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The Cold War on the Periphery, by Robert J. McMahon
It was an electrifying moment. As the clock inched closer to midnight, the magical time that finally would bring full-fledged independence to this ancient land, the boisterously expectant crowd in New Delhi's Constituent Assembly Hall hushed. Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who along with the legendary Mahatma Gandhi had come to personify the long and bitter struggle for Indian freedom, stepped to the podium. He was clad in the traditional white cotton khadi of the Congress Party, the simple yet richly symbolic uniform of the movement that had successfully defied the once seemingly invincible power of the British empire. Speaking without notes, Nehru delivered an address of unsurpassed eloquence. "Long ago," he began solemnly, "we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."
Nehru deliberately chose not to exult in the imminent achievement of his lifelong dream. Instead, the proud Brahman who had spent nine years in British prisons, and was now about to become prime minister of the world's second largest country, insisted on sacrifice, work, and continual striving in the cause of India--and humankind. "The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer," Nehru declared. "It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over." In closing, he called upon the assembled delegates to help "build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell." The applause inside the hall for those stirring, and challenging, words was deafening. Only rarely has a moment of such historical grandeur and emotional transcendence found an orator of comparable power. And, outside the hall, not even the drenching rain of a summer monsoon could dampen the delirium of the thousands of ordinary Indians who waited for the chimes of the clock to signal independence for their long-suffering homeland. 1
Hours earlier, in Karachi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah had hailed in less dramatic fashion the imminent birth of the other state to be forged out of British India. The urbane barrister's dogged insistence that Muslim rights could not be guaranteed in a predominantly Hindu India had been instrumental in forcing the Indian Congress Party hierarchy and Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, to accept with great reluctance a partitioned subcontinent. Pakistan, only two years earlier dismissed by British and Indian observers alike as Jinnah's fanciful dream, was about to become a reality. With a population of over forty-five million, it would rank as the world's largest Muslim state and the fifth largest nation in the world. But much of that world still viewed it as an anomalous, even accidental, creation. If the unparalleled pomp and ceremony surrounding Indian independence befitted India's status as the successor state to the British raj, then the more restrained formalities in Pakistan emblemized that country's awkward status as the seceding state. 2
Sadly, independence and partition also brought in their wake a human tragedy of grotesque proportions. Deep-seated religious and communal tensions and fears, exacerbated by the irresponsible rhetoric of demagogic politicians and the arbitrariness of the boundary lines drawn by the British, led to an orgy of bloodletting, especially in the Punjab. Hindus attacked Muslims, Muslims attacked Hindus, and Sikhs attacked and were attacked by both groups in a mind-numbing display of barbarism. Although the exact toll will never be known, anywhere between 225,000 and 500,000 Indians and Pakistanis were slaughtered in the weeks that followed independence. Partition also set in motion one of the greatest population movements in recorded history. Fearing for their lives, eleven and a half million people left their ancestral homes in search of what they hoped would be a safer haven on one or the other side of the new borders. This ragged army of refugees posed enormous resettlement problems for the leaders of India and Pakistan, contributing further to the sense of gloom and crisis that so quickly enveloped the subcontinent. 3
Britain's withdrawal from what had stood for centuries as the most glittering jewel in its vast colonial domain formed the opening act in one of the great historical dramas of the modern era. The curtain was beginning to close on the era of Western colonialism; before long, dozens of other new nations would follow the path of freedom blazed by India and Pakistan. The newly independent nations of Asia and Africa would soon pose a fundamental challenge to the Western-dominated global order that had prevailed ever since the fifteenth century. Their emergence would also profoundly challenge the ability of the United States, a nation which had just recently inherited the uneasy mantle of world leadership, to achieve its ambitious strategic, economic, and political objectives.
During the sweltering, crisis-filled summer of 1947, few, if any, policymakers in Washington could have found time to ponder the deeper meaning of the epic developments unfolding on the Indian subcontinent. As Indians and Pakistanis experienced the bittersweet mixture of joy and tragedy attendant to their liberation, the attention of the world's most powerful nation was fixated elsewhere. President Harry S. Truman of course sent the obligatory telegrams of congratulations to New Delhi and Karachi, greetings timed to coincide with the independence day celebrations. But to an American leadership preoccupied with what seemed a historic challenge of much greater immediacy and import India and Pakistan appeared exceptionally remote.
