Magnificent Delusions (16 page)

Ayub then proceeded to argue that if Pakistan did not receive American support, the Chinese would inevitably overwhelm Pakistan as well as India. This argument was ingenuous, at best, because Pakistan had already started exploring close ties with China, a fact that the American government knew. But during his meeting with Eisenhower Ayub wanted to make the case for modernizing the Pakistani military with American money. Raising the specter of a Chinese threat to the subcontinent was a good way of doing that.

After complaining about Soviet and Chinese flights over Pakistani territory “and the inability of the Pakistan Air Force to do anything about them,” Ayub asked for F-104 aircraft. Eisenhower said that he was not sure about giving F-104s and asked whether F-100s might not be adequate. A US general traveling with Eisenhower commented that the F-100 was a good plane and had recently been provided to the Germans. But Ayub insisted that the F-100 was obsolete, and “it would be a mistake for Pakistan to have anything that would soon be out of date.”
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He also asked for radar equipment, anti-aircraft artillery, Nike-Ajax missiles, and sidewinders.

Turning to Afghanistan, Ayub made an implicit plea for Pakistan to be seen as that country's effective protector. Afghanistan had “no intrinsic strength,” he said, and “no economic resources and no military power.” The country was created as a buffer because of a clash of interests during the nineteenth century between the Russian and British empires. It was now surviving by playing the United States against the Soviet Union.

Ayub also claimed that Afghanistan was getting enormous quantities of aid from the Soviet Union. “Afghanistan was completely sold to the Soviet Union,” he alleged, though he offered no evidence to support his allegation. “Soviet aid totaled $610 million, of which $441 million was for military purposes,” he said. The United States should threaten to cut off aid to Afghanistan and support Pakistan against it. Eisenhower observed that if the situation in Afghanistan was so far gone, he did not understand why the Afghans were so anxious for him to come to Kabul. Ayub responded by suggesting that the Afghans “intended to deceive President Eisenhower into believing that continued American aid was in the interests of the United States.”
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The most interesting part of the Eisenhower-Ayub exchange came, however, when Ayub said that “the Afghans were not Muslims nearly as much as they were opportunists.”
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This provided an insight into the emerging mindset in Pakistan. Afghans had been Muslim for longer than several ethnic groups in Pakistan. A large part of what is now Pakistan was part of the Afghan Kingdom until 1893,
when the British severed it. Pakistan had come into being only twelve years earlier, whereas Afghanistan had been a country for centuries. But in 1959 Pakistan's military dictator felt that he could dismiss his country's northwestern neighbor as an opportunist and as insufficiently Muslim.

Eisenhower heard the other side when he went to Kabul and Delhi. During two formal meetings the US president told Nehru that he had “a favorable impression of General Ayub's sincerity of purpose and his desire to live at peace with India and to bring about a settlement of the problems presently affecting relations between the two countries.” He “offered to do anything that might be considered helpful” but clarified that he should not be seen as a mediator.

According to the Indian prime minister: “Pakistan is a nation created out of opposition to things—chiefly Indian independence—and would have remained under Britain if India itself had not forced through its own independence.”
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He described the relationship between the two countries as “peculiar,” hinting that outsiders, such as Americans, could neither understand nor address its complexity.

Indians and Pakistanis, Nehru explained, were essentially the same people, and there were deep cross-border ties. He cited the example of the chief of protocol in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs whose brother had until recently been secretary general of the Pakistan Foreign Office. Even though cousins were generals in both armies, that had not helped diminish a contrived feeling of animosity. Nehru said that he thought a better feeling was developing between India and Pakistan; bitterness had diminished. But, he said, it could “be inflamed again by demagogues at any time since the people could be quickly aroused.”
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During Eisenhower's visit the Indians made the point that the American aid program reduced the likelihood that Pakistan would normalize relations with India. Equipped with US weapons, the Indians argued, the Pakistanis felt they could take on India and win. Nehru also spoke of his apprehension of “a stab in the back” from Pakistan while India was reacting to the Chinese threat. The president referred to the conditions in the terms of contract in mutual security programs for all countries, assuring Nehru that “the U.S.
would never permit Pakistan to employ military equipment received from the U.S. for aggressive purposes against India.”
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Eisenhower added that Pakistan and other countries receiving aid were dependent on the United States for ammunition. They could not carry on aggressive action for more than a week without US support, which would be immediately stopped in such situations. He spoke of “convincing assurances given by President Ayub that the last thing his government would wish would be to attack India in light of the fact that the real danger to both countries came from the Sino-Soviet bloc.” Eisenhower then expressed that Ayub had impressed him as “progressive, forward-looking and deeply concerned with the welfare of his people.”

Within a few years each one of his statements was put to the test. Pakistan initiated war with India a few years later, and the military action lasted seventeen days, at least ten days more than Eisenhower had anticipated. Pakistan reacted to an American arms cutoff by turning to the Soviet Union and China. Widespread rioting against his rule all over Pakistan challenged Ayub's progressive credentials. But at the time the assumptions Eisenhower shared with Nehru shaped American policy.

As he recalled his three-week trip through Europe and South Asia, Eisenhower must have realized that he had disagreed with Ayub on all substantive issues. He had not found the Indians bent upon Pakistan's destruction, and the Soviets had not run over Afghanistan.

