Each democracy could claim to have achieved a significant portion of its goals. While welcoming and feeding millions of refugees, India succeeded in splitting East and West Pakistan by force and emerging as the midwife of an independent Bangladesh. The United States, after attempting to head off a war through both humanitarian measures and diplomacy, successfully deterred a major Indian campaign against West Pakistan while preserving its course of rapprochement with China and détente with the Soviet Union.

COINCIDING WITH these events was a violent internal crisis in Pakistan. On March 25, 1971, after the collapse of compromise talks between East and West Pakistani politicians, Pakistani forces began Operation Searchlight, a systematic plan to eliminate all resistance in East Pakistan through an overwhelming application of force. This occurred just as Nixon and Kissinger were awaiting a definitive reply from China to messages sent that winter through Pakistan and Romania concerning a prospective high-level bilateral meeting in Beijing (a reply that arrived in April through the Pakistani channel).

In Bass’s account, an obsessive and unwarranted desire to preserve Pakistan as a conduit for the unfolding U.S.-Chinese rapprochement translated into “a green light for [Yahya Khan’s] killing campaign.”²³ In this version of events, the opening to China, while “an epochal event,” was done at the cost of American complicity in genocide, as “the Bengalis became collateral damage for realigning the global balance of power.”²⁴

This incendiary accusation confuses both the order of events and the ability of governments to bring about rapid changes in other states’ internal practices. To blame the White House for failing to secure a peaceful outcome to the winter 1971 East-West Pakistan political impasse, as Bass does—much less to equate this failure with complicity in genocide—sets the bar illogically high. The results of the 1970 election raised fundamental questions about Pakistan’s viability as a unified state. The military—already amply armed and equipped by China, France, the Soviet Union and the United States under Nixon’s predecessors—unsurprisingly declared its refusal to abide an East-West split. Would preemptively “threatening to cut off aid” have moderated the generals in charge of managing the transition to democracy, or reinforced a sense of siege?²⁵

Bass never seriously considers whether, given Pakistan’s existing geographic, ethnic and political divisions, the United States could have prevented its two wings’ slide toward violent dissolution.²⁶ In their widely respected study War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh—based on interviews with Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi participants in these events—scholars Richard Sisson and Leo Rose assessed that the American capacity to shape events within Pakistan at this time was, in fact, limited:

The question remains whether Yahya would have responded to a strong public condemnation of the crackdown by moderating his repressive policy in East Pakistan. The general consensus, even among the critics in the government, was probably not. Projected U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan in 1971 was not of a magnitude to provide Washington with much leverage to pressure the leadership in Rawalpindi to change policies in East Pakistan to avoid the loss of aid. . . . By 1971 Washington lacked much clout in Rawalpindi, particularly on issues that, in West Pakistani eyes, struck at the very basis of their national existence.²⁷

On the particular issue of American arms transfers to Pakistan, the total U.S. cutoff of the long-term weapons pipeline (which in any case was exceedingly modest) predictably had no appreciable effect on the ethnic-cleansing actions of the Pakistani army in East Pakistan. As we have seen recently with respect to Egypt, such U.S. punishing actions have a poor record of actually influencing foreign governments that believe that they are fighting for the fundamental future of their countries.

Even so, Bass has scoured the record for coarse quotations to back his biased and incendiary charges, sidestepping (and seeming purposefully to avoid) ample evidence that Nixon and Kissinger pursued a far more balanced and constructive course—one in which the United States emerged as the leading donor and organizer of East Pakistan’s cyclone relief; provided hundreds of thousands of tons of grain and extensive emergency supplies and financial assistance to prevent a famine in East Pakistan and among refugees in India; attempted through diplomacy and pressure to avert an Indian-Pakistani conflict; and then, when war broke out, pressed for an early UN-sponsored cease-fire to prevent the fighting from encompassing West Pakistan. All this was achieved while carrying out a historic opening to China and ultimately promoting détente with the Soviet Union, which backed India during the conflict. It takes an obsessively strained reading to find in this record, as Bass does, “one of the worst moments of moral blindness in U.S. foreign policy.”²⁸

