The path to U.S.-Chinese rapprochement in the early 1970s was riddled with pitfalls. Washington had refused to recognize Mao’s regime after 1949, and both governments had staked much of their foreign policy in the intervening decades on the need to battle one another’s influence. American and Chinese armies fought a bloody war against each other in Korea, and Beijing was one of Hanoi’s principal backers against Washington and Saigon in the ongoing Vietnam War. Leaders in both Beijing and Washington, moreover, faced intense domestic challenges. While Mao fought to rein in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Nixon struggled to stem the tide of political and social protests sweeping across college campuses and cities in the United States. Put simply: neither leader could afford to extend an olive branch across the Pacific only to be rejected. If rapprochement were to be achieved, therefore, Nixon and Mao would need a third party to serve as liaison. This search for an intermediary, combined with his determination to gain the upper hand in the superpower struggle, would lead Nixon to throw his support behind a Third World government that was in the midst of carrying out a wholesale massacre of its own population. Washington’s larger Cold War priorities led the White House—not for the first or last time—to back a pro-Western regime responsible for genocidal policies. Nixon’s opening to China, then, would be purchased, in no small part, with the blood of hundreds of thousands of civilians. And as had been the case in Indonesia, these killings took on a disturbing ethno-religious character.
The best candidate for the delicate role of emissary between Nixon and Mao was the state of Pakistan. Pakistan enjoyed a unique position between both the United States and China. A U.S. ally in the Cold War, it also maintained a bitter relationship with one of China’s principal rivals, India. Since the 1950s, Pakistan had served as an important player in Washington’s bid to contain Soviet influence in South Asia and the Middle East. Warm relations between Moscow and India served as an added force pushing U.S. and Pakistani leaders closer together. Further, while serving as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon had developed an affinity for Islamabad and a special contempt for New Delhi. While he considered Pakistani leaders straightforward and “frank,” he found their Indian counterparts arrogant and condescending. But the years following the 1965 India-Pakistan War had witnessed strained relations between Washington and Islamabad, a result of U.S. frustration with Pakistan for having started the war. Nixon entered office determined to revive the alliance. While the United States sought an ally in the struggle against Moscow, Pakistani leaders hoped that Washington would serve as a patron in their regional struggle against India. From the birth of the U.S.-Pakistani alliance, then, leaders in Washington and Islamabad maintained very different goals.1
But Islamabad had its own problems. Pakistan had emerged in 1947 from one of the great massacres of the twentieth century as the British Empire in India collapsed along ethnic and sectarian lines into two states, India and Pakistan. The former would be a Hindu-majority state and the latter a Muslim-majority state. Partition (1947) set off the largest migration in human history as some ten million people rushed to relocate. Meanwhile, massive riots broke out across the country, killing hundreds of thousands. Pakistan was born as a divided state, its eastern and western sections separated by nearly a thousand miles of Indian territory. One Pakistani leader called the nation a “geographic monstrosity.” More than just territory separated the two Pakistans. While an arid, mountainous landscape covered West Pakistan, the East was lush, tropical, and flat. The East was home to an ethnic-Bengali majority (which was itself split between a Muslim majority and Hindu minority) while the West was divided among Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis, and a number of smaller groups. Urdu was the most widely spoken language in West Pakistan, while the majority of East Pakistanis spoke Bengali, a language they shared with millions more Bengalis across the border, in the Indian province of West Bengal. East Pakistan also held the majority of Pakistan’s population, with some seventy-five million people to the West’s fifty-five million. But it was the leaders of West Pakistan who held the reins of political and military power.
