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January 26, 2003
REVIEWS: Using each other?
Pakistan’s half-a-century-old relationship with the US is a history of broken pledges and shattered dreams in our popular perception. From day one of this unequal equation between a superpower and a fledgling state, our leaders and policy makers laboured under a grand delusion. They thought they were entering into a symbiotic relationship with the US. That, obviously, was not the case — never has been — with Washington and the cavalcade of administrations coming to power there.
The Pakistani decision makers have also been, perennially, saddled with another handicap in regard to the US. They have never seen the equation with Washington for its own sake, or in its own perspective, but always in the larger backdrop and context of Pakistani foreign policy’s primordial frame of reference, the relationship — or lack of it — with India.
At the foundation stage of our putative relations with the US, the policy framers — both civilian and military — thought that with military assistance from America they could fill the huge resource and power gap with India. We now have the archival details of that formative phase available to fully corroborate this view. The record of a meeting in Karachi, in 1953, between the then US Vice President Richard Nixon on his maiden visit to Pakistan and Governor General Ghulam Mohammad, the first rapist of democracy in Pakistan, is well worth dilating on.
Ghulam Mohammad pressed Nixon for earliest commitment of military aid on the plea that without it Nehru will not be compelled to play ball on the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan. One is left to wonder if Ghulam Mohammad seriously believed that, armed with US help, Pakistan would be able to twist Nehru’s arm, or was that only a tactical ploy? Subsequent developments with India proved just the opposite. Nehru used Pakistan’s new fangled defence cooperation with America as an excuse to renege on his undertaking to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir.
Authentic historical evidence, now available, does not put the US in the dock for having led Pakistan up the garden path. The American leadership plainly and abundantly made clear to Pakistan at every stage that their military assistance, modest as it always was, was never intended to put Pakistan at par with India, or cultivate a level playing field for Pakistan to trade wits with its arch adversary. It was clearly and categorically a perception error of the Pakistani leadership that they could use the US to pull their chestnut out of the fire with India.
Now we can gain further insight into the behind-the-scenes happenings thanks to Fakir Aijazuddin who commands standing respect in Pakistan’s knowledgeable circles as a commentator and researcher of Pakistan’s history. Taking advantage of the US Freedom of Information Act (which makes classified and secret official documents and archives available to the public after 30 years), he has painstakingly compiled a tome of all the relevant documents and archives on the five most formidable years in US-Pakistan relations, between 1969 and 1974.
The fruit of his labour is a highly readable, but voluminous book on a fascinating and equally intriguing period in Pakistan’s tortured history. But it is not a book for ordinary readers who may feel lost in the thicket and plethora of archives. For researchers and scholars of history, though, it is an invaluable book which should take any serious reader on a journey of discovery.
It is plain that Washington never had any cobwebs of doubt that it could use Pakistan as a pawn on the chessboard in the epic struggle against communism. Indeed Pakistan’s being the largest Muslim country in the world (before its truncation in 1971) helped promote the marketing of its utility a lot but much more than that was its ideal strategic location in close physical proximity to both China and the then Soviet Union. Nixon’s 1953 scouting mission to Pakistan had brought Pakistan’s utilitarian status into its sharpest relief. The US had found the prop it needed to beef up its fight against communism.
Pakistan was quickly roped into collective alliance as a front-rank ally and given the price it deserved. But that defence readiness was in the line of containment of communism, not to make Pakistan an equal of India. Pakistan had been told, at the commencement of defence supplies, that it was not expected to use them against India. When it did, the line was quickly dried up in the wake of the 1965 war with India.
For Washington, Pakistan’s importance has never been more than that of a client state, a vassal to serve the interests of a global power whenever needed. Despite that, the Pakistani leadership has habitually wielded the US card to deceive and hoodwink the people of Pakistan and perpetuate their autocratic rule. This has been even truer under Pakistan’s periodical Bonapartes. We are, again, witnessing its replay in the ongoing context.
It was, again, Nixon as the 37th US President who used Pakistan’s excellent relations with China to bring about a sea change in the US policy of ‘no-contact’ with Beijing in the summer of 1971.
Credit in that trilateral equation was due to all the three actors involved: Nixon, Yahya and Zhou Enlai.
Nixon, despite his negative media image (which ultimately did him in when Watergate exploded), was perhaps the most knowledgeable of American presidents in foreign policy. He had a canny sense of timing to know when to put his communist-baiting past behind him and build bridges to China.
Yahhya, despite being a novice in international affairs and getting bogged down in East Pakistan, knew how to oblige Pakistan’s pay-master at a tangent where Pakistan’s role was crucial. He was ably assisted by the mandarins at the Foreign Office who performed on that occasion — as never before or since — as true professionals to rise to the occasion.
Zhou Enlai, sophisticated and suave and towering above all his peers in statesmanship, appreciated Pakistan’s declining fortunes at home and abroad and, befitting the role of a genuine friend, threw Yahya a life line. It is another matter that Yahya still hanged himself and Pakistan despite all of China’s effort to avert Pakistan’s truncation.
This is a book which should be compulsory reading for our Foreign Office mandarins so they may avoid the follies and blunders of their forebears.
The White House and Pakistan — secret declassified documents, 1969-1974
Selected and Edited by F.S. Aijazuddin
Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, P.O. Box 13033, Karachi-75350
Tel: 021-4523025
ISBN 0-19-579802-3
659pp. Rs725
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