H-Diplo Review Essay 130 on the Blood Telegram. Kissinger, Nixon and a Forgotten Genocide

H-Diplo H-Diplo Review Essay 130 on The Blood Telegram. Kissinger, Nixon and a Forgotten Genocide

Discussion published by George Fujii on Friday, June 5, 2015

H-Diplo Essay No. 130 An H-Diplo Review Essay Published by H-Diplo to the H-Net Commons on 5 June 2015, and accurate as of that date

H-Diplo Essay Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Web and Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux

Gary J. Bass. The Blood Telegram. Kissinger, Nixon and a Forgotten Genocide. New York: Knopf, 2013. ISBN: 9780307744623 (paperback, $16.95).

URL: http://tiny.cc/E130

Essay by Mario Del Pero, SciencesPo, Paris

"Selective Genocide” was the title of the telegram sent to Washington by the U.S. Consul General Archer Blood after the launch of the Pakistan army’s crackdown in what was then East Pakistan (the current Bangladesh). It was the end of March 1970. A few months earlier millions of Pakistanis had gone to the polls and participated to Pakistan’s “tremendous experiment in democracy” (25). In East Pakistan the Awami League – the Bengali nationalist party calling for broad autonomy for the region – had taken almost all the seats, winning an outright majority in the National Assembly. Trounced at the polls and fearing an autonomous and even pro-Indian East Pakistan, the military regime of Aghda Muhammad Yahya Khan first decided to suspend the opening of the National Assembly and then, facing strikes and protests in the East, launched an ill-advised and tragic military operation. The primary targets were supporters of the Awami League and, more broadly, the Hindu population of East Pakistan. Hence the label “genocide,” deliberately chosen as the heading of the telegram – the “Blood Telegram” - that gives the title to Gary Bass’s powerful denunciation of U.S. policies vis-à-vis the Indo-Pakistani crisis of 1971.

The “Blood Telegram” did not attract a lot of attention in Washington, aside from Henry Kissinger’s mocking of State Department officials(speaking to President Richard Nixon, the National Security Advisor derided “that Consul in Dacca” as someone who “doesn’t have the strongest nerves” (65). The slaughter launched by the Pakistani army, using weaponry the United States had provided, did indeed provoke an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe that also risked destabilizing the neighborhood India. But this, Nixon and Kissinger thought, was no reason for pressuring the United States’ Pakistani ally and inducing it to backpedal. The “Blood Telegram” was thus followed, two weeks later, by another, harsher telegram from Dacca, headed “Dissent from U.S. Policy toward East Pakistan,” which Bass presents as “probably the most blistering denunciation of U.S. foreign policy

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 130 on The Blood Telegram. Kissinger, Nixon and a Forgotten Genocide. H-Diplo. 06-05-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/71341/h-diplo-review-essay-130-blood-telegram-kissinger-nixon-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo ever sent by its own diplomats” (77). The second telegram was signed by twenty officials from the consulate’s diplomatic staff and the U.S. development and information programs in East Pakistan, and endorsed within hours by several State Department veteran specialists on South Asia. It condemned the U.S. government’s “failure to denounce atrocities” and “the suppression of democracy” (77). According to the signatories of the telegram, U.S. policy served neither “the moral interests broadly defined” nor “the national interests narrowly defined” (77). The U.S. government, the document continued, “has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy” (77).

This time there was no sarcasm in Washington. Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers were livid, shocked by what they perceived as an act of insubordination and fearing, correctly, immediate leaks to the press or political opponents. Rogers fumed: “It’s a terrible telegram. Couldn’t be worse – says we failed to defend American lives and are morally bankrupt” (79). The rebellion of the Dacca consulate did not alter the U.S. policy of inaction, but it cost Archer Blood his career. He was first recalled to Washington to work for the State Department’s personnel office and then pushed out of DC, Blood taught at the Army War College; it was briefly thought that he would have had a second chance under the Carter administration, but he finally retired from Foreign Service in 1982, accepting a position as diplomat-in-residence at Allegheny College.

A variety of reasons explain Yahya’s decision to launch an immensely brutal military crackdown. The main consequence was a humanitarian catastrophe of unspeakable proportions. Millions of Hindu refugees left East Pakistan and crossed the frontier to reach India’s border states of Assam, Tripura and, above all, West Bengal. Impromptu and ill-equipped camps were created and refugees lived there for months in appalling conditions. In East Pakistan, members of the Alawi League were systematically eliminated or incarcerated; massacres were carried out, beginning at Dacca University, where most students and professors were killed during the first days of the operation. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi faced a dramatic situation, but – skilled and cynical a politician as she was – she also sensed an opportunity to deal a blow to the Pakistani arch-enemy. She decided to support and arm Bengali resistance and began planning a full-scale war against Pakistan to be launched in the fall, when weather conditions – in East Pakistan as well as on the border with China – would be more favorable. The crisis in East Pakistan was transformed, almost from its very beginning, into a Cold-War issue. Pakistan was a crucial ally of the United States and Yahya was acting as intermediary in Nixon’s effort to reach out to Communist China. Albeit neutral, India received aid from the Soviet Union and Gandhi’s circle included advisors who openly advocated a closer relationship with Moscow. A crucial figure in this respect was the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, P.N. Haksar, whom Bass presents as “something like the Indian equivalent of H.R. Haldeman and Kissinger combined” (40).

