The Longest August (31 page)

Nixon's perception of the Indian diplomats as “slippery, treacherous people” was enhanced when he learned of the Indo-Soviet Treaty. He viewed it as an undisguised collusion between Delhi and Moscow—and an extension of Soviet power in South Asia. During the latter half of August, Nixon told a meeting of the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), formed to discuss the South Asia crisis, that while the Pakistanis were “straightforward” if sometimes “extremely stupid,” the “Indians are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line.” He stressed that “the US must not—cannot—allow India to use the refugees as a pretext to break up Pakistan.”
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The unending flow of refugees from East Pakistan—the figure touching six million by August, with three-quarters of them Hindu—surviving in ramshackle camps in West Bengal and surrounding states, was creating an unsustainable burden on Delhi's resources. On the other hand, these camps became an abundant source of volunteers keen to be trained as guerrillas.

In the formation of the Mukti Bahini, RAW cooperated with the Indian Army. By acquiring the nine-year-old Establishment 22 (aka Special Frontier Force) as its armed wing, it had gained experience in training volunteers as guerrillas and saboteurs. A liaison between it and the army was maintained through the military advisor to RAW's director and the Military Intelligence Advisory Group. By then, RAW had developed sophisticated signals intelligence and photo-reconnaissance capabilities, thanks to CIA assistance.

At the conclave of the Bengali officers held in Calcutta from July 11 to 17 under the joint aegis of the Indian Army and RAW, East Pakistan was divided into eleven sectors. The Liberation Force was separated into regular troops and guerrillas supported by intelligence volunteers. The guerrillas' tasks were to raid and ambush military targets, sabotage factories and power plants, and disrupt communications systems. They were also taught how to compel the Pakistani forces to scatter in small units, thus making them vulnerable to lethal attacks.
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Postmonsoon Period

By September, India was processing twenty thousand guerrillas a month in ten camps, with eight Indian soldiers appointed to coach a hundred volunteers each.
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As monsoon rains tapered off, infiltration by Mukti Bahini guerrillas rose steeply.

On the other side, intent on showing that normalcy had returned to East Pakistan, Yahya Khan declared a general amnesty in early September and replaced Tikka Khan with a moderate politician, Abdul Malik, as governor. Tikka Khan was reassigned to lead the Multan-based Corps II in West Pakistan. Lieutenant General Niazi succeeded Tikka Khan as the commander of the Eastern Command.

On the diplomatic front, after signing a friendship treaty with Delhi, the Kremlin did not alter its earlier stance on East Pakistan. In pursuance of its policy to befriend Pakistan after the 1966 Tashkent Conference, it had started supplying arms to Islamabad. Now it maintained that the conflict in East Pakistan was an “internal problem” of the Islamabad regime.

To persuade the Kremlin to alter its policy, Indira Gandhi flew to Moscow in late September. There she reiterated her argument that the nonstop flow of refugees from East Pakistan was severely straining the limited resources of her government. Because of the wretched living conditions in the camps people were dying in droves, she added. The subsequent Indo-Soviet communiqué referred to the need for all necessary measures to stop and reverse the refugee exodus, now touching eight million.
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From mid-October, the Indian troops started using artillery fire to give cover to Mukti Bahini infiltrators. To their disappointment, these partisans were rarely able to hold their ground when the Pakistan Army counterattacked. As a result, the Indians' shelling along the India–East Pakistan frontier became more intense, and the size of the infiltration by Mukti Bahini ranks swelled.

India Gandhi's diplomatic drive continued, with a focus on highlighting the ongoing flow of refugees from East Pakistan. Her three-week tour of the capitals of Western Europe and North America ended in Washington on November 4.

She was welcomed by Nixon with full military honors on the South Lawn at the White House. During their meeting Nixon made a case for avoiding a new war and offered to fix a time limit for Yahya Khan to
reach a political settlement in East Pakistan. Emulating the response of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, to the mention of the Kashmir dispute by a foreign leader, Indira Gandhi listened “with aloof indifference,” according to Kissinger, who was present. By refraining from making any comment on Nixon's presentation, she successfully created an invisible yet impenetrable wall between her and Nixon. On his part, the American president said next to nothing about the millions of refugees who had sought haven in India.

