Kissinger on the India Pakistan 1971 war

TILT! THE INDIA-PAKISTAN WAR

In 1971 Pakistan was disintegrating. The Bengali-dominated East, separated by 1,000 miles of India from the less populous but long-dominant West, was moving toward autonomy, if not outright independence. Civil war loomed. The East's 75 million people had been under martial law since 1969. Now Pakistani President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's troops, most of them Punjabis from the West who were offended by the East's separatist demands, went on a murderous rampage. Bengali refugees began streaming into India, eventually numbering some 8 million. India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, protesting that the refugees were placing an intolerable burden on her country, soon began hinting strongly at a move against Pakistan. In Kissinger's view, the refugee situation was merely a pretext for Mrs. Gandhi to seize the opportunity to dismember her hated neighbor. (Kissinger points out that the U.S. gave some $92 million in refugee aid, far more than any other single country.) The U.S. objective, says Kissinger, was "an evolution that would lead to independence for East Pakistan." But India, he adds, was too impatient to accept so gradual a solution. In August, "nonaligned" New Delhi aligned itself with Moscow by signing a Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty. "With the treaty," writes Kissinger, "Moscow threw a lighted match into a powder keg." By November, when Mrs. Gandhi visited Nixon in Washington, rumors of an India-Pakistan war were rampant.

Nixon and Mrs. Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, were not intended by fate to be personally congenial. Her assumption of almost hereditary moral superiority and her moody silences brought out all of Nixon's latent insecurities. Her bearing toward Nixon combined a disdain for a symbol of capitalism quite fashionable in developing countries with a hint that the obnoxious things she had heard about the President from her intellectual friends could not all be untrue. Nixon's comments after meetings with her were not always printable.

Without a doubt the two most unfortunate meetings Nixon had with any foreign leader were his conversations in the Oval Office on Nov. 4 and 5 with Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi began by expressing admiration for Nixon's handling of Viet Nam and the China initiative, in the manner of a professor praising a slightly backward student. Her praise lost some of its luster when she smugly expressed satisfaction that with China Nixon had consummated what India had recommended for the past decade.

Nixon had no time for Mrs. Gandhi's condescending manner. Privately, he scoffed at her moral pretensions, which he found all the more irritating because he suspected that in pursuit of her purposes she had in fact fewer scruples than Nixon.

He considered her, indeed, a cold-blooded practitioner of power politics. On Aug. 11 Nixon had admitted to the Senior Review Group that in Mrs. Gandhi's position he might pursue a similar course. But he was not in her position—and therefore he was playing for time. He, as did I, wanted to avoid a showdown. A war would threaten our geopolitical design, and we both judged that East Pakistani autonomy was inevitable, if over a slightly longer period than India suggested.

Mrs. Gandhi had no illusions about what Nixon was up to. She faced her own conflicting pressures. Though she had contributed no little to the crisis atmosphere, by now it had its own momentum, which, if she did not master it, might overwhelm her. Her dislike of Nixon, expressed in the icy formality of her manner, was perhaps compounded by the uneasy recognition that this man whom her whole upbringing caused her to disdain perceived international relations in a manner uncomfortably close to her own.

My own views of Mrs. Gandhi were similar to Nixon's, the chief difference being that I did not take her condescension personally. To be sure, I did not find in Indian history or in Indian conduct toward its own people or its neighbors a unique moral sensitivity. In my view, the moral pretensions of Indian leaders seemed to me perfectly attuned to exploit the guilt complexes of a liberal, slightly socialist West.

All the reasons that led Nixon to play for time led Mrs. Gandhi to force the issue. The inevitable emergence of Bangladesh [the Bengali name for East Pakistan] would eventually accentuate India's centrifugal tendencies. It might set a precedent for the creation of other Moslem states, carved this time out of India. This dictated to New Delhi that its birth had to be accompanied by a dramatic demonstration of Indian predominance on the subcontinent.

Attack in the East

Yahya made numerous concessions at the urging of the U.S., most important his agreement to restore civilian government in East Pakistan before the end of 1971; this in turn would surely lead to autonomy. To calm the situation, he also agreed to withdraw his troops from the borders with India. Yet New Delhi rejected the moves as inadequate. On Nov. 22, just 17 days after Mrs. Gandhi left Washington, Pakistani broadcasts reported that India had launched "an all-out offensive against East Pakistan. " I was sure that we were now witnessing the beginning of an India-Pakistan war and that India had started it. There was no pretense of legality. There was no doubt in my mind—a view held even more strongly by Nixon—that India had escalated its demands continually and deliberately to prevent a settlement. To be sure, Pakistani repression in East Bengal had been brutal and shortsighted; and millions of refugees had imposed enormous strain on the Indian economy. But what had caused the war, in Nixon's view and mine, was India's determination to establish its pre-eminence on the subcontinent.

