from the U.S. consul in Dhaka, Archer Blood, who sent cables
in late March and early April 1971 “detailing the terror being unleashed on the
populace by the Pakistani army” (89). Nixon
and Kissinger were unmoved, and the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad chimed in,
deprecating “righteous indignation” (quoted, 89) as a basis for policy. Raghavan suggests that, however “understandable”
was the U.S. softness toward Yahya because of his role as channel to China, the
U.S. could have exercised economic
leverage on Pakistan, which was “facing a major liquidity crisis” (94), without
undermining the China opening. Raghavan
thinks it “highly probable” that U.S. pressure of this sort "in late April to early May" would have forced
Yahya to grant the Awami League’s autonomy demands (266). (This must remain somewhat conjectural, of
course, since the leverage was not exercised.)
After Kissinger’s secret trip to China (July 9th-11th), U.S.
policy, Raghavan notes, “began shifting from a disinclination to squeeze Yahya
to an active tilt in favor of Pakistan” (105).
(Among major powers, the U.S. was mostly alone in this; Edward Heath’s
government in Britain, for example, took a quite different tack; see 162-69. For the positions of Australia, Canada,
France, Germany, and others, see chapter 7.)
Why the tilt? “After
all, following Kissinger’s trip to Beijing, Pakistan was no longer important as
a diplomatic conduit to China” (106). The
answer, according to Raghavan, boils down to Kissinger’s and Nixon’s “excessive
concern with reputation” (198) – their belief that if they failed to tilt
toward Pakistan and thereby failed to stand with an ally, the nascent
U.S.-China connection would be damaged.
During Kissinger’s July trip he and Zhou Enlai had discussed
the crisis, and in their last conversation before Kissinger left, “Zhou asked
Kissinger to ‘please tell President Yahya Khan that if India commits aggression,
we will support Pakistan’” (106). This
statement was vague – “we will support Pakistan” could mean a range of
different things. But Kissinger
interpreted it as a Chinese test of U.S. commitment to Pakistan, such that if
the U.S., in Raghavan’s words, “stood aside and allowed Pakistan to be
humiliated by India, [U.S.] credibility in the eyes of Beijing would suffer --
resulting in deep, possibly irreparable harm to the budding relationship with
the People’s Republic” (106; cf. 198, 247).
Thus when the crisis reached its climax in December, Nixon
and Kissinger sent a U.S. naval task force steaming from the coast of South
Vietnam toward the Bay of Bengal, told the Soviets that the situation on the
subcontinent jeopardized U.S.-Soviet détente, and urged – unavailingly – the
Chinese to move soldiers to the border with India (Nixon to Kissinger: “I tell
you a movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those
goddamn Indians to death” [quoted, 247].)
Kissinger’s remarks to Nixon at this point are laced with urgency: e.g.,
“the world’s psychological balance of power” is at stake (quoted, 248); and
“at least we’re coming off like men” (quoted, 256).
Nixon and
Kissinger claimed credit in their memoirs for saving West Pakistan from Indian
aggression, although the only concrete evidence of Indian intentions in that
respect that they had was a single-sourced CIA report of early December
(244). Raghavan argues that an attack on
West Pakistan was never India’s aim. He writes: “Nixon and Kissinger overplayed
the importance of an intelligence source, mainly because it helped them rationalize
their desire to demonstrate resolve to China and the Soviet Union…. The only
practical consequence of the aggressive U.S. posturing was to spur the Indians
to capture Dhaka and seal their victory – objectives that had not been on their
strategic horizons when the war began.
This was Nixon and Kissinger’s war of illusions. In retrospect, they
come across not as tough statesmen tilting toward their ally but as a picaresque
pair tilting at windmills” (262-63).
***
A few concluding remarks.
1971 covers a lot of ground,
and I’ve left out much in this post. For
instance I’ve mostly passed over Raghavan’s discussion of how trends in the
global normative/political environment of the time affected the crisis and the
reactions to it (see chapter 6), a topic which could occupy a post by itself
(and which, from my standpoint, would involve taking issue with one or two of
the author’s interpretations, albeit on somewhat tangential points). The book’s wide scope coupled with attention
to detail will make it valuable to historians, IR scholars, and others. Finally, a minor point: 1971 has a full scholarly apparatus and two maps, but in addition a
timeline/chronology would have been helpful.
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