Magnificent Delusions (10 page)

Chapter Two

Aid, Arms, and Bases

O
n a warm Friday in June 1953 Pakistani and American dignitaries, flanked by an army band, assembled alongside the wharf in Baltimore Harbor. The SS
Anchorage Victory
was setting sail for Karachi with nine thousand tons of wheat, the first shipment of seven hundred thousand tons to be donated under the United States' Pakistan Wheat Aid Act. This came about after Pakistan faced two successive crop failures due to lack of monsoon rains and did not have hard currency to buy wheat on the international market.

The State Department had concluded that there was a real danger of famine in Pakistan, and a grant-in-aid from US wheat surpluses was considered the only practical way of preventing famine. Borrowing was an option, but Pakistan's ability to repay the loan without retarding economic growth was questionable.

So President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked the Eighty-Third Congress to authorize the administration to send up to one million tons of wheat to Pakistan, valued at $75 million. The Congress acted quickly to pass the Pakistan-specific law, and shipments began within two weeks of the president's request. “Everything about this action is commendable,” said a
New York Times
editorial. It would “relieve distress in Pakistan” and would serve as “the mark of our friendly concern with the needs of others.”
¹

On the Pakistani side, the semi-official
Dawn
described the American decision to provide wheat as “a noble gesture.” But the paper
carefully avoided expressing gratefulness; instead, it insisted that Pakistan's food security could be guaranteed only after it had absorbed Kashmir and ensured control of the sources of rivers flowing into it. Although the famine that had just been averted had little to do with Kashmir,
Dawn
suggested that it did. The Americans had helped solve the immediate problem, but apparently they also needed to resolve the India-Pakistan dispute to earn true appreciation.
²

Internal discussions within the Eisenhower administration had also focused on Pakistan's famine less as a humanitarian problem than as a political one. The US mission sent to Pakistan to examine the wheat shortage had concluded that “it was in the security interest of the US to extend food assistance to Pakistan at the earliest.” In addition to averting the threat of famine, officials were concerned about “the possible political and financial collapse of the friendly government of an important and strategic country.”
³

The US ambassador, Avra Warren, had reported some time back that the Soviets were willing to barter four hundred thousand tons of wheat in exchange for Pakistani cotton and jute.
⁴
Although there had been no independent confirmation of this offer, the United States felt that keeping Pakistan in the Western camp was important.

The Wheat Aid Act marked the first major success in Pakistan's wooing of America. The election of Eisenhower, a Republican, as US president, aided Pakistan's relationship with the United States. Eisenhower was overall tougher about confronting the Soviet Union, and India's stubborn refusal to get drawn into the Cold War further helped Pakistan's case.

During the presidential election campaign Eisenhower aides had spoken of their plans for “bringing strategically situated Pakistan into the free world's defense system” and for “building a Pakistani army and eventually locating American airfields there.”
⁵
Additionally, the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, saw the world in Manichaean terms. He did not know much about the subcontinent, but he did know that a willing ally was preferable to someone who preferred to sit on the sidelines of the great ideological conflict of the age. Dulles had told the
New York Times
soon after Eisenhower's election that “the strong spiritual faith and martial spirit of the
people” of Pakistan “make them a dependable bulwark against communism.”
⁶

But Dulles had been wary of India's leaders long before he became Eisenhower's secretary of state. British conservatives, many of whom saw India unfit for self-governance and a potential target for Soviet penetration after British withdrawal, heavily influenced his view of South Asia. Months before partition Dulles had told the National Publishers Association in New York that “In India, Soviet Communism exercises a strong influence through the interim Hindu government” led by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Ironically, the interim government Dulles criticized also included representatives of Jinnah's Muslim League. But Dulles had already made up his mind that the Muslims were inherently anticommunist whereas the Hindus were willing to let communism influence them. Because the US embassy in New Delhi rejected this suggestion, Secretary of State Marshall undertook to try to give Dulles “a more complete picture of the Indian situation.”
⁷
Later developments proved that Dulles never got that complete picture and maintained the prejudice he had initially voiced.

Under Dulles's stewardship the Eisenhower administration moved from Truman's cautious policy of Soviet-power containment to a more aggressive anticommunism stance throughout the world. He and many others saw Asia as the major battleground against communist ideology. The Soviet satellites in Europe, he reasoned, had seen better days so they were predisposed to resisting Soviet influence. In Asia, however, the reverse was true; the Soviet system could be seen in poverty-ridden Asian nations as a better option.

“The Russian intruding into Europe is viewed as an Asiatic,” remarked foreign affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger, explaining how Dulles viewed the world. “The same Russian intruding into Asia comes as a European.”
⁸
The United States had to make sure that Asian states did not succumb to the temptation of embracing communist ideology in a quest for superior social organization, modernity, and literacy, as the region's “illiterate, impoverished feudality” offered fertile ground for communism to advance. So the United States preferred allies who prioritized resisting communism to those
who focused on changing living conditions at home, even if it involved doing business with the Soviets.

Muhammad Ali Bogra, who had succeeded Ispahani as Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, had seen an opportunity for Pakistan as he watched the US presidential election campaign in 1952. He calculated that Pakistan could secure economic and military aid by portraying itself as a frontline state in the battle against communism.

With this in mind, Bogra, the scion of a Bengali aristocratic family, arrived in Washington months before Eisenhower's election and ingratiated himself with the Republican elite. He went bowling with hard-line anticommunists and convinced them of Pakistan's anti-communist credentials. He also advanced the idea that Pakistan's army was the only army in the region willing to fight Soviet influence and incursions. That there was no significant Soviet influence in the region hardly mattered to men like Dulles, who were eager to implement their grand global strategy.

