Daily Times

March 25, 1971, exactly two years after he assumed power as the president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan started the fateful military operation codenamed searchlight that caused thousands of civilian deaths, war with India, a humiliating defeat for the Pakistan army and his own removal from power. Although the East Pakistan tragedy was in the making for over two decades and would have happened without an inept ruler to preside over its denouement, Yahya Khan’s incompetence and misjudgement, nonetheless, contributed to bringing about a speedy end. So did President Nixon’s enigmatic foreign policy based on a penchant for secret negotiations, backchannel communications and, distrust of the US State Department bureaucracy.

President Nixon and his aide Henry Kissinger pampered Yahya and gave him false hope. Nixon administration’s tacit support for Yahya, later popularised as the ‘tilt’, was a crucial factor in Yahya’s sense of self-confidence and reckless behaviour. Yahya thought that he was ‘insured’ by the US (and also by China). That if things got out of hands, the US would come to his aid openly and somehow bail him out. Nixon and Kissinger helped nurture this false belief. On a visit to the US in October 1970, the American president confidentially told him that “nobody has occupied the White House who is friendlier to Pakistan than me”. G W Choudhry, Yahya’s information minister, later concluded that minus the false hope given to him by Nixon and Kissinger, Yahya Khan would have taken a more realistic view of the East Pakistan situation. Ostensibly, President Nixon did not counsel restraint to the Pakistani dictator because Yahya was the communications’ backchannel in his opening moves for rapprochement with China.

Nixon showed vision in recognising China as a growing power and the need for normalisation of relations with the communist country. He described China as the next superpower as far back as 1968. His China move was also meant to isolate North Vietnam. China was one of the main suppliers of arms to North Vietnam and had considerable influence over the country. Yet another objective was containment of the Soviet Union. An astute politician, Nixon understood that the move, if successful, would boost his image in the US and abroad as a peacemaker, and would neutralise his liberal detractors. Coupled with a Soviet summit on arms limitation, it would virtually guarantee his re-election in 1972.

Thus, it is argued, Yahya became exceedingly important to Nixon for the US national interest and his own self-interest. In August 1969, in a meeting with Nixon in Pakistan, Yahya was asked for his help in secretly exchanging messages between the US and China to which Yahya consented. Secret messages were passed through Romanian dictator Ceausescu as well. A few weeks after his October 1970 US visit, Yahya was in China where he delivered Nixon’s message seeking cordial relations between the US and China to the Chinese leadership. The message was received favourably and resulted in Kissinger’s secret July trip to Peking. These secret diplomatic manoeuvres were going on in the background of Yahya unleashing repression in East Pakistan.

While most nations condemned the violence and killing in East Pakistan, the White House played it cool. The prevailing view in the US State Department and among many in the US Congress was that the US should exert its influence on its ally Pakistan and stop the ongoing violence but a handwritten note, May 2, 1971, by Richard Nixon “To all hands” asked not to “squeeze Yahya at this time…” Kissinger’s secret July trip to China, which he would undertake from Pakistan while on an official visit, was still a few weeks away and the White House did not want to jeopardise its special relationship with Yahya. As the refugees mounted in India, the Bengali wing of the army and police officers mutinied and started mounting attacks on the Pakistani forces with India’s help, US officials and many in the Congress wondered about the US policy of inaction. Ignorant of the China initiative, the US policy seemed incomprehensible to them. Personal factors seemed to be at play as well. Nixon considered the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, deceitful and worse. On his visit to the subcontinent in 1967, he had been wined, dined and flattered by Yahya Khan but had received little attention in India.

An interesting fact in this complex tale of intrigue is that Nixon-Kissinger’s views on some facets of the India-Pakistan conflict were being shaped by information received from a paid CIA informer in the Indian cabinet. The informer was Minister Morarji Desai who later became the prime minister of India. Since the Johnson administration days, Desai was being paid $ 20,000 per year by the CIA.

As the US State Department official Van Hollen and others have pointed out, the ‘tilt’ does not satisfactorily explain the US policy. During Kissinger’s July trip, the Chinese had agreed to talk through Paris obviating the need for a Pakistani backchannel. New research indicates that several US departmental studies conducted shortly after the December 1970 Pakistani elections concluded that US interests would not be significantly damaged by the emergence of Bangladesh because the new country was unlikely to change its “external orientation” and that it would “continue to maintain viable ties with the US”. It was also evident by early 1971 that Bangladesh was inevitable unless the deep-seated Bengali resentments were quickly mitigated.

It could very well be that, confident that an independent Bangladesh would not adversely affect US interests, Nixon and Kissinger let Yahya isolate himself internationally on purpose. From this point of view, Kissinger’s stopover in India on his secret July 1971 trip to China, Indira Gandhi’s November 1971 visit to Washington, and Kissinger’s private meetings with Indian ambassador Jha, immediately before and after his return from the July trip, could be seen in an entirely different light. This chronology of events certainly raises doubts.

Most poignant is Kissinger’s ‘warning’ to the Indian ambassador immediately on his return from China. He told the ambassador that in case of India-Pakistan war and China joining the fray on Pakistan’s side, the US would be unable to come to India’s help. It was a clear message for India to seek Soviet protection in case the Chinese got involved. The Indians promptly signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union thus guaranteeing Chinese neutrality in the forthcoming conflict with devastating consequences for Pakistan.

Postscript: This writer made an inadvertent error by placing invasion of Laos in 1970 in the article ‘Cambodian Sanctuaries’ (Daily Times, January 11, 2011). Please note that hostilities against Laos magnified in 1970 but the actual invasion took place in 1971.

The writer is a freelance columnist. He can be reached at ralphshaw11@gmail.com