After Gandhi's departure from the White House on November 5, Nixon reviewed her visit with Kissinger. “We really slobbered over the old witch,” said Nixon according to the documents declassified by the State Department in June 2005. (This was apparently a reference to the praise he showered on her when in his welcoming speech he said that Indira Gandhi had “the unique distinction, through the parliamentary system of India that more people have voted for her leadership than for any leader in the whole history of the world.”
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) “The Indians are bastards anyway,” remarked Kissinger. “They are starting a war there.” He added, “While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too. She will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn't give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she's got to go to war.”
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By a strange coincidence, on November 5 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in Beijing as head of a Pakistani delegation to seek China's backing. But the Chinese leaders avoided making a firm commitment to side with Pakistan militarily. Five days later, Nixon instructed Kissinger to ask the Chinese to move some troops toward the Indian frontier. “Threaten to move forces or move them, Henry, that's what they must do now.” Kissinger conveyed the message to Huang Hua, China's freshly appointed ambassador to the United Nations.
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Beijing had to take into account the eight mountain divisions that India had deployed along the Indo-Tibetan border. Nonetheless, it amassed soldiers on India's frontier. Delhi threatened to bomb the Lop Nor nuclear facility in Xinjiang, so Beijing redeployed its troops.
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To balance that move, it decided to shore up West Pakistan's defense capabilities. It was aided in this enterprise by the existence of the five-year-old Karakoram Highway, which traversed the Khunjerab Pass. Each day one hundred trucks, carrying civilian and military goods, arrived in Gilgit from the Chinese city of Kashgar.

India's military planners had finessed a strategy that integrated the secret Establishment 22 forces into the fight being waged against Pakistan.
According to the selective leaks from the classified official history of the Bangladesh war on its fortieth anniversary, by early November 1971 about 51,000 Mukti Bahini fighters were active in East Pakistan. By operating mainly along the frontier with India, they had succeeded in drawing the Pakistani troops forward to the India border, thereby easing the way for regular Indian soldiers' eventual thrust to Dacca.
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As it was, during November units of regular Indian soldiers resorted to conducting overnight guerrilla actions inside East Pakistan and then withdrawing across the frontier.

Ground War in East Pakistan

On the night of November 21, discontinuing their earlier practice of returning to Indian soil after pinprick attacks in East Pakistan, India's forces stayed put. Two days later Yahya Khan declared a state of emergency in all of Pakistan and called on Pakistanis to prepare for war with India. By November 25 several Indian Army divisions had attacked key border regions of East Pakistan, using armor and artillery fire. To divert Pakistani soldiers from major population centers, RAW's director, Rameshwar Kao, pressed into action the CIA-trained dissident Tibetans. Armed with hastily imported Bulgarian assault rifles and US-made carbines, and commanded by Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban, they poured into the Chittagong Hill tracts, inhabited by East Asian tribes. They tied down Pakistani troops in low-grade border skirmishes.
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Niazi had sixty-five thousand troops under his command. He faced Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the commanding officer of India's Eastern Command in Calcutta, with nearly four times as many soldiers. This compelled Niazi to adopt a defensive strategy. He withdrew his forces from scattered border pickets and assembled them in fortified defensive positions at major urban centers in the interior. “The whole nation is proud of you and you have their full support,” read the message he received from General Abdul Hamid Khan, chief of staff, on November 30. That day the military high command in Rawalpindi decided to launch Operation Chengiz Khan (Genghis Khan) on the western front of India on December 2, later postponed by twenty-four hours, without informing Niazi.
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At 5:40
pm
on Friday, December 3, Pakistan bombed eleven Indian airfields near its western frontier and mounted artillery attacks on
India-held Kashmir. When Indira Gandhi was informed of this move, she remarked, “Thank God, they have attacked us.”
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This meant that India would not be accused of aggression, since its eleven-day-old military moves in East Pakistan were considered by outsiders as part of the nationalist Bengalis' ongoing clandestine armed struggle. At midnight Indira Gandhi declared war on Pakistan.