But Pakistan's domestic politics at the time were chaotic and byzantine. Ghulam Muhammad, the powerful former finance minister, was now governor-general. National elections had been postponed indefinitely, and political factions vied for influence in an environment of palace intrigue. Those in power were primarily concerned with the paucity of resources to run the government as well as to maintain the British-inherited army.

Along with Defense Secretary Iskander Mirza and the army commander, General Muhammad Ayub Khan, the governor-general concerned himself with securing economic and military aid for Pakistan more than other political concerns. Within months of Eisenhower's inauguration Governor-General Muhammad decided to appoint Bogra as prime minister, hoping that his standing in Washington would help with Pakistan's quest for aid.

Bogra was ensconced as prime minister when Dulles visited twelve countries in an attempt to rally Middle Eastern and South Asian countries in a global crusade against communism. The US secretary of state was received warmly in Pakistan, but felt that the Indians rebuffed him when they told him outright that they would not join
any military alliance. Even before independence Nehru had declared that India would “keep away from the power politics of groups, aligned against one another, which have led in the past to world wars and which may again lead to disasters on an even faster scale.”
⁹

On several occasions Nehru tried to explain to American officials that his vision for India was one of nonalignment, not neutrality, in the US-Soviet struggle. Although his sister, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, while serving as New Delhi's ambassador in Moscow right after independence, told her US counterpart that most Indian leaders knew that their “natural alignment” was with the West, Nehru recognized India's “relative impotence.” He felt that a nation “still in swaddling clothes” should not talk about “military participation in event of war.”

Pandit's view, which her brother shared, was that “India's role in the family of nations should be modest and relatively humble” until the nation had solved some of its basic internal problems.
¹⁰
Conversely, Pakistani leaders saw external alliances as a means of addressing their domestic issues. They were all too willing to privately discuss joining a US-led military alliance as long as assurances of arms and aid accompanied it. They also sought US support in Pakistan's conflicts with Afghanistan and India.

Without realizing the complexity of the issues involved, Dulles thought he could help Pakistan cut a deal with its neighbors. American officials also ignored the Pakistani government's policy of keeping discussions of alliance with the United States secret from the country's Parliament and media. The calculus of the Ghulam Muhammad-Mirza-Ayub trio was that they would bargain for the highest bidder for Pakistan's support. The absence of political support at home would serve as a convenient way of getting out of fulfilling promises to Americans as well as being the basis for renegotiating that price.

On his return, Dulles identified four sources of what he said was “fear, bitterness and weakness” in the Middle East–South Asia region. In addition to “the overwhelming poverty of the entire area,” he felt that the United States could enlist the region's nations as allies after solving three quarrels: the Egyptian-British dispute over the
Suez Canal, the Arab-Israeli hostility, and the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir.
¹¹
This view was somewhat simplistic, as history demonstrates that only one of the three has been resolved six decades later: after the failed Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of 1956, France and Britain no longer own the Suez Canal.

In addition to Dulles, eleven other US officials visited Pakistan over the summer of 1953. That year had also seen a massive decline in the world prices of cotton and jute, the two items that accounted for 85 percent of Pakistan's exports. Given the adverse economic conditions, the flurry of visitors from Washington bolstered Pakistan's hopes of tapping the US treasury. As the country's leaders had failed to make plans for dealing with economic crisis, “The Americans will soon rescue us” was also a formula for the country's ruling class's political survival.

The United States decided to supply wheat and avert famine in Pakistan soon after Dulles's first visit. Although the wheat was welcomed in Pakistan, it was not considered enough. From the point of view of Pakistan's army, one million tons of wheat was hardly adequate compensation for what it was being asked to do on behalf of the free world. The real prize would be military equipment, which the United States had not yet promised. Frustrated with the civilians' negotiations, Ayub decided to take matters in his own hand.

Just prior to when Muhammad, Pakistan's civilian head of state, and Zafrulla Khan, the foreign minister, visited the United States, Ayub also made a trip there.
¹²
He sought a “deal whereby Pakistan could—for the right price—serve as the West's eastern anchor in an Asian alliance structure.”
¹³
Even though the Americans had arranged a series of visits to US military facilities for the Pakistan army commander, Ayub stormed into the office of Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade and said, “For Christ's sake, I didn't come here to look at barracks. Our army can be your army if you want us. But let's make a decision.”
¹⁴

However, by the end of its first year in office, the Eisenhower administration was seeking to reduce American involvement in military operations like those undertaken in Korea, and it aimed to do this by building up frontline states' military capability. The idea of a
Middle East defense organization was shelved in favor of creating a “Northern Tier of Defense” against Soviet expansion, with Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan as its partners.

Each of these countries presented its own unique problems. Iran could not be included in such an arrangement until its left-leaning Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was deposed. Iraq's weak monarchy and Turkey's Kemalist regime extracted their own benefits from the Americans. And in the case of Pakistan, the issue was overcoming India's objections.

Dulles and his brother Allen, who now headed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), saw Pakistan's usefulness primarily in terms of its geographic location, an opinion that resonated with the Pakistani leadership's own views. A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) at the time argued that “given sufficient inducement, Pakistan would probably be willing to authorize Western use of Pakistan air and naval bases in wartime and possibly Western development of such bases in peacetime.” Military aid was regarded as that incentive.