Blood feud & the birth of Bangladesh

Bangladeshs independence was written in the words of Blood Archer Blood, a courageous American diplomat who did not take up arms but who fired the first salvo in the war of conscience against his own government. Four decades later, the US continues to bankroll the Pak military
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK The front page of the Pakistans premier newspaper Dawn on December 17, 1971, is a sight to behold. The banner headline across eight columns blares, WAR TILL VICTORY, citing the pledge by the countrys military dictator Yahya Khan in his catastrophic war against India. A twocolumn story below it says Pakistan promised continued support by China. A government advertisement on the right hand bottom column, under a giant caption of JEHAD, calls for donations to the National Defence Fund. A separate Appeal to every Pakistani invokes the Holy Prophet to ask for more contributions from Pakistani businesses to the countrys armed forces. On the left hand side of the page, in two columns, is a story under the innocuous sounding headline, Fighting ends in East Wing. History, and other newspapers in India and across the world, records the day rather differently. A few hours before some of these delusional and deceptive headlines, General AAK Niazi, commander of the Pakistani Army in East Pakistan, had surrendered to his Indian counterpart Lt.Gen Jagjit Singh Arora, along with 90,000 of his men, in what was noted as the biggest capitulation in terms of troops since World War II. To say the rout led to the formation of Bangladesh was not entirely accurate, because the eastern wing had already declared itself independent from Pakistan several months before on March 26, 1971. A government in exile had already come into effect a few weeks later on April 17. Many people had anticipated the birth of a new nation, but one man foresaw it with stunning clarity. Archer Kent Blood was an American diplomat then posted as the Consul General of the United States in Dhaka. As Pakistani forces rampaged across the eastern wing in a brutal killing spree, Blood went up against his own government, which was backing the marauding army, and predicting the birth of a new nation. I believe the most likely eventual outcome of the struggle under way in East Pakistan is a Bengali victory and the consequent establishment of an independent Bangladesh, Blood wrote in a April 6, 1971 cable to the State Department. The US decision to turn a blind eye towards West Pakistans brutal crackdown in the east was based on the secret channel of communication and help that the loser was providing to the Nixon administration in its overtures to Communist China. Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger also had a pathological dislike towards Indias prime minister Indira Gandhi for her perceived closeness to the Soviet Union and a general aversion towards India for its moralising stance. Although the Pakistani repression in the east was widely reported in the US media and the American public was revolted by Washingtons stance, the duo continued to wink at the bloodbath. But Archer Blood persisted with his dissent in the cable that he generated with his colleagues. Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,(...) they thundered in the landmark telegram. But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

The cable, dubbed the Blood Telegram, constitutes the most trenchant expression of dissent ever in the history of the state department, till similar expressions surfaced during the war in Iraq. In his 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens described the Blood cable as the most public and the most strongly worded demarche, from State Department servants to the State Department, that has ever been recorded. Although Bloods disagreement was conveyed in what was called the Dissent Channel, an internal communication system that allowed diplomats to question US policies without reprisal, he was punished for his boldness and integrity that went against the White House line. In a April 28, 1971 National Security Council decision paper, President Nixon, in a handwritten diktat, wrote: To all hands. Dont squeeze Yahya at this time. And for his dissent, Blood was shipped back to Washington and consigned to an obscure post in the personnel department. That creative dissent which became increasingly blunt and overt, was recorded by Joseph Galloway, a senior military correspondent with the Knight Ridder newspapers, who was covering the conflict those days. When Galloway met Blood in Dhaka, the Consul General told him he had been officially silenced by Washington, but the correspondents suspicions of a continuing slaughter of Bengalis by the Pakistan army were quite correct. He himself couldnt speak on the record, but he had scores of Bengalis on the consulate staff. He pointed Galloway to an office across the hall and said: Its yours for as long as you need it. Those staffers who want to tell you their stories will come visit you there. I listened to men and women who wept as they told how parents, siblings, even children had died in Dhaka and in towns from Chittagong to Naryanganj to the hill country tea plantations, Galloway recalled in a touching tribute to Blood, who passed away in FortCollins, Colorado in 2004. Four decades later, Washington has learned little from the episode as it continues to back and bankroll a Pakistani military that is widely seen by todays dissenting diplomats and soldiers as a rapacious, parasitic force feeding off its own people while promoting terrorism across its borders. The Dissent Channel itself has fallen into disuse. According to a recent study, of the first 150 episodes of dissent recorded by the administration, none resulted in policy change. Brady Kiesling, a latter-day Archer Blood who raised the red flag against the red flag against the Iraq War, was among those who saw the futility of dissent in a system that promoted those who kept nonconforming opinions to themselves. Last month, when Dakota Meyer, a Marine awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest American decoration, protested the supply of sophisticated arms to the same people (the Pakistan Army) who are killing our guys, his dissention was met with deafening silence from the administration, even as the Pakistani military threatened to shoot at US forces with US supplied weapons. Packed with conformists sold on the idea that the Pakistani military is a professional, modernist force that is an ally to the US, US administration mandarins continued to bat for the khakhis in Pakistan. Archer Blood must surely be rolling in his grave.

