Book review: Raghavan on the birth of Bangladesh

Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh.  Harvard University Press, 2013.  358 pp.

The crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh was a major episode in the history of South Asia and had implications that reached beyond the subcontinent.  It raised issues that would recur frequently in subsequent decades, as humanitarian catastrophes increasingly took place in the context of civil wars and/or secession.  The creation of Bangladesh also had lasting geopolitical consequences: Srinath Raghavan writes in 1971 that it “was the most significant geopolitical event in the subcontinent since its partition in 1947” (4).  

Raghavan’s book is marked by narrative detail and backed by extensive research: among other things, he has gone into various archives (though Pakistan’s archives on the episode remain closed), read many memoirs and other sources, and also made use of the substantial amount of recent work on the international history of the 1960s and 1970s.  He maintains that the birth of Bangladesh was not inevitable but the product of “choice and chance” (8) and should be viewed in light of “the interplay between the domestic, regional, and international dimensions” (9).  Raghavan deals with the stances of many countries during the crisis and also pays attention to actors such as the press, celebrity musicians, NGOs, and the UN. However, the classic figures of diplomats, soldiers, and heads of state occupy center stage in his account.

This post focuses on what 1971 says about the roles in the crisis of the Soviet Union and the United States, and how these roles were complexly entangled with those of some of the other main players, notably China.  As will be seen, Raghavan is highly critical of Nixon and Kissinger, particularly the latter’s overemphasis on U.S. ‘credibility’ and his tendency to see linkages everywhere.

One general impression that emerges from this history is that none of the main actors wanted the crisis to escalate into a direct great-power military confrontation.  The dominant, though certainly not exclusive, diplomatic-strategic note was one of caution.  This impulse toward restraint, however, also meant that no decisive action was taken to stop the Pakistani army’s rampage in East Pakistan until India went beyond supplying aid to the indigenous independence forces and eventually intervened with its own soldiers (and Raghavan thinks India should have intervened earlier).       

The Nine-Month Crisis

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.

Mitzen on Pinker

Although I've probably mentioned Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature here before, I haven't previously discussed it at any length, for the excellent reason that I haven't read it. However, Jennifer Mitzen's review of the book in the current Perspectives on Politics is worth a post [the link is to a gated version; I haven't searched for an ungated version but there probably isn't one].

As many will know (including those who haven't read the 800-page book), Pinker argues that all forms of violence have declined since the Middle Ages and have declined especially sharply in contemporary times, with 'the West' being the center of this trend. Mitzen basically grants this, but argues that Pinker's approach induces a sense of complacency about the violence that remains, even though that is not his intent. In her words, while "absolv[ing] modernity and moderns" of responsibility for the violence of the past, Pinker "dull[s] our sense that it is important to care about, much less feel a sense of responsibility toward, the distant others still mired in violence."

It is tricky, of course, to argue about a book's (or any text's) effect on readers' sensibilities and feelings since, in these respects, no two readers will be affected in exactly the same way. Shaw's Heartbreak House, to take one example that comes to mind, might have caused some readers (or viewers) of the play to crusade against the pre-1914 arms race in Europe while at the same time inducing others to consider the prospect of starting their own munitions company. Good art is ambiguous (even when it appears to be preachy, as Shaw often does), and scholarship is also often ambiguous, at least in terms of its effects on the sensibilities of its consumers.

With that said: how, in Mitzen's view, does Pinker's approach induce complacency and a dulling of the sense that "it is important to care about...distant others...."?

Pinker's account of liberalism and modernity is, she writes, "airbrushed and uncomplicated." Thus, according to him, the French Revolution took a wrong turn not because of any tensions or contradictions in the Enlightenment but because, in Pinker's words, "many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights" (hmm).

Mitzen criticizes Pinker's accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which he depicts as having nothing to do with modernity, reason or science. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on that particular question. I do tend to think, however, that the legacy of the Enlightenment, although mostly positive, is, to use Mitzen's word, "mixed."

Her key point is that "[t]he mechanisms of Pinker's causal argument suggest that there is not a whole lot we as individual agents can or ought to do about the violence that remains, especially violence outside of the liberal West." Societies, in Pinker's view, will adopt 'reason' and reduce violence when they "are ready" (Mitzen's words) and until then we basically just have to wait. 

This makes Mitzen uncomfortable, and I understand why. On the other hand, I don't think she would be more comfortable with an approach that attempts to spread 'reason' by force. What we are left with is a sort of middle ground, in which societies are mostly left to chart their own paths but with 'the West' offering financial and/or other support to 'liberal,' 'modern' voices within them, while at the same time trying to temper global economic forces that may hinder political liberalization. As a general matter, I suspect that Pinker and Mitzen would both endorse that approach.

Wherein the break is briefly interrupted

The local PBS station just aired Daniel Goldhagen's film about genocide, Worse than War (made to accompany his book of the same name). It has some powerful and emotional moments.

It also has an argument and a set of policy recommendations, none of which I have the time or inclination to go into, at least not now. But one or two reactions may be worth noting. Most of Goldhagen's scholarship (including his prize-winning undergraduate thesis and his Ph.D. dissertation, which became the famous and controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners) deals with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This film however deals with genocide in general, focusing on various instances of it, especially fairly recent ones (e.g., Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s; Guatemala in the '80s; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and Darfur).

Goldhagen argues in the film that genocidal political leaders are not "crazy" but are "rational calculators" (his phrase) who weigh costs and benefits; if they are made to realize that genocide will not 'pay' because they will be punished swiftly, then they will not order it. This description may very well apply to Slobodan Milosevic or Omar al-Bashir. Goldhagen does not say explicitly, however, that this description applies to Hitler. And whether the "rational calculator" label applies to perpetrators, as opposed to leaders, is less clear still. (As Goldhagen mentions at one point, surviving concentration camp inmates were sent on forced death marches in the very last days of Nazi Germany, even after officials in the Nazi hierarchy had ordered killings to stop; the organizers of the death marches ignored those orders.) Goldhagen also observes that genocidal leaders mobilize and play on prejudices that people already have; of course, since such prejudices are usually irrational, "rational calculators" have to know how to mobilize and harness irrationality. In the process, however, isn't it possible that these "rational calculators" may come to believe the myths that they start out by exploiting? If so, does that make them less rational? These questions were not really addressed in the film; perhaps they are addressed in the book.

[The break from posting will now resume.]

15th anniversary of Rwandan genocide

Rwandans have held vigils and other ceremonies on the fifteenth anniversary of the 1994 genocide. The Rwandan genocide, tragic in itself, aggravated a simmering war in eastern Congo, helping to turn it into a full-fledged civil and regional conflict. Despite a number of books on the genocide, the full history of its intersection with the conflicts in Congo and the broader region probably has yet to be written.

Update: Gérard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford UP, 2008), may be what I had in mind.