This imbalance remained a constant source of tension between the two parts of Pakistan. When Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, announced that Urdu would be the official state language, Bengali leaders opted to break away from the dominant party in West Pakistan, the Muslim League, and found their own political party, the Awami Muslim League, in 1949. The Awami League quickly grew to become the largest political organization in East Pakistan and the key opposition party in Pakistan. At the head of the party sat Sheikh Mujibar Rahman. A fifty-year-old Bengali with heavy glasses and a thick black mustache, Mujib, as his followers knew him, rose to the top of the nationalist movement in East Pakistan. Under his leadership, the Awami League advanced a proposal for autonomy in 1966. The proposal called for self-government in the two halves of the country, with cooperation on defense and international affairs. While the majority in the East embraced the proposal, West Pakistani leaders rejected it and arrested Mujib. Even as the nationalist movement built momentum in the East, political ferment gripped the country. In 1969, in the face of growing opposition to his leadership, President Ayub Khan of the Muslim League resigned, placing Gen. Yahya Khan in power. Yahya created a military government, declared martial law, and began preparations for national elections to be held in 1970. The two most prominent challengers to succeed Ayub Khan in the elections would be Mujib’s Awami League and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by opposition leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The PPP put forward a center-left platform that called for an end to military rule, greater democracy, and socialist economic policies. With only weeks remaining before the general elections, catastrophe struck.
On the night of November 12, 1970, a massive cyclone tore through the low-lying coastal regions of East Pakistan. One-hundred-twenty-mile-per-hour winds blasted twenty-foot waves across the shores of one of the most densely populated regions of the world. During the best of times, the residents of the flat littoral waged a battle against the sea, maintaining dikes designed to keep the waters at bay. They now stood helpless in the path of one of the worst storms of the century. After the storm had passed, scores of coastal islands lay submerged and cut off from contact with state authorities; hundreds of thousands of their inhabitants were missing, carried out to sea by the receding tides. The surging waters had swept bodies into the trees, where many remained. Government officials estimated that as many as half a million people may have been killed, making the Bhola Cyclone one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. Journalists flying overhead could smell the stench of death as survivors combed through the flooded ruins searching for the dead. Thousands of crushed cattle lay strewn across the sodden fields. Salt water clogged miles of rice paddies, devastating the harvest upon which the local population depended. Those who had managed to survive the cyclone now faced the threat of famine, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery.2 As the waters receded, the desperate survivors looked to officials in Islamabad for relief. The cyclone highlighted the disparities between the two halves of the country, but it was merely the first wave of an even greater storm set to sweep through East Pakistan. The events of the coming months would transform South Asia and the wider Cold War world.3
A nation already gripped by political unrest now faced a catastrophe of historic proportions. The government’s response only made matters worse. President Yahya Khan made a brief stopover in Dhaka on his return from China two days after the storm. Apparently inebriated from in-flight refreshments, he stumbled through a brief speech at the airport in which he remarked that the situation “didn’t look so bad.” This, in addition to an aerial tour of some of the devastation, marked the totality of the president’s first visit to the disaster-stricken area. The East Pakistan press blasted the government’s response, complaining about the lack of West Pakistani military personnel to help with rescue operations and accusing the president of failing to respond to the disaster. In an impassioned speech, Mujib railed that West Pakistani leaders “are guilty of almost cold-blooded murder.” The staff at the U.S. consulate in Dhaka was perplexed by Islamabad’s “display of indifference” to the disaster. The consul general, Archer Blood, blamed the government’s lack of response on the growing animosity between East and West Pakistan. “Yahya had been offered a golden opportunity to bring the two wings closer in the mutual enterprise of disaster relief,” he later wrote, “but had muffed the chance.”4
