Sashan
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As the world watches the Obama administration waffling and weavingfrom my redline to our redline to erased redline, from an "unbelievably small" application of force to an unbelievably feckless policyit is relevant to recall that there was a time when America had a strong, clear and consistent sense of its role in the world, centered on U.S. national interests.
The team of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his ubiquitous national security adviser (and, later, secretary of state), managed just such a firm and fearless foreign policy: supporting allies, keeping an aggressive Soviet Union off-balance and initiating a secret opening with communist Chinaall during far more turbulent times than today.
Among the largely forgotten incidents of those years were a series of events in South Asia in 1971 culminating in a India-Pakistan war and the birth of a nation called Bangladesh. Those events, especially the Nixon-Kissinger role in them, are the subject of "The Blood Telegram" by Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.
First, briefly, the progression of events: Islamic Pakistan of 1971 was, as Mr. Bass puts it, a "cartographic oddity" whose eastern and western halves were separated by 1,000 miles of hostile, largely Hindu, India. West Pakistan (the Pakistan of today) was mostly arid, poor and Urdu-speaking. East Pakistan (today's Bangladesh) was swampy, even poorer and Bengali-speaking.
India and Pakistan had fought several wars, one as recently as 1965. In late 1970, Pakistan's military regime, to its lasting regret, held parliamentary elections in which the Awami League of East Pakistan won a decisive victory over the political parties of West Pakistan. The Bengalis were poised to take power and institute effective autonomy for East Pakistan when, in late March, Gen. Yahya Khan, the leader of Pakistan's regime, unleashed 30,000 soldiers (eventually reinforced to 70,000) to reassert control over 75 million Bengalis and crush their hopes, for a time.
Statistics are unreliable, but perhaps 500,000 Bengalis were killed over the nine months following the crackdown, and some 10 million Bengali refugees fled into neighboring India. Both the refugees and the casualties came disproportionately from East Pakistan's Hindu minority. A low-level Bengali guerrilla war went on until December, when the Indians, frustrated by the refugee burden but also cynically seeing an opportunity to sever Pakistan, invaded East Pakistan. Within two weeks India had defeated the Pakistan army and played midwife to the birth of the severely disabled infant nation of Bangladesh.
These indeed were dramatic events. For the Bengalis and the small number of missionaries and diplomats in East Pakistan at the timeas well as the Western reporters who were filing stories from the war (I was one of them)events live on in grim memories of razed villages, maimed bodies, emaciated refugees and a pervasive climate of fear. Atrocities, most committed by Pakistan's army, were all too commonplace; the many victims all too anonymous. A book at least partly based on eyewitness accounts could make for riveting reading all these years later, but that isn't the book Mr. Bass has given us. Rather, the professor has written a political and diplomatic history of the war year, but even on its own terms "The Blood Telegram" falls short.
Again to recapitulate: In those days India was closely allied with the Soviet Union, while China and the United States, though enemies of each other, were allies of Pakistan. It was precisely during the civil-war year of 1971 that Mr. Kissinger was planning and then undertaking his secret trip to open U.S. relations with Chinausing Pakistan's Gen. Khan as his intermediary and West Pakistan as his point of entry.
A full accounting of these complex alliances, alignments and diplomatic moves would also make for a fascinating book, but instead we get a partialand far from impartialversion. Mr. Bass has done no reporting or research on either Soviet or Chinese thinking about the events in East Pakistan. More disappointingly, he offers only the thinnest analysis of the thinking among the generals and politicians of West Pakistan as they tried to deal with the crisis.
Mr. Bass does a better job delving into Indian archives and interviewing some Indian principals to give us a sense of the frenetic mood and maneuvering in New Delhi. To his credit, he doesn't entirely buy the Indian myth that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her government went to war with Pakistan out of humanitarian concerns for the plight of the Bengali refugees. Mr. Bass well understands that the Indians were at least as much motivated by the chance to dismember, diminish and perhaps destroy Pakistan.
The book's primary focus, however, is on policy-making in Washington. Mr. Bass clearly spent countless hours listening to Nixon-era tapes of Oval Office conversations between the president and Mr. Kissinger. Their coarse language and macho expletives make amusing reading, and if Mr. Bass had set out to indict them for profanity, he surely makes his case. He can also fairly charge them with being verbally insensitive and politically incorrect, as when Nixon dismisses the Bengalis as "just a bunch of brown goddamned *******" or suggests that "what India needs is a famine." In the event, the U.S. did provide substantial refugee relief, and Nixon was no less sensitive to the plight of beleaguered Bengalis than his liberal successors have been to that of Rwandans or, for that matter, Syrians.
