Home ›› 04 Apr 2022 ›› Governance
Bangladesh is set to mark Monday as the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties with the United States that had tilted towards Pakistan in 1971, while a key US policymaker at that time, Henry Kissinger, later called the stance “a case history of political misjudgement”.
“The issue (Pakistan crisis) burst upon us while Pakistan was our only channel to China,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his White House Years, where he served as US President Richard Nixon’s national security assistant and subsequently, the secretary of state.
Documents now suggest that in 1971, the duo were frantically trying to build relations with Peking, now Beijing, to negate the Soviet Union’s influence in that cold war era in a bipolar world, taking the advantage of the Sino-Soviet conflict, though both the countries were communist ones.
It appears the state department, which is the US foreign office, was side-lined or kept in dark about the Nixon administration’s clandestine efforts.
Pakistan’s support in the process visibly obligated the Nixon administration to take Islamabad’s side and even at the tail-end of Bangladesh’s Liberation War, the US sent its Seventh Fleets’ task force led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal.
Kissinger, however, wrote that the Seventh Fleet was sent to protect West Pakistan and “we have to prevent India from attacking West Pakistan; that’s the major thing”. Yet, he commented that “the outcome of an independent Bangladesh was foreordained”, but added that the events related to Bangladesh’s Liberation War were “perhaps the most complex issue” of Nixon’s term in office.
Kissinger reiterated this view later as well in a conversation with Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman when he said Bangladesh’s independence was virtually inevitable but he wanted to see it under different circumstances.
According to a declassified US state department document Nixon, Kissinger and US Attorney General Mitchell in a conversation among them on December 8, 1971, became sure that the Pakistani army was set to concede defeat and Bangladesh’s emergence was inevitable.
Yet the US sent the Seventh Fleet under the pretext of evacuating American citizens from the warzone but Kissinger wrote “in reality, (it was aimed) to give emphasis to our warnings against an attack on West Pakistan”.
The declassified documents including those of the CIA cables suggested the attack aimed particularly to give a warning to Indian high ups not to invade West Pakistan after liberating Bangladesh.
A currently declassified CIA cable of December 6, 1971, leaked a briefing of the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that revealed that New Delhi had three war objectives.
Those were – the quick liberation of Bangladesh, the incorporation into India of the southern part of Azad Kashmir for strategic rather than territorial reasons and to destroy Pakistani military striking power so that it never attempts to challenge India in the future.
The documents suggest that the Nixon administration feared that Gandhi would wage a full-scale military attack on West Pakistan soon after Bangladesh’s liberation.
This apprehension prompted the US to exert maximum political pressure through the UN along with the military movement to safeguard its ally West Pakistan.