A humanitarian disaster; a civil war; a developing conflict between two regional giants; a Cold War crisis: what happened in East Pakistan appeared to be all these things combined and, given the stakes and interests of the superpowers, the potential for escalation was very high. Nixon and

Kissinger did very little to prevent such an escalation. They sided unequivocally with Yahya, minimizing Pakistan’s responsibilities and attributed a moral equivalence – between Pakistan and India, the Pakistani army and the Bengali rebels – that was simply denied by facts. “Rather than being appalled by the ferocity of the crackdown,” Bass writes, “Kissinger – when speaking only to Nixon – was impressed. He thought it could work” (64). “When you look over the history of nations,” Nixon pondered during a conversation with his National Security Advisor, “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. Look what the British did when they took India” (64). Kissinger, Bass continues, desperately looked for massacres committed by Bengalis in order “to generate a moral equivalence that would exonerate Yahya” (84). Pakistan’s use of U.S. weaponry was known at the highest levels, but nothing was done and the Nixon administration did not pressure its ally to avoid using such arms against Bengali civilians. Finally, the pro-Pakistan tilt of Nixon and Kissinger was compounded by their strong hostility towards India and Indira Gandhi, whom the President possibly despised more than any other world leader. There was, in this resentment towards India, also a domestic political element, since both Kissinger and Nixon considered New Delhi a “State Department favorite” (6) and alleged Democratic “obsequiousness toward India … a prime example of liberal softheadedness” (6).

What followed was a decidedly self-defeating and, one must add, incredibly cynical response to the crisis in East Pakistan. That Yahya could not prevail in a civil war was widely understood at the White House, Kissinger’s wishful thinking notwithstanding. Just as well understood was the risk of India’s intervention and the ensuing, potentially uncontrollable, escalation of the conflict (Nixon and Kissinger frequently flirted with the idea of a Chinese intervention against India and hoped that this possibility could act as a deterrent). Not to mention, finally, the humanitarian toll that the conflict was taking.

But despite all of this, and the many warnings coming from experts, diplomats like Archer Blood, allies and members of Congress, the Administration did not modify its position, sticking – in the words of a State Department official – to an approach of “massive inaction” (31) that proved to be counter-productive as well as morally reprehensible. Why was this so? How can we explain a policy that did not benefit U.S. interests and that proved to be so unrealistic and impracticable? Bass offers various responses in what is in all respects an extraordinarily powerful, thoroughly documented, and well-written book. He stresses, and perhaps sometimes over-emphasizes, the personal dimension, in particular Nixon’s affection and respect for Yahya and his equally unparalleled aversion to Gandhi. Nixon considered Yahya a “good friend” (149); according to Samuel Hoskinson – one of Kissinger’s officials dealing with South Asia – Kissinger and Nixon were very fond of the Pakistani strongman: “they liked him … He was a soldier. He had style. He was a kind of jaunty guy … he was a man’s man. He wasn’t some woman running a country” (11). The relationship between the “woman” running India, Indira Gandhi, and Nixon was instead one “of mutual loathing” (6). And throughout the book one loses count of how many expletives are thrown at the Indian Prime Minister by Kissinger and Nixon, “bitch” being – without much creativity - the most frequent and common (see, for example.255).

This personal dimension was compounded by the stunning degree of prejudice, superficiality, and ignorance displayed throughout the crisis by Nixon and, even more, by his National Security Advisor. Their behavior was consistently informed by biases and preconceptions, those against the Bengalis, India, and its leaders apparently being the most obdurate and immutable. “The Bengalis aren’t very good fighters I guess” (57), Kissinger reflected while discussing the effectiveness of the Pakistani carnage in the early phase of the intervention. The same Bengalis were (Kissinger again) “by nature left” (87): “if we get in there now,” Kissinger continued, “we get West Pakistan turned against us, and … the Bengalis are going to get left anyway” (87). “The Indians are no goddam good” (153), Nixon exploded once, “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country, but they do” (154). The President and his National Security Advisor characterized the Indians, from time to time, as “a slippery, treacherous people” (177), “cowards” (301), “savages” (319) who were intent “to cannibalize” (319) Pakistan (“Cannibalize, that’s the word,” Nixon continued enjoying the definition he had come up with, “I should have thought of it earlier. You see, that really puts it to the Indians ... the connotation is savages. To cannibalize … that’s what the sons of bitches are up to,” 319).