Mr. Bass's aim, however, is to indict them for a callous and unprincipled foreign policy that, in his view, made America actively complicit in the near-genocidal events taking place in East Pakistan. He claims that the U.S. "allowed" these grim events to take place. The indictment doesn't wash.
At the time, the U.S. was clearly on the unpopular side of the conflict, supporting a military dictatorship against a popular democratic movement in a brutal civil war. Nixon was denounced for this policy by liberal senators and criticized by his own junior diplomats, including Archer Blood, his consul general in Dacca, East Pakistan's capital. Blood's "dissent" cable gives the book its name. But Nixon and Mr. Kissinger weren't guided by popularity.
Pragmatism certainly was a key factor in the Nixon-Kissinger policy of standing behind Pakistan, since the momentous opportunity of an opening to China hinged in no small part on Pakistan's function as intermediary. Great-power politics also played a part, since the Soviet Union was supplying India with arms. "Indian-Soviet collusion in raping a friend of ours" is how Mr. Kissinger put it. Priorities also played a part. Along with pursuing the opening to China, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were juggling a continuing war in Indochina and tensions in the Middle East.
To this list of motivations we can add emotions. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger felt comfortable dealing with Pakistan's simple, stolid and even stupid generals; they were decidedly uncomfortable dealing with India's argumentative, volatile and, in their view, duplicitous political leaders, beginning with Indira Gandhi. By far the most entertaining sections of "The Blood Telegram" are snippets of Nixon-Kissinger conversations about Mrs. Gandhi ("the witch," "the *****" and so on) and the details of her November 1971 visit to the Oval Office, during which the "mutual loathing" (in Mr. Bass's phrase) between the leaders was on display. To Nixon, as he confided to Mr. Kissinger, the Indians and their leader were "a slippery, treacherous people . . . insufferably arrogant."
Mr. Bass credits all these factors in the making of U.S. policy, but he gives Nixon and Mr. Kissinger insufficient credit for the principles that guided them: an unwavering loyalty to allies and an aversion to interference in another nation's internal affairs. (They obviously viewed Vietnam as a war of communist aggression rather than a civil struggle.) Pakistan was a longtime ally, and the struggle in East Pakistan, until India invaded, was a civil war. Mr. Bass may not like those principles, but they underlay American policy at the timehard as this may be to understand in the present period, when U.S. foreign policy seems to have no guiding principles at all.
When India invaded East Pakistan in December 1971, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger behaved like leaders of a great powerwarning the Soviets not to get involved, secretly ferrying some warplanes from Jordan and Iran to Pakistan, secretly suggesting to China that it mass some troops on India's northern border, and sending an aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal. None of these moves stopped the Indian invasion and occupation of East Pakistan, but arguably the brinkmanship sent a strong enough message to prevent India from risking a full-scale attack on West Pakistan.
Even a critic of U.S. policy like Mr. Bass has a hard time convincing readers that anything would have been gained had Nixon and Mr. Kissinger pursued a less pro-Pakistan policy or flip-flopped between contending parties. Liberal consciences certainly would have been soothed, but what else would have been gained? It is difficult to imagine that the sort of steps that would have pleased Mr. Basspublic criticism of the Pakistanis, some twisting of Pakistani generals' arms, cutting off paltry U.S. aidwould have had the slightest effect on a military regime that saw itself in a death struggle for its territorial integrity and national survival. An irresolute American policy also would have been an ineffectual one.
More than four decades have passed since these events, and what has changed as a result of them? The map of the Subcontinent changed as Bangladesh was born, but little else. A truncated and now nuclear-armed Pakistan remains hostile to India and nominally friendly to the U.S., though rarely helpful. India, which basked in its 1971 victory, has grown in economic and military power and is largely friendly to the U.S. And it now has border squabbles not just with Pakistan but also with Bangladesh. As for Bangladesh, it stumbles along, making halting economic progress but plagued by poverty, overpopulation, corruption and periodic calamities both natural and self-inflicted. These days Bangladesh barely registers on the radar screen of any great power and receives fleeting public attention only when a river ferry sinks or textile factory goes up in flames.
For the Bangladeshis, that "liberation" struggle of 1971 remains, as Mr. Bass writes, their "defining national trauma," and still today they are convening tribunals to punish old enemies of the people who allegedly collaborated in war crimes. As one who lived through many of these events, I can only wish them to deal with their many present problems rather than wallow in their painful past.
Mr. Kann, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Indo-Pakistani War for The Wall Street Journal, was until 2007 chairman of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Journal.