FALLEN HERO: For expressing his dissent, Blood was shipped back to Washington and consigned to some obscure post in the personnel department

CONFLICT ZONE: Bangladeshis flee to India to escape the rampaging Pakistani Army in 1971

THE WAR CONTINUES

The roots of present sectarian and communal discord being witnessed within Pakistan can be traced back to its humiliating defeat in the 1971 war
G PARTHASARATHY Iwas in Moscow in 1971, when a political Tsunami swept across Bangladesh, ultimately leading to its liberation on December 16, that year. These momentous changes came about a time when the world was witnessing the astonishing phenomenon of the arch anti-Communist, the US president Richard Nixon reaching out to Chinas Communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung, to cement a global alliance against the Soviet Union. Faced with Sino-American hostility, as millions of refugees were being driven from Bangladesh into India, New Delhi responded by signing a Treaty with the Soviet Union a development which ensured Soviet military and political support to a diplomatically isolated India and the eventual liberation of Bangladesh. Forty years later, the Soviet Union no longer exists; China is emerging as major challenge to the US on the world stage; and India is emerging as a global economic power with a growing partnership with the Americans, while Pakistan is the target of American anger and air assaults, from neighbouring Afghanistan. In military terms, the major impact of the 1971 conflict was the decision taken by then Pakistani president, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, barely one month after the Bangladesh conflict ended, that a weakened and dismembered Pakistan would develop nuclear weapons, even if it had to eat grass. Bhutto had concluded that given the disparities in size between India and Pakistan, there was little hope in what remained of Pakistan, to withstand another Indian onslaught. What followed was an unrelenting Pakistani quest in Europe and the USA to steal or buy designs and components required

for the enrichment of uranium. China soon stepped in, to provide Pakistan the designs and wherewithal to manufacture and test nuclear weapons. The first Pakistan nuclear test was carried out, not in 1998, in response to our Pokhran tests, but in 1990, in the Chinese Province of Xinjiang. Moreover, Pakistan realised after the Kargil conflict that in conventional terms, India could thwart any attempt by it to seize territory by force. Pakistans army thus now believes that the only feasible way to deal with India is through low intensity conflict, waged by Jihadi groups like the Lashkare-Taiba. Its calculation is that India would be apprehensive of retaliating, because of the fear of nuclear escalation. While Indians remained focussed on the military implications of victory in 1971, Pakistanis faced a larger trauma than merely the loss of their eastern wing, or the ignominy of 93,000 army prisoners in Indian POW camps. Pakistans birth as a separate nation state was premised on the belief that religion alone was an unshakeable basis for nationhood. Economically exploited, culturally alienated and politically deprived, the people of its Eastern Wing struggled, sacrificed and attained separation. Pakistans dilemma, ever since, has been how to define its sense of nationhood. The alienation of Shias subject to routine bombings in the midst of prayers is growing across the country. Further, in Sind Province the Muhajirs (refugees from India), living in urban hubs like Karachi, Sukkur and Hyderabad, have little in common with their native Sindhi brethren. The Sindhis, in turn, have been grievously alienated by the fact that the only two Sindhi prime ministers of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir have been executed or assassinated during periods of rule by the Punjabi dominated army. Karachi is today being torn apart by ethnic and sectarian violence. In Pakistans largest Province Baluchistan, the Punjabi dominated army continues to confront an armed Baluchi insurgency. External factors have also played a key role in promoting religious extremism, sectarianismand weaponisation across Pakistan. It was the joint American/ISI strategy of backing radical Sunni groups to force the Soviet Union to end its occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan, which led to the emergence in Pakistan of radical and armed Sunni Islamic groups, with external backing from Saudi Arabia. With Iran joining the fray by backing radical Shia organisations, the stage was set for continuing Shia-Sunni violence. The Pakistan army has become, after the Bangladesh debacle, the primary organisation for promoting what it calls radical Islam. The Bangladesh experience should have taught the military that religion alone cannot constitute a viable basis for nationhood in a country that is ethnically and linguistically diverse. Celebration and accommodation of diversity alone can be a viable basis for fostering a feeling of nationhood in a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society. The dominant militaryestablishment has obviously learned no lessons from the misery it brought to the country by its actions in Bangladesh. The armys primary apprehension is that it would lose its influence and perquisites if relations with India were to improve, through an understanding of the intrinsic and inherent strength of Indias vibrant democracy and its secular and pluralistic ethos. In his book Descent into Chaos, Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid describes how the armys quest for dominance in the country is leading Pakistan down the road to disaster. Civil society institutions are too weak and fearful of challenging the actions of their rapacious army. Indians can only hope that circumstances will arise when a further discredited army is forced to yield space to those in Pakistan who wish their country to progress rapidly and live at peace and harmony with its neighbours. The writer is a former diplomat and author

LOST CAUSE: General AAK Niazi (in the centre) signing the surrender documents in Dacca on Dec 16, Lt. General Aurora is seated next to him; (below) Pakistani Major General Farman Ali (first in front row) along with army officers and men discard their weapons in an act of submission on the same day