Prejudice and ignorance – relevant and somehow disturbing as they were – did not represent the only motivations behind Nixon’s actions and choices. Pakistan was an important ally, counterbalancing India in the region. More importantly, Yahya was playing a crucial role in Kissinger and Nixon’s most ambitious, and potentially game-changing, diplomatic initiative: the opening to China. The Pakistani General was the message-carrier to Beijing: the key intermediary in the secret dialogue between China and the United States (a task he seemed to have immensely enjoyed: Yahya, Kissinger once joked with his staff, “hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” 177). The tilt toward Pakistan was thus motivated also by the China connection and, more generally, by the China-first policy of Nixon, which rendered secondary any other consideration (prevention of mass killings rarely making the top of Nixon’s or Kissinger’s list, anyway).

The opening to China was itself part of the broader geopolitical game played by Kissinger and Nixon: of a bipolar/Cold War set of mind which informed, shaped, and often distorted the analyses, policies, and discourse of the duo. The crisis in East Pakistan was thus read and interpreted through the lenses, often deforming and homologating, of the bipolar competition. It rapidly became a conflict of the ‘us’ (the U.S., Pakistan and the ally-in-becoming China) versus ‘them’ (India and the Soviet Union, which in August 1971 signed a new treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperating that incensed the Nixon administration). And it became a conflict for the regional, if not even the global, ‘balance of power,’ whatever that meant in the new (and to Kissinger frequently incomprehensible) international scenario of the 1970s. With great, quasi-Strangelovian gusto, the National Security Advisor envisaged scenarios of war between China and India, believing that the military mobilization of the latter could inhibit any anti-Pakistani actions of New Dehli. The Chinese, however, knew better: their vicious anti- Indian rhetoric was not matched by serious military action and there was in reality little chance that China would ever act to bail Pakistan out in case of an Indian attack.

Swift and effective, the attack came in November 1971, after a pointless visit of Indira Gandhi to Washington, marked by the mutual resentment between the U.S. President and the Indian Prime Minister. “It was explosive,” Bass writes, Nixon “thought she was a warmonger;” Gandhi “thought he was helping along a genocide… Kissinger later declared that these were undoubtedly the worst meetings Nixon held with any foreign leader” (253-7). The Pakistan army was no match for India, which crushed it in two weeks. Kissinger went apoplectic and, as in so many occasions during his tenure in government, he lost his rationality if not his outright sense of reality. Nixon reacted more soberly and proved in the end to be better equipped to understand, and accept, the consequences of Pakistan’s military defeat: “despite his visceral hatred of India”, Bass maintains, Nixon “saw the bigger picture: this was just one crisis in just one part of the world, where the United States was playing a losing hand” (273). For Kissinger, the likely outcome was instead a Cold War apocalypse: “if we collapse now, the Soviets won’t respect us for it; the Chinese will despise us,” he told the President, “this will then be the Suez ’56 episode of our administration” (271). Shifting to other, improbable historical analogies, Kissinger chose one of the most used, and abused, particularly in the 1970s: the alleged lesson of the 1930s. “I consider this our Rhineland” (289), he argued, fearing a possible extension of the war and India’s attempt to break apart West Pakistan. Once again, U.S. credibility appeared to be a stake, with Soviet allies taking notice of America’s impotence and the possible global, domino-like repercussions and reverberations. It was necessary – Kissinger argued – to prevent “a complete collapse of the world’s psychological balance of power, which will be produced if a combination of the Soviet Union and the Soviet armed client state can tackle a not so insignificant country without anybody doing anything” (299). A domino could start, he claimed, with Indonesia and the Middle East being potentially the next rows in the line.

Hence the “doomsday vision of a solitary United States isolated against a Soviet-dominated world” (307) and, once this paranoia did not materialize, the bizarre self-congratulatory reaction of the President and his Advisor, praising themselves for avoiding what was not going to happen anyway, and magnifying their ability to come off the crisis “like men” (306) (as often, Kissinger indulged in some melodramatic flattering of the President’s feats: “what you did,” he told Nixon, “was an heroic act … I know no other man in the country, no other man who would have done what you did,” 309). In this self-serving narrative, the two lonely “men” of the White House had been capable of detecting Moscow’s game, standing up to it and letting the Soviets know “they were looking down the gun barrel” (309). In reality, the Soviet Union, just like China, acted with moderation throughout the crisis and the Indo-Pakistani war, avoiding provocations and the brinkmanship so admired instead by Kissinger and Nixon. As for India, which Nixon came to consider a “Russian satellite” (323), the military triumph in East Pakistan and the ensuing independence of Bangladesh left little appetite for a further escalation of the war in the West. The phobic fantasies of Nixon and Kissenger had little connection to reality. Just as in Indochina, no dominoes began to fall. The relationship with India remained inevitably tense; one of the main setbacks for the U.S. was the paradoxical ingratitude of Pakistan, which felt betrayed by what it considered to be the insufficient commitment of the United States.