Yet our paramount concern transcended the subcontinent. The Soviet Union could have restrained India; it chose not to. It had actively encouraged India to exploit Pakistan's travail in part to deliver a blow to our system of alliances, in even greater measure to demonstrate Chinese impotence. Since it was a common concern about Soviet power that had driven Peking and Washington together, a demonstration of U.S. irrelevance would severely strain our precarious new relationship with China.

Nor were we defending only abstract principles of international conduct. The victim of the attack was an ally—however reluctant many were to admit it—to which we had made several explicit promises concerning precisely this contingency.

Clear treaty commitments reinforced by other undertakings dated back to 1959. One could debate the wisdom of these undertakings, but we could not ignore them. Yet when Pakistan invoked the 1959 bilateral agreement between us as the basis for U.S. aid, the State Department was eloquent in arguing that no binding obligation existed. The image of a great nation conducting itself like a shyster looking for legalistic loopholes was not likely to inspire other allies who had signed treaties with us.

The issue burst upon us while Pakistan was our only channel to China; we had no other means of communication with Peking.

A major American initiative of fundamental importance to the global balance of power could not have survived if we colluded with the Soviet Union in the public humiliation of China's friend —and our ally. The naked recourse to force by a partner of the Soviet Union backed by Soviet arms and buttressed by Soviet assurances threatened the very structure of international order just when our whole Middle East strategy depended on proving the inefficacy of such tactics and when America's weight as a factor in the world was already being undercut by our divisions over Indochina.

There was no question of "saving" East Pakistan. Both Nixon and I had recognized for months that its independence was inevitable; war was not necessary to accomplish it. We strove to preserve West Pakistan as an independent state, since we judged India's real aim was to encompass its disintegration. We sought to prevent a demonstration that Soviet arms and diplomatic support were inevitably decisive in crises.

It was nearly impossible to implement this strategy because our departments operated on different premises. They were afraid of antagonizing India; they saw that Pakistan was bound to lose the war whatever we did; they knew our course was unpopular in the Congress and the media. If there was a "tilt" in the U.S. Government at this stage, it was on the side of India.

In this atmosphere the Washington Special Action Group assembled on Dec. 3 to chart a course. It was a meeting memorialized in transcripts that were leaked to Columnist Jack Anderson. Out of context these sounded as if the White House was hell-bent on pursuing its own biases, but they can only be understood against the background of the several preceding months of frustrating and furious resistance by the bureaucracy to the President's explicit decisions. "I've been catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the President, who says we're not tough enough," I commented in what I thought was the privacy of the Situation Room. "He really doesn't believe we're carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt toward Pakistan, and he believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way." That was of course a plain statement of the facts.

My sarcasm did nothing to affect departmental proclivities. When I transmitted the President's instruction to cut off economic aid to India, State suggested a similar step toward Pakistan—in spite of the President's view that India was the guilty party. This provoked me in exasperation into another "tilt" statement: "It's hard to tilt toward Pakistan, as the President wishes, if every time we take some action in relation to India we have to do the same thing for Pakistan."

Dismembering the West?

On Dec. 7 Yahya informed us that East Pakistan was disintegrating. The issue had gone far beyond self-determination for East Pakistan. A report reached us, from a source whose reliability we have never had any reason to doubt, that Prime Minister Gandhi was determined to reduce even West Pakistan to impotence: she had indicated that India would not accept any U.N. call for a cease-fire until Bangladesh was "liberated"; after that, Indian forces would proceed with the "liberation" of the Pakistani part of Kashmir and continue fighting until the Pakistani army and air force were wiped out. In other words, West Pakistan was to be dismembered and rendered defenseless. Mrs. Gandhi also told colleagues that if the Chinese "rattled the sword," the Soviets had promised to take appropriate counteraction. Other intelligence indicated that this meant diversionary military action against China in Xinjiang (Sinkiang). Pakistan could not possibly survive such a combination of pressures, and a Sino-Soviet war was not excluded.

Against this background I gave a press briefing in which I emphasized that we had not condoned the Pakistani repression in East Bengal in March 1971; military aid had been cut off, and major efforts had been made to promote political accommodation between the Pakistani government and Bangladesh officials in Calcutta. In our view India was responsible for the war. The resolution we supported at the U.N., calling for cease-fire and withdrawal of forces, won overwhelming backing, passing 104 to 11. Here was an issue on which we enjoyed more support in the world community than on practically any other in a decade. But neither our briefings nor the overwhelming expression of world opinion softened media or congressional criticism.

On Sunday morning, Dec. 12, Nixon, Al Haig and I met in the Oval Office, just before Nixon and I were to depart for the Azores to meet with French President Georges Pompidou. It was symptomatic of the internal relationships of the Nixon Administration that neither the Secretary of State nor of Defense nor any representative of their departments attended this crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship was taken.