Britain's retreat from empire in South Asia coincided with a crucial phase in the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Throughout the spring and summer of 1947, as India and Pakistan lurched uncertainly toward independence, President Truman, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and other senior officials monitored international developments with mounting apprehension. They feared that the future stability and peace of the world might very well be hanging in the balance. Political instability, economic distress, and social chaos wracked the Western European and Eastern Mediterranean countries whose stability the United States considered so essential to its own security. U.S. decision makers were convinced that the Soviet Union stood poised to capitalize on those unhappy conditions, extending its power and influence into the heart of Europe. Unless they acted with dispatch, Truman administration strategists worried that Josef Stalin and his associates in the Kremlin might eventually emulate the pattern of Nazi Germany, gaining direct or indirect control over the industrial infrastructure, raw materials, skilled workforce, and military installations that made Europe the world's richest strategic prize. If such an eventuality came to pass, U.S. analysts agreed, the physical safety of their own country, along with its political institutions, economic freedoms, and basic values, could be endangered as well. The major American initiatives of mid-1947--the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the effort to revitalize German and Japanese production--were formulated to help forestall such a strategic nightmare. 4
In the late 1940s, India and Pakistan appeared far removed from the major theaters of Cold War confrontation. The two new dominions contained approximately one-fifth of the world's population, stretched over a vast expanse of territory. But population and size alone did not translate into importance for U.S. policymakers. Recent memories of World War II inclined most American analysts to weigh threats and interests principally in terms of power potential. Neither India nor Pakistan possessed the basic ingredients of military-economic power that U.S. strategists most valued. Without an advanced industrial base, a skilled workforce, or crucial raw materials, the Indian subcontinent barely factored into American calculations about overall correlations of world power. It offered a most unlikely site for superpower competition or conflict. In the several years that followed independence, senior American officials accordingly paid scant notice to either India or Pakistan. The newly independent countries of South Asia seemed to most senior policymakers, and to the American populace as a whole, to be lands as remote as they were exotic. New York Congressman Emmanuel Celler hardly exaggerated when, on the eve of partition, he remarked that "most Americans still think of India as a land of minarets and performers of the rope trick." 5
This book examines how and why an area that seemed destined to remain indefinitely on the periphery of world politics--and on the periphery of the American consciousness--came to be drawn into the Cold War vortex. It analyzes why U.S. policymakers came to view Pakistan and India as valuable strategic prizes and examines the various tactics American officials employed in seeking to align those two developing nations with the West. This book explores, in addition, the profound consequences of America's multifaceted political, military, and economic commitments in the subcontinent--for the global and regional foreign policy objectives of the United States, and for the peace and stability of South Asia.
In the broadest sense, this study addresses a set of issues that are of fundamental importance to all who would understand the global reach of postwar American foreign policy. How and why, it asks, did the national security interests of the United States become so expansive that they extended far beyond the industrial core nations of Western Europe and East Asia to embrace nations, such as India and Pakistan, on the Third World periphery? Why did areas possessing few of the essential prerequisites of industrial-military power become objects of intense concern for the United States? And what combination of strategic, economic, political, ideological, and psychological variables best explicates the national security imperatives that led the United States to seek friends and allies in virtually every corner of the planet?
The Indian subcontinent, which held only marginal value to American planners in the immediate aftermath of independence, provides an unusually rich laboratory for investigating those broader questions. Indeed, in some respects an examination of U.S. actions along the Third World periphery reveals more about the limitations, inconsistencies, and contradictions that plagued American Cold War foreign policy than does an exploration of U.S. behavior toward more intrinsically valuable areas such as Western Europe and Japan. During the same period encompassed by this study, the perceptions held by top American strategists about the interests, objectives, and risks at stake in those core areas remained largely constant, befitting their status as regions of unquestionably vital political, economic, and strategic importance to the United States. In striking contrast, American assessments of the advantages it stood to reap in South Asia, and of the threats posed to its global interests there, fluctuated dramatically during those years. A close examination of the evolution of U.S. policy toward India and Pakistan thus provides a fruitful opportunity for assessing the complex, and contested, process by which American policymakers sought to divine interests and threats in lands whose relevance to wider global objectives was never clear-cut or self-evident.
It is a major theme of this book that American policymakers never succeeded in constructing a rational, effective approach to the myriad challenges posed by India and Pakistan. They wound up exaggerating the importance of the subcontinent to the United States and overestimating their ability to convert two impoverished, developing societies into strategic Cold War partners. They also proved unable to foster the regional stability upon which American policy goals were predicated, consistently overrating Washington's ability to resolve Kashmir and other bilateral disputes that were rooted in deep religious, communal, ethnic, and national antagonisms.