But Eisenhower liked Ayub, so the details of Ayub's views did not change the American president's impression of him. This became clear when Eisenhower met with Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain in Madrid on his way back to the United States. Reviewing his trip, Eisenhower spoke of America's “starry-eyed and academic types of liberals” who “criticized General Ayub when he seized power via a military coup.” But the US president felt that “one can see everywhere in Pakistan improvements and a quite happy attitude.”

In Eisenhower's opinion Pakistan's progress was “demonstrated by the huge crowds of friendly people who turned out in Karachi” to welcome him. He did not, however, explain how a huge welcoming
crowd attested to the progress of the country's multitudes; after all, it could as easily have pointed to people not having much to do or the authoritarian regime's ability to generate a gathering. But Eisenhower felt that “The whole Pakistani nation was strongly anti-Communist,” and that alone was enough to make him very fond of it.
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However, the US government found no evidence that Pakistan faced an immediate Soviet threat or that the Soviets supported an aggressive Afghan posture against Pakistan. There was also no evidence of China preparing to militarily assert its territorial claims against Pakistan.
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Nonetheless, the Eisenhower administration approved a phased program to modernize the country's air force anyway. Orders were soon placed with the Lockheed Corporation for the first squadron comprising twelve planes of the F-104 Starfighter high-performance supersonic interceptor aircraft on behalf of Pakistan, paid for with US funds.

By the end of Eisenhower's term as president the United States had helped Pakistan's army equip four infantry divisions and one and a half armored divisions, including M-47 Patton tanks. Barracks had also been built with US money for twenty-five thousand troops as well as new cantonments at Kharian and Jhelum. The United States had provided twelve vessels for the Pakistan navy, including destroyers and minesweepers. The Pakistan air force had received six squadrons of aircraft, including three fighter-bomber squadrons and one squadron each of interceptor day fighters, light bombers, and transport planes.

T
HE ELECTION IN
1960 of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States led to closer ties between India and the United States. Even as a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy had questioned America's embrace of Pakistan at the expense of close ties with India. In an article in
Foreign Affairs
, he had called for a reassessment of “those American aid programs which have reflected an ill-conceived and ill-concealed disdain for the ‘neutralists' and ‘socialists'.”
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For Kennedy, neutralism and socialism in India's democ
racy represented “the free world's strongest bulwarks to the seductive appeal of Peking and Moscow.”

Liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith arrived as ambassador to India soon after Kennedy's inauguration. He spoke effusively about democratic India being America's natural partner. This led to strong protests from Pakistan that a neutral nation was being given preference over an American ally. By now Ayub had consolidated control over Pakistan's media through a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, through which media criticism was easy to generate or turn off for political effect. Conscious that the Americans responded to how they were perceived, a major media offensive was launched against the Indo-American entente.

The government-owned
Morning News
, for example, lambasted the Kennedy administration for wooing Nehru. Ignoring Eisenhower's munificence toward Pakistan, an editorial in the paper argued that the new president had only “accentuated the tendency” of Eisenhower to court those whom Moscow supported. “America obviously does not want to be left behind in the race to woo Pandit Nehru,” it said, sarcastically referring to the Indian leader with his Brahmin title. “In fact, Mr. Kennedy has scored a lead over Khrushchev by conferring upon the Indian Prime Minister the mantle of leadership of Asia and Africa,” wrote the editorialist, echoing the sentiment in other newspapers.
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Officials chimed in with suggestions of a possible conspiracy, which they knew to be false. Bogra, serving as Ayub's foreign minister, claimed that the United States had “deceived Pakistan” as far back as 1951 by entering into a secret treaty with India.
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Coming from someone who served as a poster boy for US-Pakistan alliance during the 1950s, this conspiracy theory was bound to gain traction.

Thus, Pakistani public opinion was fully mobilized against the possibility of Americans preparing to desert Pakistan. Veiled threats of Pakistan turning to China and the Soviet Union for its security accompanied the criticism. This ran contrary to Eisenhower and Nixon's beliefs about Pakistanis being inherently anticommunist.

The
New York Times
, which had editorially supported the alliance with Pakistan during the Dulles years, now dismissed Pakistan's
objections to improved American ties with India. “Pakistan's dissatisfactions with the United States are as much psychological as anything else,”
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observed an editorial. But these Pakistani protests did have the effect of tempering the Kennedy administration's handling of Pakistan while it strengthened relations with India.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson traveled to the region in the spring of 1961. His mission was not only to generate good will for the United States but also to persuade the Indians and Pakistanis that their policies need not be a zero-sum game. Just ahead of his visit, Ayub had appeared willing to provide troops for a multinational force for Laos, where a communist insurgency threatened the US-backed government. Johnson sought a firmer commitment during his meeting with Ayub, only to hear the Pakistani president explain how American victory against communism depended on American willingness to help Pakistan against India.

Ayub said that “Pakistan did not want the United States to fail—it wanted it to win against the Soviets. The US battle was Pakistan's battle.” But, he argued, the United States was not deploying its great power effectively. If the United States did not use its power, it hurt Pakistan, he claimed, adding that “The power of the United States was much greater than at times the Americans seemed to think.”
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Ayub wanted the United States to use its power “to influence Nehru,” and this alone could ensure the defense of South Asia. He spoke of the “threat to India” from the Soviets and from the Chinese communists, saying that only good relations between Pakistan and India could save India from communism.