The United States joined an international relief effort, sending aid, along with helicopters to assist its distribution. But as National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger calculated, Washington’s relief effort might prove problematic. Islamabad was clearly bungling its response to the disaster. “A highly visible appearance that the U.S. was injecting its independent management,” Kissinger argued, “would carry the implication that President Yahya’s government in West Pakistan could not or would not effectively manage this situation in East Pakistan.” With the national elections approaching, Kissinger worried that U.S. aid might undermine Yahya’s political position. In what was only a hint of the callousness to come, the national security advisor placed a higher premium on supporting the military government in Islamabad than in saving lives in East Pakistan.5
Given the scope of the disaster, many observers expected Yahya to postpone the national elections until the following year. But the general was convinced that the elections would produce a split vote between the competing parties and a divided Parliament that would leave him in control of a new civilian government. On December 7, 1970, Pakistanis crowded around television sets to watch live coverage of the election returns. The results stunned them. Boosted by ongoing resentment over Islamabad’s response to the cyclone, the Awami League captured 160 of East Pakistan’s 162 open seats in the National Assembly, but it did not win a single seat in West Pakistan, where Bhutto’s PPP captured 81 seats. Beyond the Awami League’s crushing victory, the election exposed the gaping political divide between East and West Pakistan. State Department intelligence analysts warned that with “an absolute majority, the Awami League may be tempted to press too hard for more autonomy than the West Pakistanis are prepared to accept.” A showdown between East Pakistanis seeking autonomy and West Pakistanis desperate to hold the country together appeared increasingly likely. Leaders in Islamabad feared that, if seated with a majority in the National Assembly, Mujib and the Awami League would legally secede from Pakistan or reduce the power of the military. Unwilling to hand over power, Yahya attempted to broker a compromise with Mujib and Bhutto. Talks achieved little, however, as Mujib and the Awami League demanded that the regime acknowledge their electoral victory and suspend the ongoing state of martial law in effect since Yahya’s seizure of power in 1969. With negotiations deadlocked, West Pakistani military leaders began drawing up plans to intervene in the East in order to crush the Awami League.6
OPERATION SEARCHLIGHT: THE INVASION OF EAST PAKISTAN
In the late hours of March 25, 1971, army units launched their assault. Rolling through ramshackle barricades thrown up on the streets of Dhaka by Bengali students, the military struck first at local security forces. The barracks of the East Pakistan Rifles, East Pakistan’s primary border protection force, which had revolted from the West Pakistani military, were surrounded, and members of the units systematically slaughtered. Another contingent of troops surrounded the Tanti and Sakhari Bazaars and began razing houses with the residents still inside. The military staged another attack, setting fire to the offices of the Bengali daily Ittefaq, roasting forty people who remained inside. Pakistani troops deployed artillery and heavy machine guns against Dhaka’s civilian population, with brutal results. Archer Blood spent the night on the roof of his residence watching tracer bullets flicker over the city and listening to machine-gun fire. Thirty-seven-year-old Sydney Schanberg, a reporter for the New York Times, reported seeing massive fires on the campus of Dhaka University from the Intercontinental Hotel as the sound of constant, heavy gunfire rattled through the city. A UN official witnessing the massacres reported more conservative but still horrifying estimates of five thousand to seven thousand civilians killed. “There were innumerable fires,” he wrote in a secret report, “and almost all the quarters . . . of the poorest people were intentionally burned down by the Army. No living thing could be found in these burned quarters afterwards.” The following morning, the city was quiet. Army vehicles moved through the streets, and government-controlled radio announced that the Awami League had been outlawed. The regime had branded Mujib a traitor and imposed a curfew throughout the city. The rebel-controlled radio reported that at least three hundred thousand people were killed in the first forty-eight hours.7
Simon Dring, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, had seen firsthand the Pakistan Army roll into Dhaka in American-built M-24 tanks. The first casualties, he explained, were those people who tried to set up ramshackle barricades of automobiles, furniture, and tree stumps in the streets. The university, he reported, had been turned into a grisly killing zone: bodies floating in the lake, corpses smoldering in the burned-out residence halls, and students shot down on the lawns. The thirty dead bodies that remained inside Iqbal Hall, Dring wrote, “could never have accounted for all the blood in the corridors.” Meanwhile, army units surrounded Sheikh Mujib’s house, arrested the leader, beat his bodyguards, ransacked the property, and shot down the Bengali flag flying outside. The following day, at noon, troops converged on the old quarter of the city and began pouring fire into the “sprawling maze of narrow, winding streets.” Soldiers with gasoline cans began dousing buildings with petroleum as other units took up firing positions. “Those who tried to escape were shot,” Dring wrote. “Those who stayed were burnt alive.” Their work completed, the soldiers moved on to other neighborhoods to repeat the process.8