At 11:30 a.m. we sent a message over Nixon's name on the hot line to Moscow—its first use by the Nixon Administration. (Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev later used it during the October 1973 Middle East war.) Actually, this Moscow-Washington telegraphic link worked more slowly than did the communications of the Soviet embassy. But it conferred a sense of urgency and might speed up Soviet decisions. The one-page hot line message declared that the President had "set in train certain moves" in the U.N. Security Council that could not be reversed. It concluded: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that time is of the essence to avoid consequences neither of us want."

Just when we had finished dispatching the hot line message, we received word that Huang Hua, then China's U.N. Ambassador, needed to see me with an urgent message from Peking. It was unprecedented, the Chinese having previously always saved their messages until we asked for a meeting—a charming Middle Kingdom legacy. We assumed that only a matter of gravity could induce them into such a departure. We guessed that they were coming to the military assistance of Pakistan. If so, we were on the verge of a possible showdown. For if China moved militarily, the Soviet Union—according to all our information—was committed to use force against China.

Nixon understood immediately that if the Soviet Union succeeded in humiliating China, all prospects for world equilibrium would disappear. He decided—and I fully agreed—that if the Soviet Union threatened China we would not stand idly by.

A country we did not recognize and with which we had had next to no contact for two decades would obtain some significant assistance—the precise nature to be worked out when the circumstances arose. To provide some military means to give effect to our strategy and to reinforce the message to Moscow, Nixon now ordered an aircraft carrier task force that had been alerted earlier to proceed through the Strait of Malacca and into the Bay of Bengal.

In the event, the Chinese message was not what we expected. On the contrary, it accepted the U.N. procedure and the political solution I had outlined to Huang Hua during a secret trip to New York City 48 hours earlier—asking for a ceasefire and withdrawal, but settling for a standstill ceasefire. But Nixon did not know this when he made his lonely and brave decision. Had things developed as we anticipated, we would have had no choice but to assist China in some manner against the probable opposition of much of the Government, the media and the Congress.

Margin of Uncertainty

Our fleet passed into the Bay of Bengal and attracted much media attention. Were we threatening India? Were we seeking to defend East Pakistan? Had we lost our minds? It was in fact sober calculation. We had some 72 hours to bring the war to a conclusion before West Pakistan would be swept into the maelstrom. It would take India that long to shift its forces. We had to give the Soviets a warning. We had to be ready to back up the Chinese if they came in. Moving the task force into the Bay of Bengal created precisely the margin of uncertainty needed to force a decision by New Delhi and Moscow.

On the return flight from the Azores meeting I said to the press pool on Air Force One that Soviet conduct on the subcontinent was not compatible with the mutual restraint required by genuine coexistence. If it continued, we would have to re-evaluate our entire relationship.

The message got through to Moscow. By the morning of Dec. 16, we were receiving reliable reports that the Soviets were pressing New Delhi to accept the territorial status quo in the West, including in Kashmir. Later that day, Mrs. Gandhi offered an unconditional cease-fire in the West. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a reluctant decision resulting from Soviet pressure, which in turn grew out of American insistence. The crisis was over. We had avoided the worst—which is sometimes the maximum statesmen can achieve.

'The India:Pakistan war of 1971 was perhaps the most complex issue of Nixon's first term. What made the crisis so difficult was that the stakes were so much greater than the common perception of them. I remain convinced to this day that Mrs. Gandhi was not motivated primarily by conditions in East Pakistan. India struck in late November; by the timetable that we induced Yahya to accept, martial law would have ended and a civilian government would have taken power at the end of December. This would almost surely have led to the independence of East Pakistan—probably without the excesses of brutality, including public bayoneting, that followed.

Our conduct was attributed to personal pique, anti-Indian bias, callousness toward suffering, or immorality. Had we acted differently, Pakistan, after losing its eastern wing, would have lost Kashmir and possibly Baluchistan and other portions of its western wing—in other words, it would have disintegrated.

The crisis also demonstrated the error of the myth that Nixon, aided by me, exercised an octopus-like grip over a Government that was kept in ignorance of our activities. The reality was the opposite of the folklore: not widening White House dominance but bitter departmental rearguard resistance; not clear-cut directives but elliptical maneuvers to keep open options; not the inability of the agencies to present their views but the difficulty faced by the Chief Executive in making his views prevail. The administrative practices of the Nixon Administration were unwise and not sustainable in the long run; fairness requires an admission that they did not take place in a vacuum.

Nixon deserves great credit for tough decisions taken in the face of enormous public pressures; for his strategic grasp; for his courage. His administrative approach was weird and its human cost unattractive, yet history must also record the fundamental fact that major successes were achieved that had proved unattainable by conventional procedures.