All in the national interest
To a Bangladeshi associated with the history of his country´s birth, the documents presented in the pages that follow evoke a strange feeling. They are like reading about the unfolding events in the future from some point in the past. These cables are all about facing the past and confronting the future. In many ways, the events of 1971 have ceased to be part of international memory, political or personal. There is no mention of 1971 when large-scale state-sponsored killing sprees are discussed, and Bangladesh provides better copy for disasters and microcredit. As far as the world is concerned, South Asia has been squeezed into matters relating to hostility between India and Pakistan because strategic interests intervene there.
From these declassified documents of Foggy Bottom (The American Papers: Secret and Confidential, India*Pakistan* Bangladesh, Documents 1965-1973, Compiled and Selected by Roedad Khan, OUP, Karachi, 1999), it is clear that the big reason why the US wanted Pakistan united was to keep the roaring Reds at bay, be they from Moscow, Peking or from the fabled hills of Naxalbari.
The telegrams are not about the war in Bangladesh or any other war. When they discuss the events of 1971 in Bangladesh, they are actually about another war —the global fight against communism. The events were not about preventing military intervention by US forces but the paranoia of possible US policy failure.And not in South Asia, but vis-avis the Soviets in South Asia. What these documents do is make the US look silly when they talk about human rights and democracy.
These cables are also about political globalisation, the platform on which the present-day chariots of economic globalisation roll on. The Cold War was about economic and political markets. Instead of emerging economies, they were emerging polities. The states didn´t matter but the enemy did.
Even as a Bangladeshi, one has to recognise that the most important aspect of the papers is the indication here about the global diplomatic transition that was about to happen. The friendship between China and USA as a coalition against the Soviet Union was what history was all about. The papers do reflect the concern of the State Department on the plight of the refugees but they do not hesitate to say what the stakes of the fight were all about. This is significant because any doubts one may have had about international political amorality is removed. Here, then, is a fine testament to the rules of governing nation states, handling emergence of nation states, and ´managing´ the plight of people affected by the process. The depth of professionalism, which may draw admiration, allows tough decisions to be taken, which will affect millions of anonymous lives, of brown and black bodies, clad in scanty clothes.
In 1998, a team of three, including myself, visited Pakistan to talk to the generals and the leaders about what had happened in 1971. This idea that East Pakistanis were thought of as a lesser breed of Pakistanis came through as an idea deeply rooted in many Pakistani minds. The older generation still seemed to hang on to it while the younger ´progressives´ were somewhat embarrassed to learn that such beliefs had once prevailed.
Journey to Pakistan
It was clear that the Punjabi bureaucratic elite considered East Pakistanis as genuinely inferior. An ex-member of the Pakistan Planning Commission blamed lack of competence of Bengalees for their failure to develop economically: "They couldn´t write a development proposal properly so I would help them." The gentleman from Punjab had reduced the process of governance to the level of competence in proposal writing. The direction of the state had been truly bureaucratised.
An interesting insight came from the politicians, including Benazir Bhutto, some of whom said that Bengal was anti-feudal while Pakistan was based on feudalism and the conflict was irreconcilable. Said one: "The military in Pakistan has been feudalised as a matter of policy to protect feudalism through land grants. But the Awami League was committed to abolishing it so there was no way out. Conflict was inevitable."
The Awami League won the election of 1970 with victory in 167 out of the 169 National Assembly seats in East Pakistan. The League´s election platform was based on the Six-Point formula, a radical autonomy agenda which had a long history and which included: 1. a federation of the two wings; 2. central government to deal only with defence and foreign affairs; 3. two separate currencies for the two wings or same currency but with measures to prevent flight of capital and each side to maintain separate revenue accounts; 4. separate authority to levy taxes and to collect revenue; 5. separate foreign exchange accounts for both the wings; and 6. setting up a para-military force for East Pakistan. East Pakistanis loved it, West Pakistanis would have none of it.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People´s Party (PPP), which had won the majority of the seats in West Pakistan (88 out of 144), took up the cause of the western part, while Sheikh Mujibur Rahman contemplated what it meant to have an absolute majority. Earlier, in 1968, Sheikh Mujib had been put on trial as a traitor in the Agartala Conspiracy Case—for colluding with India to separate East Pakistan—but pubic resentment and fierce agitation had put an end to the matter. He had to be let go, and as a consequence of a general unrest that was already on, the military dictator, Ayub Khan, handed over power to his army chief Yahya Khan. That was in 1969, and Yahya held the first election on the basis of adult franchise in Pakistan the following year.
Ironically, this handover from Ayub to Yahya was successfully challenged in a Pakistani court in 1972 and the verdict was that the handing over had been illegal. So what triggered the crisis of 1971 had no real basis in the eyes of the law. The election held under Yahya Khan´s martial law was invalid. But by then history had happened.
