The patterns of undermining sovereignty on the part of an unelected bureaucrat invested with almost unlimited authority continues.
We now know of one reason why the general was so favored, at a time when he had made himself-and his patrons–responsible for the grossest war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The link is here.
In April 1971, a United States ping-pong team had accepted a surprise invitation to compete in Beijing and by the end of that month, using the Pakistani ambassador as an intermediary, the Chinese authorities had forwarded a letter inviting Nixon to send an envoy.
Just a young Bavarian.
Thus there was one motive of realpolitik for the shame that Nixon and Kissinger were to visit on their own country for its complicity in the extermination of the Bengalis.
So much going on here.
Those who like to plead realpolitik, however, might wish to consider some further circumstances. There already was, and had been for some time, a back channel between Washington and Beijing.
Realpolitik is politics or diplomacy based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral and ethical premises.
It ran through Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania-not a much more decorative choice but not, at that stage, a positively criminal one.
There was no reason to confine approaches, to a serious person like Chou En Lai, to the narrow channel afforded by a blood-soaked (and short- lived, as it turned out) despot like the "delicate and tactful" Yahya Khan.
Either Chou En Lai wanted contact, in other words, or he did not. As Lawrence Lifschultz, the primary historian of this period, has put it: Winston Lord, Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council, stressed to investigators the internal rationalization developed within the upper echelons of the Administration.
Lord told [the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] "We had to demonstrate to China we were a reliable government to deal with.
We had to show China that we respect a mutual friend." How, after two decades of belligerent animosity with the People's Republic, mere support for Pakistan in its bloody civil war was supposed to demonstrate to China that the US "was a reliable government to deal with" was a mystifying proposition which more cynical observers of the events, both in and outside the US government, consider to have been an excuse justifying the simple convenience of the Islamabad link-a link which Washington had no overriding desire to shift.
Second, the knowledge of this secret diplomacy and its accompanying privileges obviously freed the Pakistani general of such restraints as might have inhibited him.
He told his closest associates, including his minister of information, G.W. Choudhury, that his private understanding with Washington and Beijing would protect him.
Choudhury later wrote: "If Nixon and Kissinger had not given him that false hope, he'd have been more realistic." Thus, the collusion with him in the matter of China increases the direct complicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the massacres.
(There is another consideration outside the scope of this book, which involves the question: why did Kissinger confine his China diplomacy to channels provided by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes?
Why was an open diplomacy not just as easy, if not easier?
The answer- which also lies outside the scope of this book -is apparently that surreptitiousness, while not essential in itself, was essential if Nixon and Kissinger were going to be able to take the credit for it.)
It cannot possibly be argued, in any case, that the saving of Kissinger's private correspondence with China was worth the deliberate sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Bengali civilians.
And-which is worse still-later and fuller disclosures now allow us to doubt that this was indeed the whole motive. The Kissinger policy toward Bangladesh may well have been largely conducted for its own sake, as a means of gratifying his boss's animus against India and as a means of preventing the emergence of Bangladesh as a self-determining state in any case.
The diplomatic commonplace term "tilt"-signifying that mixture of signals and nuances and codes that describe a foreign policy preference that is often too embarrassing to be openly avowed-actually originates in this dire episode.
On 6 March 1971, Kissinger summoned a meeting at the National Security Council and–in advance of the crisis in East-West Pakistan relations that was by then palpable and predictable to those attending-insisted that no preemptive action be taken.
Those present who suggested that a warning to General Yahya Khan be issued, essentially advising him to honor the election results, he strongly opposed.
His subsequent policy was as noted above. After returning from China in July, he began to speak in almost Maoist phrases about a Soviet-Indian plot to dismember and even annex part of Pakistan, which would compel China to intervene on Pakistan's side. (In pursuit of this fantasy of confrontation, he annoyed Admiral Elmo Zumwalt by ordering him to dispatch the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise from the coast of Vietnam to the Bay of Bengal, while giving it no stated mission.)
But no analyst in the State Department or the CIA could be found to underwrite such a bizarre prediction and, at a meeting of the Senior Review Group, Kissinger lost his temper with this insubordination.
"The President always says to tilt toward Pakistan, but every proposal I get is in the opposite direction. Sometimes I think I'm in a nuthouse."
The Nixon White House was, as it happens, in the process of becoming exactly that, but his hearers only had time to notice that a new power-term had entered Washington's vernacular of crisis and conspiracy.