Book Review: 'The Blood Telegram' by Gary J. Bass - WSJ.com
The book is getting published tomorrow and kindle version is available as well.
The team of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his ubiquitous national security adviser (and, later, secretary of state), managed just such a firm and fearless foreign policy: supporting allies, keeping an aggressive Soviet Union off-balance and initiating a secret opening with communist Chinaall during far more turbulent times than today.
Among the largely forgotten incidents of those years were a series of events in South Asia in 1971 culminating in a India-Pakistan war and the birth of a nation called Bangladesh. Those events, especially the Nixon-Kissinger role in them, are the subject of "The Blood Telegram" by Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.
First, briefly, the progression of events: Islamic Pakistan of 1971 was, as Mr. Bass puts it, a "cartographic oddity" whose eastern and western halves were separated by 1,000 miles of hostile, largely Hindu, India. West Pakistan (the Pakistan of today) was mostly arid, poor and Urdu-speaking. East Pakistan (today's Bangladesh) was swampy, even poorer and Bengali-speaking.
India and Pakistan had fought several wars, one as recently as 1965. In late 1970, Pakistan's military regime, to its lasting regret, held parliamentary elections in which the Awami League of East Pakistan won a decisive victory over the political parties of West Pakistan. The Bengalis were poised to take power and institute effective autonomy for East Pakistan when, in late March, Gen. Yahya Khan, the leader of Pakistan's regime, unleashed 30,000 soldiers (eventually reinforced to 70,000) to reassert control over 75 million Bengalis and crush their hopes, for a time.
Statistics are unreliable, but perhaps 500,000 Bengalis were killed over the nine months following the crackdown, and some 10 million Bengali refugees fled into neighboring India. Both the refugees and the casualties came disproportionately from East Pakistan's Hindu minority. A low-level Bengali guerrilla war went on until December, when the Indians, frustrated by the refugee burden but also cynically seeing an opportunity to sever Pakistan, invaded East Pakistan. Within two weeks India had defeated the Pakistan army and played midwife to the birth of the severely disabled infant nation of Bangladesh.
These indeed were dramatic events. For the Bengalis and the small number of missionaries and diplomats in East Pakistan at the timeas well as the Western reporters who were filing stories from the war (I was one of them)events live on in grim memories of razed villages, maimed bodies, emaciated refugees and a pervasive climate of fear. Atrocities, most committed by Pakistan's army, were all too commonplace; the many victims all too anonymous. A book at least partly based on eyewitness accounts could make for riveting reading all these years later, but that isn't the book Mr. Bass has given us. Rather, the professor has written a political and diplomatic history of the war year, but even on its own terms "The Blood Telegram" falls short.
Again to recapitulate: In those days India was closely allied with the Soviet Union, while China and the United States, though enemies of each other, were allies of Pakistan. It was precisely during the civil-war year of 1971 that Mr. Kissinger was planning and then undertaking his secret trip to open U.S. relations with Chinausing Pakistan's Gen. Khan as his intermediary and West Pakistan as his point of entry.
A full accounting of these complex alliances, alignments and diplomatic moves would also make for a fascinating book, but instead we get a partialand far from impartialversion. Mr. Bass has done no reporting or research on either Soviet or Chinese thinking about the events in East Pakistan. More disappointingly, he offers only the thinnest analysis of the thinking among the generals and politicians of West Pakistan as they tried to deal with the crisis.
Mr. Bass does a better job delving into Indian archives and interviewing some Indian principals to give us a sense of the frenetic mood and maneuvering in New Delhi. To his credit, he doesn't entirely buy the Indian myth that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her government went to war with Pakistan out of humanitarian concerns for the plight of the Bengali refugees. Mr. Bass well understands that the Indians were at least as much motivated by the chance to dismember, diminish and perhaps destroy Pakistan.
The book's primary focus, however, is on policy-making in Washington. Mr. Bass clearly spent countless hours listening to Nixon-era tapes of Oval Office conversations between the president and Mr. Kissinger. Their coarse language and macho expletives make amusing reading, and if Mr. Bass had set out to indict them for profanity, he surely makes his case. He can also fairly charge them with being verbally insensitive and politically incorrect, as when Nixon dismisses the Bengalis as "just a bunch of brown goddamned *******" or suggests that "what India needs is a famine." In the event, the U.S. did provide substantial refugee relief, and Nixon was no less sensitive to the plight of beleaguered Bengalis than his liberal successors have been to that of Rwandans or, for that matter, Syrians.