For Sheikh Mujib, history was on his heels that year. The East was in no mood to compromise on the Six Points and the West Pakistani leadership was not ready to accept the menu. We were told by the reminiscing senior generals, bureaucrats, politicians and journalists whom we met in Pakistan that the decision not to hand over power to Sheikh Mujib (who held majority in the Assembly), was taken at Larkana, Bhutto´s ancestral home during a visit by Yahya to shoot game.
The pressure was strong on Yahya to take tough action and cancel the election results. His top brass was for it, and public sentiment was high against Sheikh Mujib and his Six Points in Sindh and Punjab. Everything had been upset because the Pakistani intelligence outfits had failed to predict such a massive Mujib victory. There was no contingency plan.
The generals felt that they could let Mujib rule Pakistan only on their terms. And Mujib, sitting on an overwhelming "mandate" could move little any other way. Bhutto continued to threaten. Non-PPP parliament members reached Dhaka to participate in the assembly that Yahya had called, but it was suddenly suspended. Almost immediately, the streets of Dhaka went wild.
Mujib went public and called for the "final struggle" on 7 March and unofficially took over the local administration. The students who controlled the streets had, in fact, declared independence on 3 March. Troops started to arrive in Dhaka by plane, and plans for the March crackdown were finalised. On the night of 25 March, the troops attacked selected parts of Dhaka, including Dhaka University, killing hundreds. The seal had been broken.
Games of great powers
What is missing in the declassified papers is the sense of crisis and a desire to do anything to avert it. A New York Times headline put it along the lines of "What happened to the leverage we never had?". Bhutto and Mujib got personality profiles done, but Yahya Khan was spared in the despatches. Yahya was known to be a committed debauch, a man obsessed with "wine and women". Even in 1970, his fondness for plump and mature women was more than gossip. In Pakistan, everyone mentioned this part of his life to us and said that this suited Bhutto well in his manipulations, though his own life was no less colourful. The tone of writing when the subject is Yahya is almost respectful. This is an indication of where the US intelligence suffered. They were pinning hopes on a man who had not much hope left, and none hoped much from him. But he delivered all there was to the US.
For the US, the Bangladesh crisis doesn´t appear as a humanitarian issue. The situation analysis came across as brilliant and confident, reflecting the quality of men sent to serve in South Asia. But the cables also expose how diagnosis suffers when you are looking over South Asia´s shoulder at something else. For the US, Pakistan had to be saved to prevent communist influence; Pakistan had to be supported because it was a convenient railway station on the way to communist China.
The papers therefore have little to do with the Subcontinent, they are all about the games great powers play. This is also about the Soviet Union´s last hurrah. The Indo-Soviet treaty signed in August 1971 made all the difference. Air Vice Marshall A.K. Khandekar, who was the deputy chief of staff of the Bangladesh forces in 1971, says that before the treaty was signed, the guerillas would go into operations without sufficient weapons and logistical support. But that changed after the treaty, and that made a big difference to the eventual outcome. It also means that India had already decided to take the plunge and planning was on for the eventual attack on East Pakistan. From the American documents it is clear that the analysts do not seem to have read this bit of the future too well.
By the time the US government was getting to understand the "meaning" of the Indo-Soviet treaty, the matter had gone too far. Indira Gandhi is righteous and impassioned in her missive to the American President, but Nixon sounds like a man resorting to language to hide what is already a settled matter. That the Soviet Union would soon be crowing in victory can´t have been lost to either. Here was the price for obtaining Chinese friendship.
The most depressing part of these declassified documents is the absence of any compassion. Diplomacy is about power and victories, not people and lives. But understanding this does not make international relations any more palatable as a topic. It has allowed immorality and the sanctioning of any act for the sake of national self-interest, while sounding highly moral in public.
The act of forming nation states also leave a trail of victims behind in various stages of devastation. The people of Bangladesh have birthed a state, but even today, almost three decades later, it meets only the aspirations of the elite, and has failed to fulfill the dreams that drove the people to 26 March 1971. Pakistan risked the mantle of a geno-cidal state and paid a price by losing half of itself in favour of India, its arch enemy. India won neither a friend nor an ally, but a reluctant fellow traveller, though it did succeed in breaking up Pakistan. True, Bangladesh serves as a market for many Indian goods today, but then it sends migrants to India and is often a haven for the increasingly belligerent insurgents from the Northeast.
The 1971 scenes of suffering are greater than any symbols of victory. But US foreign policy succeeded in the long run. Pakistan thought that the US would bail them out with the 7th Fleet but that didn´t happen. In the end Mao shook hands with Nixon, the Soviet Union was humbled, and that is what these papers are all about.
Meanwhile, the Bihari boy, growing up in the wretched "Geneva camps" of Dhaka who still claims the citizenship of Pakistan will probably never see his homeland. He will only gaze at Bangladesh, a land which is denied by and to him. He has a flag but no land. One wonders if his father would have given so much to preserve Pakistan if he knew what the future held.
It was a war which could only accommodate victims. The pain lives on in many hearts. Only the victorious armada of the West has continued to sail on as the papers so eloquently testify.