Similar reports surfaced from elsewhere in the city. On the morning of March 26—as Bangladeshi Independence was declared—Pakistani troops attacked civilians waiting at the old city’s dock at Sadarghat. After setting up a machine gun on the roof of the terminal, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Witnesses who visited the scene recalled pools of dried blood on the terminal floor, corpses dragged “into buses and burned,” and bodies floating in the river. Army units also attacked the Hindu temple complex of Ramna Kalibari, located in the center of the Ramna Race Course. Pakistani forces massacred scores of civilians found inside and then set fire to the pile of machine-gunned bodies before demolishing the ancient temple.9
Over the following days, Archer Blood and his staff watched as the army tightened its grip on the city, set up military checkpoints at key intersections, and laid dragnets for suspected dissidents. Reports of the army’s assault on Dhaka University were particularly troubling. The urban campus had become a rallying point for student supporters of the Awami League. Blood wrote that military units had attacked the university with the plan “to take no prisoners and to kill all students present at the dorms.” Students in one dormitory were shot in the rooms or “mowed down when they came out of the building in groups.” Meanwhile, soldiers set the women’s dormitory on fire and machine-gunned the girls who tried to escape. Following rains on the night of March 29, Blood reported seeing evidence of mass graves outside Iqbal and Rokeya Halls. The “stench was terrible,” he later wrote. Military leaders also targeted members of the university faculty, who were hunted down and shot in their homes. The heads of the philosophy, statistics, history, and English departments were all murdered in what U.S. consulate staff speculated had been a “pre-planned purge.” Bengali intellectuals viewed the attack on the university, Blood cabled Washington, as a campaign designed to “erase all traces of current ‘trouble making’ generation.” Another army unit demolished the Central Shahid Minar, a monument to the martyrs of the 1952 Bengali-language movement. One of the American officers at the consulate watched the military hauling truckloads of prisoners to the East Pakistan Rifles camp at Peelkhana to be shot.10
On March 28, Blood cabled the State Department in Washington with a grisly description of the events he and his staff were watching. “Here in Dacca,” he wrote, “we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the [Pakistani] military.” The regime appeared to be in the process of hunting down and murdering Awami League supporters, university faculty, and student leaders. Meanwhile, non-Bengali Muslims backed by the military were staging raids into Dhaka’s slums, “murdering Bengalis and Hindus,” and setting off an exodus of refugees from the capital. “Full horror of [Pakistani] military atrocities will come to light sooner or later,” Blood warned his superiors. He argued that there was little reason for Washington to continue “pretending to believe” Islamabad’s denials. At the very least, he pleaded, the U.S. government should bring private pressure on Pakistan to end the slaughter.11
It was becoming increasingly evident that the Pakistani military had launched a nationwide campaign of terror. Refugees fleeing East Pakistan’s second-largest city, Chittagong, reported similar attacks there by the military. The army, they claimed, had torched large sections of the city’s slums, leaving nothing but the smoking ruins of thousands of bamboo huts. A student who had fled the city reported counting four hundred bodies floating in one section of the river. “They seemed to be enjoying killing and destroying everything,” a Danish witness noted.12 “Each day,” a British witness reported, “I could see fresh groups of bodies piled up on the pavements. . . . There were men, women, even babies with bayonet and gunshot wounds. Some appeared to have been crushed.”13 Scott Butcher, a political officer in the U.S. consulate in Dhaka, remembered seeing “bodies rotting in the fields.” He saw one rotting corpse “in a main street, obviously left there as an example.” Another official, traveling in the countryside, reported visiting Hindu villages where people had been lined up and shot by the hundreds. The army had burned mills, destroyed entire rice crops, and left the survivors to starve. Many of those who were able fled, joining a torrent of refugees moving west toward India.14
