Magnificent Delusions (25 page)

Mujib said he did not want separation; instead, he wanted “a form of confederation in which the people of Bangladesh would get their just and rightful share of foreign aid, and not a mere twenty percent.” Products from Bangladesh constituted the main source of hard currency earnings for Pakistan, he argued, prompting him to ask, rhetorically, “How can Islamabad justify the crumbs which they have thrown us?”
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In effect, the Bengali leader was asking the United States to use its influence to redress West Pakistan's injustices against his people. His electoral mandate gave him the right to seek a constitutional arrangement his voters preferred. Mujib also wanted Americans to know that their past policy of supporting the West Pakistan army and its leaders had not turned him and the Bengali people against the United States. All Washington needed to do was take off its blinders and stop assuming that only through close ties with West Pakistani generals could American interests be protected.

Previously, American policy makers, beginning with Dulles, had looked at Pakistan only through the eyes of its “fighting men.” But now they were confronted with Pakistan's internal contradictions that journalists and academics like Margaret Bourke-White and Hans J. Morgenthau had pointed out, only to be ignored: the subcontinent was on the verge of another partition, this time not on the basis of religion but on grounds of ethnicity. As an independent country Bangladesh would be more ethnically homogenous than either India or Pakistan. One language, a common culture, and a shared history would unite it. Islam would be the religion of
Bangladesh's majority, but unlike Pakistan, it would not be the basis of its nationhood. Regrettably, few Americans in government had paid attention to the Bengali perspective while allying with Pakistan's military leaders.

Most of Pakistan's generals belonged to the West Pakistani provinces of Punjab and the Northwest Frontier. They were ethnic Punjabis or Pashtuns. Some were from the Urdu-speaking minority that moved to Pakistan from northern India after partition. Pakistan's army was a product of the British concept of martial races, which had led the British in India to recruit soldiers only from certain ethnic groups. The British had not deemed the Bengalis a martial race, so Pakistan's army boasted very little East Pakistani representation.

In 1947 Bengalis constituted only 1 percent of the Pakistan army, and by the 1960s their number went up to only 7 percent.
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In the officer corps the difference was sharper. Similarly, Pakistan's bureaucracy had far fewer Bengalis than it had West Pakistanis. In 1966 only 27,648 government officials out of a total of 114,302 belonged to East Pakistan.
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Although East Pakistan was the country's major foreign exchange earner, it received a smaller share of federal investment. As a result, in 1970 West Pakistani per capita income was 61 percent higher than Bengali per capita income.
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East Pakistan had been seething with anger long before Mujib and the Awami League translated that rage into votes. But West Pakistani officers were unable to feel the depth of this sentiment in what can only be described as colonial hubris. The West Pakistani elite seemed willing to risk the division of the country rather than allow the Bengali majority to have a leading role in the country's governance.

Successive Pakistani leaders had tried to forge Pakistani nationhood on the basis of Islam and hatred of India, but the Bengalis resented the West Pakistani tendency to see their cultural affinity with Bengali Hindus as somehow un-Islamic. After all, their economic interests were more closely tied to India. With American assistance West Pakistan had achieved a degree of industrialization, which enabled West Pakistan to export cotton yarn and textiles to Europe, the United States, and Japan. Thus, East Pakistanis still preferred
traditional trade patterns that had linked India, through Bengal, to Southeast Asia.

American journalists had reported on the East-West chasm in Pakistan, but US policy had completely ignored it. Pakistan is “an improbable country,” the
New York Times
had pointed out on the eve of the elections. “Its two parts, the Bengali East and the Punjabi West are separated by culture, language, diet, temperament and a thousand miles of the unfriendly territory of India.” The paper's reporter could see that the glue of Islam was “losing its hold” and that Pakistan was the rare country “where the majority region is the backward one.” He quoted Mujib as saying: “If we are the majority, we are Pakistan.”
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The December 1970 election had brought Pakistan's fissures to the fore. In response, West Pakistanis reacted with shades of ethnic superiority. Soon after the elections a general visiting Dhaka told his military colleagues: “Don't worry. We will not allow these black bastards to rule over us,” a reference to the darker skin color of Bengalis compared to Pashtuns and Punjabis.
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“The Punjab is finished, smashed,” an industrialist told the
Times
. “Our country has gone to the dogs,” he said, because “We will be ruled by Sindh and Bengal,” a reference to the fact that Mujib was Bengali whereas Bhutto was an ethnic Sindhi.
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When Yahya announced that he would defer convening the legislature indefinitely, the Awami League responded by calling for civil disobedience. In response, for the next several days the military virtually lost control of East Pakistan to Awami League mobs. West Pakistani civilians were attacked as were central government buildings. Bangladesh flags replaced the Pakistani standard in the province. Government employees (including High Court judges) absented themselves from their offices. Mujib's residence became the new secretariat of Bangladesh, from where he issued directives to keep the Bangladesh economy moving. Millions of Bengalis joined rallies all over East Pakistan, singing the song “Our Golden Bengal.”
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Bangladesh had effectively seceded.

After a few days of armed preparation, during which three-way talks involving the Awami League, the PPP, and the army were arranged as subterfuge, Yahya ordered the army to crackdown on the
Bengalis. According to one Pakistani general, Yahya was assured that “short and harsh action” would cow down Mujib and his supporters. In the view of Pakistani generals, “killing of a few thousand would not be a high price for keeping the country together.”
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They saw Mujib as a “traitor” to Pakistan and were not prepared to negotiate with him further.

However, two important West Pakistani military officers did not support the decision to use force. The military governor of East Pakistan, Admiral Syed Muhammad Ahsan, and the military commander of East Pakistan, Lieutenant General Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, both argued that military measures would not change the political situation. Ahsan had been Yahya's representative at Eisenhower's funeral a couple of years earlier, and Yaqub later became Pakistan's ambassador to the United States and foreign minister.