Mr. Bass's aim, however, is to indict them for a callous and unprincipled foreign policy that, in his view, made America actively complicit in the near-genocidal events taking place in East Pakistan. He claims that the U.S. "allowed" these grim events to take place. The indictment doesn't wash.
At the time, the U.S. was clearly on the unpopular side of the conflict, supporting a military dictatorship against a popular democratic movement in a brutal civil war. Nixon was denounced for this policy by liberal senators and criticized by his own junior diplomats, including Archer Blood, his consul general in Dacca, East Pakistan's capital. Blood's "dissent" cable gives the book its name. But Nixon and Mr. Kissinger weren't guided by popularity.
Pragmatism certainly was a key factor in the Nixon-Kissinger policy of standing behind Pakistan, since the momentous opportunity of an opening to China hinged in no small part on Pakistan's function as intermediary. Great-power politics also played a part, since the Soviet Union was supplying India with arms. "Indian-Soviet collusion in raping a friend of ours" is how Mr. Kissinger put it. Priorities also played a part. Along with pursuing the opening to China, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were juggling a continuing war in Indochina and tensions in the Middle East.
To this list of motivations we can add emotions. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger felt comfortable dealing with Pakistan's simple, stolid and even stupid generals; they were decidedly uncomfortable dealing with India's argumentative, volatile and, in their view, duplicitous political leaders, beginning with Indira Gandhi. By far the most entertaining sections of "The Blood Telegram" are snippets of Nixon-Kissinger conversations about Mrs. Gandhi ("the witch," "the *****" and so on) and the details of her November 1971 visit to the Oval Office, during which the "mutual loathing" (in Mr. Bass's phrase) between the leaders was on display. To Nixon, as he confided to Mr. Kissinger, the Indians and their leader were "a slippery, treacherous people . . . insufferably arrogant."
Mr. Bass credits all these factors in the making of U.S. policy, but he gives Nixon and Mr. Kissinger insufficient credit for the principles that guided them: an unwavering loyalty to allies and an aversion to interference in another nation's internal affairs. (They obviously viewed Vietnam as a war of communist aggression rather than a civil struggle.) Pakistan was a longtime ally, and the struggle in East Pakistan, until India invaded, was a civil war. Mr. Bass may not like those principles, but they underlay American policy at the timehard as this may be to understand in the present period, when U.S. foreign policy seems to have no guiding principles at all.
When India invaded East Pakistan in December 1971, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger behaved like leaders of a great powerwarning the Soviets not to get involved, secretly ferrying some warplanes from Jordan and Iran to Pakistan, secretly suggesting to China that it mass some troops on India's northern border, and sending an aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal. None of these moves stopped the Indian invasion and occupation of East Pakistan, but arguably the brinkmanship sent a strong enough message to prevent India from risking a full-scale attack on West Pakistan.
Even a critic of U.S. policy like Mr. Bass has a hard time convincing readers that anything would have been gained had Nixon and Mr. Kissinger pursued a less pro-Pakistan policy or flip-flopped between contending parties. Liberal consciences certainly would have been soothed, but what else would have been gained? It is difficult to imagine that the sort of steps that would have pleased Mr. Basspublic criticism of the Pakistanis, some twisting of Pakistani generals' arms, cutting off paltry U.S. aidwould have had the slightest effect on a military regime that saw itself in a death struggle for its territorial integrity and national survival. An irresolute American policy also would have been an ineffectual one.
More than four decades have passed since these events, and what has changed as a result of them? The map of the Subcontinent changed as Bangladesh was born, but little else. A truncated and now nuclear-armed Pakistan remains hostile to India and nominally friendly to the U.S., though rarely helpful. India, which basked in its 1971 victory, has grown in economic and military power and is largely friendly to the U.S. And it now has border squabbles not just with Pakistan but also with Bangladesh. As for Bangladesh, it stumbles along, making halting economic progress but plagued by poverty, overpopulation, corruption and periodic calamities both natural and self-inflicted. These days Bangladesh barely registers on the radar screen of any great power and receives fleeting public attention only when a river ferry sinks or textile factory goes up in flames.
For the Bangladeshis, that "liberation" struggle of 1971 remains, as Mr. Bass writes, their "defining national trauma," and still today they are convening tribunals to punish old enemies of the people who allegedly collaborated in war crimes. As one who lived through many of these events, I can only wish them to deal with their many present problems rather than wallow in their painful past.
Mr. Kann, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Indo-Pakistani War for The Wall Street Journal, was until 2007 chairman of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Journal.
Book Review: 'The Blood Telegram' by Gary J. Bass - WSJ.com
The book is getting published tomorrow and kindle version is available as well.