Much of the force of Bass’s narrative derives from vivid, often-inflammatory quotations from the Nixon tapes, and there is no shortage of those. No crass Nixon statement or sarcastic aside seems to have gone unquoted. Yet presidential vulgarity was hardly a Nixon innovation. Dwight Eisenhower swore like the trooper he was. At a 1953 summit with Winston Churchill, Eisenhower dismissed Churchill’s advice to engage the post-Stalin Soviet leadership, stating (as Churchill’s private secretary recorded) that “Russia was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present ‘beat’ into the back streets.”²⁹ Lyndon Johnson once pressed a point with the Greek ambassador as follows: “F*** your Parliament and your Constitution, America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea.”³⁰ In short, Bass appears to be curiously offended that conversations in the Oval Office are often not the stuff of a church social.

FURTHERMORE, BASS'S treatment of some sources suggests that he has privileged outrage over accuracy. For example, he recounts a July 30, 1971, Senior Review Group meeting convened to discuss American policy in South Asia as follows:

In a Situation Room meeting, Kissinger defended the president’s man. “We’re not out of gas with Yahya,” he said. “Yahya will be reasonable.” He preferred to be gentle with Yahya, not hectoring or squeezing him. When a State Department official suggested getting the army out of running East Pakistan, Kissinger stood up for Pakistan’s sovereignty: “Why is it our business to tell the Pakistanis how to run their government?”³¹

Heartless realpolitik? Not quite. No reader of Bass’s account would guess that Kissinger was actually discussing how to resolve a refugee crisis and deliver emergency American food aid to the Bengali population. Responding to the argument that a push for political reconciliation should precede further humanitarian assistance, Kissinger argued that the threat of a famine was too urgent: “We’re not out of gas with Yahya. I think he will do a lot of things that are reasonable if we concentrate on the refugee problem. One thing he will not do is talk to the Awami League, at least not as an institution. He might talk to some League leaders as individuals.”³² The immediate focus, Kissinger insisted, should be on providing food aid:

On famine relief, we must get a program started under any and all circumstances. If famine develops, it will generate another major outflow of refugees. This is one thing we can do something about. I think we can get considerable Pakistani cooperation on this. . . . But the famine will start in October. Under the best possible scenario, political accommodation will have barely begun in October.³³

As for a colleague’s argument that the United States should “take [the Pakistani army] out of the civil administration” because a civilian presence would encourage refugees to return, Kissinger asked: “We can appropriately ask them for humanitarian behavior, but can we tell them how to run things?”³⁴ The United States, he argued, was better off dealing with an existing government and insisting that it accept American food relief and logistical guidance:

If we are faced with a huge famine and a huge new refugee outflow in October and we’re still debating political accommodation, we’ll have a heluva lot to answer for. We need an emergency relief plan and we need to tell Yahya that this is what has to be done to get the supplies delivered. Yahya will be reasonable.³⁵

None of this discussion emerges in the Bass account, which splices out-of-context quotations to recast a discussion of emergency humanitarian assistance into a scene of careless indifference to suffering. Similar misrepresentations recur throughout the book. Bass also glosses over the action points decided upon in the meeting, which included agreement to prepare “a comprehensive relief program for East Pakistan, including what has already been moved and where the bottlenecks are” as well as “a telegram, to be approved by the President, outlining an approach to Yahya telling him what needs to be done on refugees, food relief, etc.”³⁶

Even as delicate diplomacy unfolded, Nixon and Kissinger made repeated appeals to the Pakistani military to moderate its domestic practices and seek political compromise. In May 1971, Nixon wrote to Yahya Khan pressing him to keep the peace with India and honor his pledges of a transition to civilian governance. Nixon warned that this was both a humanitarian matter and a strategic imperative:

Image: Pullquote: Under Bass's definition of 'complicity' with atrocities, few practitioners of American foreign policy would escape unindicted.Essay Types: Essay