In the face of this onslaught, there was little the Awami League could do. In the longer term, though, Awami League leaders were certain that East Pakistan could be liberated from Islamabad’s control. With Mujib arrested, the acting Awami League leadership declared independence and begged the world community for assistance. On April 11, the prime minister of the provisional government of Bangladesh, Tajuddin Ahmad, broadcast a message to the people of the newly created country over the Free Bengal Radio Station, calling for their support in a liberation struggle. Although Yahya had “ordered his Army to commit genocide,” Ahmad announced, the Bengali people were resisting. In the process, a “new Bengali Nation has been born amidst the ruins of the battlefield.” Though the military’s crackdown had been brutal, most of the country lay outside the army’s control and open to foreign journalists. The new prime minister asked the outside world for weapons and aid to continue the liberation struggle, looking in particular for support from the Soviet Union and India. The “massacre of 75 million people and the attempt to suppress their struggle for freedom is now an international issue of major dimensions which threatens the conscience as much as the peace of the region,” Ahmad intoned. “The battle will not be long because our strength multiplies daily as our plight gets wider recognition in the world,” the prime minister insisted. “But we can expect much blood to be shed by these butchers and much wanton destruction and pillage before they are wiped out by the liberation army.”15
THE U.S. RESPONSE
As reports of the atrocities in East Pakistan streamed into the White House, officials in the Nixon administration debated their response. Pakistan had stood as an important U.S. ally in South Asia since the 1950s, when Islamabad had joined the Baghdad Pact, an alliance of Southwest Asian states stretching along the southern borders of the USSR from the Dardanelles to the Himalayas.16 While Indian leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru celebrated Cold War nonalignment, Pakistan’s government served as a pro-American bastion in the region. But Nixon had even more ambitious plans for his South Asian ally. In a private meeting during a visit to Islamabad in early August 1969, Nixon asked Yahya to act as Washington’s go-between in setting up a clandestine channel to Beijing. After two decades of hostility with the Communist nation, Nixon was eager to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China. By reaching out to China, he hoped to exploit the widening rift between Moscow and Beijing, turning the world’s most populous nation into a potential ally in the Cold War. To do this, however, he would need a secret channel to the PRC—a channel that Yahya might be able to provide. The Pakistani leader was only too happy to accept this opportunity to strengthen the bonds between his nation and the United States. The following day, an enthusiastic Nixon told his chief of staff that Yahya struck him as “a real leader, very intelligent, and with great insight into Russia-China relations.”17
The mounting bloodshed in East Pakistan complicated Nixon’s plans. Why, increasing numbers of observers asked, did the White House refuse to condemn the atrocities? While the Nixon administration might discount newspaper stories from correspondents watching the violence in Dhaka, grisly reports from U.S. Foreign Service officers were not so easy to dismiss. Archer Blood’s telegrams in particular created a headache for a White House that preferred to ignore the slaughter being carried out by its ally in South Asia. In a March 29 conversation, Nixon and Kissinger each expressed his support for Yahya’s success in crushing the Awami League. “The use of power against seeming odds pays off,” Kissinger argued. “[H]ell,” Nixon replied, “when you look over the history of nations 30,000 well-disciplined people can take 75 million any time. Look what the Spanish did when they came in and took the Incas and all the rest. Look what the British did when they took India. . . . But anyway, I wish him well. I just . . . I mean it’s better not to have it come apart than to have to come apart.” In a conversation with Nixon the following day, Kissinger ridiculed Blood in a display of machismo that might have been comical had it not been so monstrous: “That consul in Dacca doesn’t have the strongest nerves.” Nixon was convinced that Washington should maintain its distance: “The main thing is to keep cool and not do anything. There’s nothing in it for us either way.”18
Unlike Nixon and Kissinger, Blood and his staff in Dhaka refused to watch in silence while a U.S. ally butchered thousands of its unarmed citizens. On April 6, 1971, Blood sent a cable to Washington that shook the foreign policy establishment. Signed by twenty-nine members of the consulate staff, the so-called Blood Telegram was a scathing condemnation of Washington’s silence over the ongoing brutality in East Pakistan:
Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the [West Pakistani] dominated government and to lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy. . . . [W]e have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely [an] internal matter of a sovereign state. We, as professional public servants express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world.
