WASHINGTON, June 29: The US government under President Richard Nixon had backed Pakistan even before the 1971 India-Pakistan war because it believed that peace and stability in South Asia could only be maintained by aiding Islamabad against a stronger India, newly de-classified documents said. Even before the ‘tilt’ towards Pakistan during the war, the Nixon administration preferred it to India as it believed New Delhi was stronger then because of the military aid it received from Russia, it said.

The US state department has declassified many documents this month on US foreign policy of the time. One key conversation transcript, discussed at a seminar at the State Department which ended on Wednesday, comes from the meeting between President Nixon and the then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in the White House on Nov 5, 1971, shortly after a meeting with the visiting Indira Gandhi.

The documents show that President Nixon had developed a “special relationship” with Pakistan’s then military dictator, General Yahya Khan.

One document quotes him as saying: “Pakistanis are straightforward and sometimes extremely stupid. The Indians are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line.”

The documents show that Mr Nixon had a soft corner for Pakistan because it was serving as a secret conduit on behalf of Nixon and Mr Kissinger in their attempts to open contacts with China, it said.

In a White House conversation with Mr Kissinger on June 4, 1971, President Nixon berates his ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, for wanting to, as Mr Kissinger puts it, “help India push the Pakistanis out”.

President Nixon says: “I don’t want him to come in with that kind of jackass thing with me. Keating, like every ambassador who goes over there, goes over there and gets sucked in.”

Mr Kissinger then says: “Those sons-of-bitches, who never have lifted a finger for us, why should we get involved in the morass of East Pakistan?

“If East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool. It’s going to be 100 million people; they have the lowest standard of living in Asia.”

President Nixon replies: “Yeah.”

Mr Kissinger: “They’re going to become a ripe field for communist infiltration.”

President Nixon then openly courted China to try to turn the tide of the war Pakistan’s way.

With the Indian army and armed Bengali separatists winning, the US on Dec. 10, 1971 urged Beijing to mobilise troops towards India, saying the US would back it if the Soviet Union became involved.

China declined and on Dec 16, the war ended with the Indian army and Bengali separatists taking Dhaka.

A major theme of the just-released volume is on the Nixon administration’s policy of one-time only exceptions of arms sales to Pakistan, a policy that reversed the previous government’s moratorium on lethal military sales to both countries after the 1965 war.

The documents said US-India relations, which was not good at that time, deteriorated even further when Mr Nixon decided to sell 100 tanks to Pakistan, a deal which was objected to by his Secretary of State William Rogers.

India responded by closing some United States Information Service cultural centres, it said.

After the war, the Nixon administration offered substantial economic aid and limited military aid to Pakistan under its new civilian President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as part of the US adjustment to a new balance of power in the region.

Though Pakistan did not consider the military aid sufficient, relations between both the countries were generally good at that time.

US relations with India showed some improvement when Washington responded cautiously to overtures from India for better bilateral relations, it said.

There was, however, the realisation among the US intelligence community and the Washington bureaucracy that India had a growing potential for producing nuclear weapons.

On Afghanistan, the document said, the US was prepared to use diplomacy, aid, and cultural programmes to offset Soviet influence in the country.

The issue of whether Afghanistan was spending too much on sophisticated military equipment was a complicating factor to aid programmes designed to counter Afghanistan’s general economic backwardness, government inefficiency, and extended drought, it said.

About Bangladesh, it said, the Nixon administration decided to recognise the country as an independent state in the backdrop of Pakistan’s opinion that such a step should not be ‘premature.’