No newspaper reader in India needs to be reminded of Mr. Nixon’s and Mr. Kissinger’s notorious “tilt” towards Pakistan at the time of the 1971 war over Bangladesh. The reasons for it are also well known — long-standing Western prejudice against the Hindus, failure to appreciate the importance of the attempt to build a secular state in India, opposition to the policy of non-alignment in view of its inevitable emphasis on anti-imperialism and anti-racialism, geographical location of Pakistan which links it at once with the Gulf and Central Asia, Islamabad’s security pact with the United States and membership of Seato and Cento, and above all its China connection which Washington found particularly useful for the purpose of its secret negotiations with Beijing in 1971. On these counts Mr. Kissinger’s memoirs currently being serialised do not add much to our knowledge. But they are important for another reason. They demonstrate most convincingly the rashness, ineptness and warped judgment of the men who took vital decisions in Washington in the Nixon era.
This is, of course, not a new discovery. The Nixon administration’s record in Indochina speaks for itself. But in spite of it, Mr. Nixon’s and Mr. Kissinger’s assessment of the Indo-Pakistan conflict in 1971 as revealed through the latter’s memoirs comes as a surprise. Despite the absence of any worthwhile evidence to this effect, they convinced themselves that Mrs. Gandhi would not be content with victory on the eastern front leading to the emancipation of Bangladesh which in turn would make it possible for the refugees in India to return home and that she would push the war on the western front with a view to smashing Pakistan’s military machine. Apparently they did not even care to find out whether this objective was within India’s reach, that is, whether its armed forces could inflict a crushing defeat on Pakistan in the west within a matter of weeks, and whether the Indian leaders thought that the possible gains were worth the price that would have to be paid in terms of loss of international goodwill which the Pakistan army’s reign of terror in Bangladesh and the flight of about 10 million people had created for this country. It is even more extraordinary that Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger should have taken it for granted that in the event of India pressing the war on the western front, China would intervene directly and on a scale which would oblige New Delhi to invoke its recently concluded treaty with Moscow to ask the latter to attack China, that the Soviet leadership would readily comply with such a request and that it was necessary for them not only to warn the Kremlin through the use of the hot line but also to send a task force of the sixth fleet into the Bay of Bengal to underline the warning by making it clear that the United States, too, might act on the side of Pakistan and China.
The Himalayan passes were frozen by the time active hostilities commenced between India and Pakistan in early December. As such the Chinese could not have easily made a diversionary move. The Maoist leadership had acted cautiously at the time of the earlier Indo-Pakistan war in 1965 and in Vietnam. There was, therefore, no reason to conclude that it would behave differently this time, specially when its stakes in Pakistan could not be said to be high enough for it to risk the possibility of an armed conflict with the Soviet Union. The Soviet leaders have been known for their caution and if the development of nuclear weapons by the Chinese and the armed clashes on the Ussuri had not persuaded them to invade China, it was unlikely that they would have done so for the sake of India. They would without doubt have stepped up military assistance to this country in the event of Chinese intervention in some form. But that would not have produced the risk of a wider war. And if there was any scope for doubt regarding Chinese intentions, it should have been removed when Ambassador Hua Huang called on Mr. Kissinger and, contrary to the latter’s absurd expectation, did not hold out the threat of “coming to the military assistance of Pakistan (sic).
Mr. Kissinger is utterly wrong in respect of the Indian as well as the Soviet policy in 1971. India had nothing to gain by pressing the attack in the west. Indian leaders did not take a lofty view of their military superiority over Pakistan. Mrs. Gandhi’s subsequent dealings with Mr. Bhutto confirm that she was not interested even in humiliating that country, not to speak of her wanting to break it up further. The Soviet leaders would have loved a negotiated settlement over Bangladesh itself. They would never have supported a deliberate extension of the war by India once Bangladesh had been liberated. All this was well known in New Delhi then. Apparently only the CIA men were not aware of these facts. Or is it that like Mr John Foster Dulles, Mr Kissinger’s is a schematic approach which has little regard for facts? Either way it reflects little credit on the information gathering and policy making machine in the United States.
The Times of India, 11 October 1979