Humanitarian interests aside, Blood noted, Islamabad was not likely to prevail in the current conflict. The probable outcome, he argued, would be the creation of an independent East Pakistan. “At the moment we possess the good will of the Awami League,” he concluded. “We would be foolish to forfeit this asset by pursuing a rigid policy of one-sided support to the likely loser.”19
Upon receiving the cable, a furious secretary of state William Rogers telephoned Kissinger “to talk about that goddamn message from our people in Dacca.” Kissinger worried that the cable would probably be leaked to Democratic senator and likely 1972 presidential candidate Edward “Ted” Kennedy.20 Rogers fired back a sharply worded cable to Dhaka denying the charges that Washington had not taken steps to protect U.S. citizens in East Pakistan and explaining that its lack of an official response to the crackdown was motivated by a desire to avoid any action that might put Americans in harm’s way. Moreover, he wrote, the State Department viewed the fighting in East Pakistan as “an internal matter of the Pakistan Government.” In a further attempt to wash his hands of the matter, Rogers added that Washington had received reports of atrocities on both sides, though even he was not so bold as to “equate the two.”21 Blood and his staff shot back a scathing reply. The situation in East Pakistan, Blood insisted, should not be treated as a legitimate government restoring order over rebellious citizens because Islamabad had little legitimate authority. “How many votes did Yahya obtain?” Blood demanded. “We do not see [the] issue as [a] distinctly internal one. Aside from international moral obligations to condemn genocide (of Pakistani Hindus, although by Websters [sic] Definition [the] term likewise seems applicable to Awami League followers who [are] being hunted down with vengeance),” he wrote, the conflict had “definite colonial versus anti-colonial aspects.”22
Although the White House might dismiss the cables coming from Dhaka as the hysterics of weak-nerved bureaucrats, Blood and his staff were not the only officials worried about the likely outcome of the fighting in East Pakistan. CIA analysts made it clear that Islamabad had very little hope of restoring control over the eastern half of the country. While the military had arrested most of the Awami League’s top leadership, most of the rank-and-file members remained at large. Furthermore, many of the East Pakistan Rifles had escaped and melted into the surrounding countryside. The army controlled only the two largest cities, Dhaka and Chittagong. “The prospects are poor that the 30,000-odd West Pakistani troops can substantially improve their position,” U.S. analysts noted, “much less reassert control over 75 million rebellious Bengalis. . . . The refusal of Pakistan’s military leaders to honor [the 1970 elections] and their attempt to terrorize the Bengalis into submission have almost certainly ended any general desire in East Bengal to see the Pakistani union continue.” To make matters worse, the report continued, Islamabad could not seal the border with India, and New Delhi had likely already begun sending aid to Bengali guerrilla fighters. Fearing that a prolonged guerrilla conflict could generate a more radical leadership in East Pakistan, India might be tempted to stage a full-scale military intervention that would almost certainly overwhelm West Pakistani forces in East Pakistan. National Security Council staff reached similar conclusions. Although the Pakistani military might manage to hold on to power through repressive measures for months or even years, a mid-April report stated, “it is our assessment that Pakistan as a unitary state cannot survive.”23
While the White House stalled, voices inside and outside the U.S. government continued to call for action. As Nixon and Kissinger feared, Ted Kennedy did indeed choose to pursue the question of the slaughter in East Pakistan. In July, Kennedy excoriated the Nixon administration for its efforts to “whitewash one of the greatest nightmares in modern times.” In August, Kennedy visited Bangladeshi refugee camps in East India. What he saw appalled him. “Nothing is more clear, or more easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror—and its genocidal consequences—launched by the Pakistani army on the night of March 25th,” he reported. “All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad. America’s heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal.”24