US officials knew Ahsan and Yaqub well, so Washington should have heard their views. But the United States chose to stand by Yahya. A new military commander, Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, arrived in Dhaka in March 1971 to enforce national unity with US weapons supplied ostensibly to save South Asia from communism. Pakistani soldiers then confined foreign journalists to their hotels before starting “Operation Searchlight,” a ferocious military action aimed at arresting and killing Awami League leaders. During this military operation at least ten thousand civilians were massacred within three days. There was a large Pakistani force already stationed in East Pakistan, but reinforcements and equipment were flown in from West Pakistan to bolster their strength.

The general officer commanding in East Pakistan, Major General Khadim Hussain Raja, summed up the army's attitude when he told an Awami League sympathizer within earshot of fellow officers: “I will muster all I can—tanks, artillery and machine guns—to kill all the traitors and, if necessary, raze Dhaka to the ground. There will be no one to rule; there will be nothing to rule.”
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Four days after the army operation began, Kissinger reported to Nixon that “Apparently, Yahya has got control of East Pakistan.”
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The conversations between Nixon and Kissinger during this period provide insight into their thoughts on the approaching debacle.
Kissinger noted, for example, that “all the experts were saying that 30,000 people can't get control of 75 million.” He conceded the State Department experts' opinion could “still turn out to be true,” but resistance in East Pakistan had crumbled for the moment, and the Pakistan government had managed to hide the gravity of the situation from the rest of the world. “The use of power against seeming odds pays off,” he said. Nixon declared, “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,” the US president said. “Look what the British did when they took India.” He failed to see the irony of invoking colonial parallels while discussing the use of force to keep a post-colonial state together. Kissinger acknowledged that Mujib was a moderate, but he and Nixon did not trust the Bengalis to be able to rule their own country. They feared an “unstable situation,” that “radical groups” would gain strength.

As the Pakistan army used force to subdue East Pakistan, Kissinger admitted that “the Indians who one normally would expect to favor a breakup of Pakistan aren't so eager for this one.”
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Ahsan, who had conducted the elections as military governor, agreed with that assessment. He told US officials later that he did not believe in the theory that India engineered Mujib's electoral victory and subsequent stance on autonomy. “Prior to March at least, separation was not Mujib's intention,” Ahsan observed. He also said that “India's position has, despite public outcry, been relatively moderate and its hands before the events in March were relatively clean.”
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But soon after Operation Searchlight, Pakistan blamed India for the events in East Pakistan. Faced with Pakistan's military might, a large number of Awami League activists and East Bengali Hindus crossed the border into the Indian states of Tripura, Assam, and West Bengal. Defecting Bengali soldiers and officers from the Pakistan army soon joined them. These trained military men had preempted a Pakistani order to disarm and detain all ethnic Bengalis in the army.

Mujib had been arrested and taken to West Pakistan. But several other Awami League leaders had announced the formation of a
Bangladesh government in exile based in the Indian port city of Calcutta. India then asserted that hundreds of thousands of refugees had poured in, creating a refugee emergency. The Indian intelligence service, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), started recruiting and training a guerrilla army from the refugee camps. Soon the Bangladesh
Mukti Bahini
(Liberation army) was methodically attacking the Pakistani forces throughout the country's eastern wing.

Pakistan rushed in further reinforcements, but this proved difficult because India had banned Pakistani aircraft from flying over its territory after a group of Kashmiris hijacked an Indian civilian airliner to Lahore. Aircraft carrying Pakistani troops had to fly a circuitous route over the sea, avoiding Indian territory, to get to Dhaka. This slowed but did not stop, as the flights brought in additional soldiers.

Pakistani soldiers were trained to fight in the continental climate of West Pakistan's border with India. Most of them had never set foot in East Pakistan and did not speak the Bengali language. In the tropical climate and heavily vegetated terrain of Bengal, they felt lost. Moreover, the Mukti Bahini not only had the support of the people, but its soldiers also knew their territory better. Pakistan alleged that regular Indian forces operated alongside the guerrillas, pretending to be part of the hastily raised liberation army.

Nixon and Kissinger agreed that the United States could not do much about the situation. “We should just stay out—like in Biafra,” Nixon determined, referring to an earlier secessionist war in the African state of Nigeria that ended in the central government's military victory. Kissinger agreed. US involvement “would infuriate the West Pakistanis,” but “it wouldn't gain anything with the East Pakistanis, who wouldn't know about it anyway.” As for the Indians, Kissinger pointed out that the “Indians are not noted for their gratitude.”
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But the American media did not see the unfolding tragedy with similar nonchalance. The brutality of the Pakistan army shocked US diplomats on ground in Dhaka. “Here in Dhaka we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pakistan military,” began a telegram to the State Department, signed by Archer Blood, US consul-general in East Pakistan. “Evidence continues to mount
that the Martial Law authorities have a list of Awami league supporters whom they are systematically eliminating by seeking them out in their homes and shooting them down.”

Blood, a career foreign service officer, had titled his cable, “Selective Genocide.” He warned that the “full horror of Pakistani military atrocities will come to light sooner or later” and wondered why the US government pretended to believe the Pakistan government's assertions that they were not taking place.

The US government had apparently been oblivious to cynical manipulation, Blood said, even when its citizens were evacuated from East Pakistan. The Pakistan government had insisted that the Americans fly first from Dhaka to Karachi on Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) aircraft before leaving the country. The United States could have evacuated its citizens to Bangkok, which was geographically closer, but the Pakistanis denied permission for special military flights because they wanted to earn revenue on the return flights that were ferrying troops to the eastern wing.