The Blood Telegram makes for an extraordinary reading, offering a detailed and compelling narrative of a key Cold War event, whose long-term repercussions are still visible today. Gary Bass pulls no punches in presenting a story – that of the U.S. reaction to the 1971 crisis in then East Pakistan – marked by superficiality, cynicism, ignorance, and moral indifference to what soon became a terrible humanitarian crisis. He does so by bringing possibly the best of his experience as a reporter to the study of Cold War history: something visible both in the diligence and accuracy of his archival research and in a style of writing that is rich, dense, and passionate, and still remarkably lucid and clear. The Blood Telegram is in all regards a page-turner, with parts – like the one on the secret meeting in New York between Kissinger and China’s ambassador to the UN, Huang Hua (301-3) – that seem to come from a (very good) spy novel rather than a history book. The research relies primarily on U.S. sources – White House tapes and NSC and State Department files overall – and on many interviews (not surprisingly, however, Kissinger declined Bass’s request for an interview). But Bass has also made a laudable effort to use Indian sources – including Haksar’s papers and various materials from the Indian national archives – which are albeit less comprehensive than U.S. documentary materials.

It is difficult to find flaws in a book like this, which deservedly won multiple awards (among them, the SHAFR Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award). The question of sources, used and available, poses, however, a problem. As it is often the case in Cold War historiography, a story with multiple actors is studied (and has to be studied) primarily through the documents of one of these actors. True, Bass is concerned mainly with Nixon and Kissinger: their indifference to the humanitarian catastrophe provoked by the Pakistani repression and their stunning mismanagement of what ensued. But he is compelled also to assess the actions, choices, motivations and objectives of the other subjects, Pakistani, Bengali and Indian leaders, or decision-makers in Moscow and Beijing. In other words, Bass has to face a structural problem which affects the study of the Cold War: namely the huge, and perhaps even increasing, archival asymmetries that still exist today, calls to global history and multi-archival/national research notwithstanding.

A second limit of The Blood Telegram is that the historiography is from time to time overlooked or not engaged with. The hyper-detailed narrative is sometimes pleonastic and on a few occasions is not matched by a sufficient attention to the broader context and to the more general Cold-War dynamics of the early1970s. Bass’s concern is clearly with the moral bankruptcy of the Nixon administration in face of the East Pakistan crisis; with the stunning cynicism of the President and Kissinger, their vulgar prejudices, and their absolute indifference to the plight of the Hindu population of East Pakistan. He tends to explain this, however, by occasionally applying stereotyped representations of Nixon and Kissinger, the most recurrent being the idea that the latter was driven by a coherent and a-moral realism. When discussing Kissinger’s hope to use China against India, for example, Bass writes that it “was a daring realpolitik gambit that [Klemens von] Metternich himself might have admired” (238). But what emerges in Bass’s splendid book, and what many historians now have come to realize, is in fact the astonishing shallowness of Kissinger’s analyses of international dynamics and the irresponsibility (and yes, ultimate unrealism) of the ensuing policy prescriptions. Supporting Yahya, alienating India, envisioning non-existent dominoes and Soviet victories, and foreseeing

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 130 on The Blood Telegram. Kissinger, Nixon and a Forgotten Genocide. H-Diplo. 06-05-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/71341/h-diplo-review-essay-130-blood-telegram-kissinger-nixon-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 6 H-Diplo unlikely Chinese intervention were all part and parcel of a vision – of the specific East Pakistan crisis and of the Cold War in South Asia broadly – that had little or no connection to reality. They were fantasies pertaining to table war games more than to the daily task of thoughtfully guiding the foreign policy of the main global power, and avoiding catastrophic escalations and conflicts. Bass does not reflect much on this aspect, but he still offers one of the most powerful indictments ever of Nixon and Kissinger: revealing, in striking detail, how improvised, superficial, and irresponsible their conduct of U.S. foreign relations often was.

Mario Del Pero is Professor of International History at SciencesPo, Paris. Among his most recent publications are “Libertà e Impero. Gli Stati Uniti e il Mondo, 1776-2011” (Rome, 2011), “Democrazie. L’Europa meridionale e la fine delle dittature,” with Víctor Gavín, Fernando Guirao and Antonio Varsori (Rome, 2010) andThe Eccentric Realist. Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY, 2009). He is currently working on a history of post-1970s U.S. foreign policy.