After Dhaka becomes independent, Kissinger tells Nixon he has saved ‘West Pakistan’ – Times of India

Kolkata: A day after Dhaka’s independence on December 16, 1971, then-President Richard Nixon was told by his strategic advisor Henry Kissinger that he had “saved West Pakistan” according to confidential papers after it was declassified by the US Department of Defense. ” Was. Of the state
The visit to this ironic accolade came eight-and-a-half months after the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation said in a secret meeting that they believed their protégé General Yahya Khan could quell the uprising in the past, amid the debacle of American diplomacy. will be able to do. Pakistan with naked military power.
“Congratulations sir. You saved West Pakistan,” Kissinger said over the phone to his boss Nixon, about 16 hours after General AAK Niazi signed the surrender of East Pakistan and about the time that the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi announced a unilateral ceasefire on the Western Front on 17 December. standard time.
Elaborating on the awkward conversation, Ambassador Pinak R Chakraborty, former Bangladesh High Commissioner, who is currently writing a book on Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation, said Kissinger was playing a “suspicious role”.
“Their (US administration’s) main objective was to befriend China by using Pakistanis as middlemen during the months of conflict. His comments were an attempt to take credit with Pakistanis in a hopeless situation and an attempt to appease one Must be read as difficult boss,” Chakraborty told PTI on Thursday.
However, the fact that it was a war of liberation was misunderstood by the Americans from the start.
About eight and a half months earlier, on March 29, 1971, Kissinger was telling Nixon in a similar telephone conversation that Pakistan would be able to stop an insurgency in its eastern wing and his president cited the example of the British invasion of India. To justify that belief.
The US National Security Adviser told Nixon in a phone call on March 26, 1971, shortly after the breakup of Pakistani military rule in East Pakistan: “Obviously Yahya has got control of East Pakistan … all the experts were saying That 30,000 people (Pakistan Army) at that time in the East) can’t control 75 million (Bangladesh’s population) … at the moment it seems to be quiet.”
President Nixon replied that this ability of a small force to control a large population was normal and added: “Look what the Spanish did when they came and took the Incas. Look what the British did by occupying India .
“The Americans completely misread the situation. They failed to understand the people’s desire to be independent and the fast pace of changing the course of history,” said the former Bangladesh High Commissioner in New Delhi and allegiance to the Bangladesh government Ambassador Tariq Karim, one of the first East Pakistani diplomats to make the announcement, said in exile.
On 8 December, when Pakistani security in East Pakistan was falling before an attack by Joint Command of the Indian Army and the Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini (liberation warriors), Nixon and Kissinger were busy plotting ways to convert or arrest the war rider. Were. ,
Kissinger, in a meeting with Nixon and Attorney General Newton Mitchell, which is now declassified, said that he “received you a message from the Shah (of Iran), in which he says that he is supplying ammunition (an endangered species). Pakistan) – he is doing it now.”
The illustrious diplomat also revealed that Iran would send fighter jets to defend Jordan from Israel, while Jordan would send jets to Pakistan for the war effort against India.
The US NSA also expressed apprehensions that India would launch a massive attack on West Pakistan after winning the war in the East. “The Indian plan is now clear. They are going to move their army from East Pakistan to the West. Then they will destroy Pakistan’s land forces and air forces, take over the part of Kashmir that is in Pakistan and then close it up,” Kissinger warned.
“When this has happened, the centrifugal forces in West Pakistan will be freed. Balochistan and the Northwest Frontier will celebrate. West Pakistan will become a kind of complex Afghanistan,” said Henry Kissinger.
The dire warnings seemed to work, and President Nixon agreed in the same conversation to move the American Seventh Fleet from the waters of Vietnam to the Bay of Bengal under the pretext of evacuating American civilians from the war zone. Nixon replied, “Will you transfer the aircraft carrier? I’ll do it right away. I won’t wait 24 hours.”
Led by the 75,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, the Seventh Fleet was considered the most formidable naval force of the time. The only aircraft carrier India had was the aging Vikrant which was ready to withstand heavy force in the event of a disaster.
Bangladesh freedom fighter Colonel Kazi Sajjad Ali Zaheer (retd), who was awarded the Padma Shri by India earlier this year, said, “Prominent Democrats like Ted Kennedy, brother of the deceased US President Robert Kennedy, were with us. But the Republicans were blind. The command of America’s Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal did not really affect the war as the Russians quickly sent their own fleet to counter this chess move by the West.
In a later conversation in 1972, Kissinger told the US President: “So far no one has understood what we did in India-Pakistan and how we saved the Chinese alternative we needed for the bloody Russians.” Why should we give a damn about Bangladesh?”