That complicity included actively arming the government that perpetrated the massacre of civilians in East Pakistan. On April 10, the New York Times reported that Washington was still sending spare military parts and ammunition to Islamabad. “There is growing evidence,” the paper reported, “that the Pakistani Army has been using American tanks, jet aircraft and other equipment in its attempt to crush the movement for autonomy.”25 Though it had delayed shipments of arms to Islamabad, the flow of ammunition and spare parts (necessary to maintain Pakistan’s substantial stores of American military hardware) continued. Much as Nixon and Kissinger might have liked to deny it, they maintained leverage over Yahya that might be used to rein in the crackdown. Yet, instead of pressuring Islamabad to ease its repression, they lamented the growing criticism of their policies. The “Dacca consulate is in open rebellion,” Kissinger complained. A widening chorus of critics both within and outside Washington were now calling for the United States to begin aiding the Bengalis. Nixon shared Kissinger’s frustration. “The people who bitch about Vietnam bitch about it because we intervened in what they say is a civil war,” he fumed. “Now some of those same bastards . . . want us to intervene here—both civil wars.” Many of those same voices also called for a suspension of U.S. aid to West Pakistan, Kissinger added. “For us to cut off aid would infuriate the West Pakistanis.”26
Still, State Department officials doubted that the Pakistan Army could “substantially improve its position, much less reassert control over the Bengalis.” Moreover, even if it were able to do so, Islamabad would not be in a position to create anything resembling a representative government in East Pakistan. If, on the other hand, East Pakistan managed to secure independence quickly, it would likely enjoy a moderate political leadership. However, they warned, a prolonged struggle would likely radicalize leaders in the East.27 In any case, it increasingly appeared that “the breakup of Pakistan is inevitable.”28 On April 28, 1971, Kissinger sent his recommendation to the president. While unqualified support for West Pakistan would encourage Islamabad to “drag out the present situation and increase the political and economic costs to them and to us,” cutting off aid would tilt the balance in favor of East Pakistan. Instead, he argued, the United States should pursue a middle path aimed at helping West Pakistani leaders achieve some sort of negotiated settlement. Shipments of spare military parts would continue, but new weapons systems would be embargoed so as to avoid angering Congress. Nixon agreed with Kissinger’s reasoning and added a handwritten note: “To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time [emphasis in original].”29
Nixon and Kissinger’s refusal to bring pressure on Yahya stemmed from a number of factors. Certainly, their view of Pakistan as a Cold War ally was critical. Why, they asked, should Washington criticize a pro-U.S. government in order to help India, a state that leaned toward the USSR, and left-wing Bangladeshi rebels who were likely to align with New Delhi? As Kissinger told Nixon, the Indians were “sons-of-bitches, who never have lifted a finger for us, why should we get involved in the morass of East Pakistan? All the more so, I quite agree with the point, if East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool. It’s going [to] be 100 million people, they have the lowest standard of living in Asia.”30 However, no concern was more pressing than the White House’s central diplomatic gambit of 1971: preparations for an opening to the People’s Republic of China. Deteriorating relations between Beijing and Moscow—culminating in the Ussuri River Clash of 1969—presented a clear opportunity for Nixon to accomplish his long-standing goal of opening relations with China.
For the people of Bangladesh, the timing could not possibly have been worse. Pakistan’s critical assistance in Nixon and Kissinger’s efforts to set up a back channel to China guaranteed that the White House would withhold condemnation of the crackdown in Bangladesh. Certainly, Nixon and Kissinger had a high tolerance for their allies’ human rights abuses. But if ever there was a time for the White House to turn a blind eye to a Third World massacre, this was it. The ongoing disaster of the war in Vietnam, the geopolitical stakes involved in the opening to China, and the prospect of strengthening Washington’s alliance with Pakistan presented the Nixon White House with an easy choice. Bangladesh would become a casualty of Nixon and Kissinger’s Cold War strategy.