Hot War, Frenzied Diplomacy

On December 4, India launched an integrated ground, sea, and air invasion of East Pakistan of such might that it won the moniker of a “blitzkrieg without tanks.” Accompanied by Mukti Bahini fighters, Indian troops penetrated the East Pakistani frontier at five points and advanced on Dacca from the north, east, and west. Niazi's forces tried to slow down the enemy's advance by blowing up bridges. Aided by Mukti Bahini guerrillas already inside East Pakistan, the invading forces cut off communications between the capital and other important cities. And by capturing vital railheads they immobilized the defenders. The Indians responded to Pakistan's air and ground assaults on their soil with attacks on targets in West Pakistan.

The third Indo-Pakistan war unleashed a diplomatic frenzy. At the UN Security Council, George Herbert Walker Bush, the American ambassador to the United Nations, introduced a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of armed forces by India and Pakistan. It was vetoed by the Soviet Union. The CIA chief, Richard Helms, told Nixon that while Gandhi hoped China would not intervene from the north, the Kremlin had warned her that the Chinese were still able to “rattle the sword” in the Ladakh region of Kashmir.

On December 6 India recognized the Calcutta-based provisional government of Bangladesh. Yahya Khan responded by forming a civilian administration with Nurul Amin, a Bengali from East Pakistan, as prime minister and Bhutto as deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

By December 9, the Indians had blunted Pakistan's offensive on their western front and destroyed its oil storage tanks in Karachi.

On December 10 Kissinger met Huang at the United Nations. “If the People's Republic were to consider the situation on the Indian subcontinent a threat to its security, and if it took measures to protect its security, the US would oppose efforts of others to interfere with the People's
Republic,” he told Huang. “We are not recommending any particular steps; we are simply informing you about the actions of others. The movement of our naval force is still east of the Straits of Malacca and will not become obvious until Sunday evening [December 12] when they cross the Straits.” Kissinger then offered Washington's assessment of the military situation on the subcontinent. “The Pakistani Army in the East has been destroyed,” he said. “The Pakistani Army in the West will run out of what we call POL—gas and oil—in another two or three weeks, two weeks probably, because the oil storage capacity in Karachi has been destroyed. We think that the immediate objective must be to prevent an attack on the West Pakistan Army by India. We are afraid that if nothing is done to stop it, East Pakistan will become a Bhutan and West Pakistan will become a Nepal. And India with Soviet help would be free to turn its energies elsewhere.”
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Both Washington and Beijing feared that India's invasion of West Pakistan would lead to Soviet domination of South Asia, a prospect they were determined to abort. Nixon encouraged China to further increase its arms shipments to Pakistan.

Bhutto arrived at the United Nations on the evening of December 10 to shore up Pakistan's case.

What happened on the diplomatic front during the next crucial days was captured in the message Kissinger sent to Zhou Enlai on December 17. According to Kissinger, on December 12 the United States urged the Soviet Union through its embassy in Washington to pressure India to end the war. The next day Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin informed the White House that the Kremlin was consulting India and would inform it of the result. “Early Tuesday morning, December 14, the Soviet Union sent a message which, in addition to some standard Soviet views on the South Asian situation, relayed firm assurance that the Indian leadership had no plans of seizing West Pakistan territory or attacking West Pakistan armed forces.” Later that morning, instructed by Nixon, Deputy Secretary of State General Alexander Haig met Soviet chargé d'affaires Yuli Vorontsov and told him that the president and Kissinger had found the Soviet message imprecise on India's intentions in West Pakistan and wanted clarification on two points: Did the Soviet note include Azad Kashmir, and did it involve a return to the exact borders before the outbreak of hostilities? Vorontsov expressed his personal understanding that this was precisely the Soviet view.