Its alliance with Pakistan, consummated in 1954, lay at the heart of America's policy failures in South Asia. The military commitment to Pakistan grew primarily out of U.S. plans for strengthening the Western defense perimeter in the Middle East; it was based on the spurious assumption that Pakistan could help deter or retard a Soviet military incursion at a time of global war. While the United States sought to enlist Pakistan in its global defense network, Pakistan sought arms and alignment for more traditional reasons: principally to gain external protection against its chief rival on the subcontinent, India. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru angrily charged the United States with bringing the Cold War to South Asia in 1954. And, in a sense, he was correct. Pakistan's alignment with the United States just exacerbated Indo-Pakistani tensions and intensified regional discord. Nor did the Pakistani-American alliance ever achieve its stated purpose. Instead, it fostered a patron-client relationship between Karachi and Washington that tied the United States to a regime plagued by a daunting set of nation-building problems.
By the late 1950s, American strategic thinking about South Asia underwent a significant shift. Concerned that the Soviet Union was beginning to gain influence with India through liberal aid and trade inducements, and fearful that India's inability to meet its ambitious development goals might lead to an upsurge of communist strength within the country, the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated a vastly expanded program of economic aid for India. The Eisenhower administration and the John F. Kennedy administration that followed were also driven to support Indian development by the fear that economic failure in India would redound to the international prestige of China, dealing a crippling blow to American hopes that the democratic-capitalist path to development would prove as efficacious as the socialist model. Both administrations consequently made liberal development assistance to India a centerpiece of their foreign aid programs. After the Sino-Indian war of 1962, Kennedy rushed emergency military assistance to India as well, hoping that he could induce New Delhi to abandon its nonaligned foreign policy for formal or informal alignment with the West.
The American response to the Sino-Indian conflict baldly exposed the contradictions inherent in the U.S. approach to the subcontinent. The Pakistanis angrily denounced their ally's military support for India, as they had earlier criticized Washington's expanded economic aid effort, as a grievous betrayal. In response, the Pakistanis moved away from what they now perceived as a dangerous dependence on an unreliable superpower. In their search for new friends, they turned to China, forging an entente that infuriated presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and that made a mockery of Pakistan's commitment to an anticommunist alliance system. The Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, a conflict fought largely with U.S. arms, ironically yet decisively shattered the assumptions that had long underlaid American policy toward the region.
Strategic objectives flowing from the larger Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union and China invariably shaped American actions toward the subcontinent in the 1947-1965 period. But the centrality of strategic variables in the overall policy equation should not be allowed to disguise their essentially vague, inconsistent, and inchoate nature. Essential to an understanding of U.S. behavior in India and Pakistan are the limitations and contradictions of Washington's strategic vision. American planners never appraised the relative significance of the subcontinent to broader foreign policy goals with either precision or consistency. By the early 1950s, American strategists viewed Pakistan as a key to the defense of the Middle East; but they were not sure precisely how it would contribute to that larger objective, nor were they certain about the exact nature of the threat posed by the Kremlin. By the early 1960s, American strategists viewed India as indispensable to the containment of Chinese expansion; but they were not sure specifically how it would contribute to that larger objective, nor were they clear about the precise nature of the threat posed by Beijing. Exaggerated expectations, vague threat perceptions, and murky strategic calculations infused American thinking about India and Pakistan throughout this era.
Pakistan and India posed not only a conceptual challenge to American decision makers but a domestic political one as well. As aid--military and economic--became the principal tool of U.S. influence in the subcontinent, the executive branch needed to cultivate both public support and the backing of a budget-minded Congress. Yet convincing skeptical legislators that two distant, impoverished nations deserved hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid proved extraordinarily difficult for each of the presidential administrations covered in this narrative. Deep-seated congressional hostility to India in particular, focused invariably on its uncooperative, nonaligned approach to world affairs, proved a major impediment to administration planners throughout this period. The narrative that follows confirms the old adage that the foreign policy of a democratic nation cannot long be sustained without a strong domestic base of support.
The vast disparities between the power and resources possessed by the world's richest nation and two developing societies that ranked among its poorest form an important subtext for this study. It should not be surprising that those disparities, in conjunction with widely divergent historical experiences, contributed to the enormous cultural gap separating the interests, expectations, and values of American leaders from those of their Indian and Pakistani counterparts. Nor should it be surprising that the massive military and economic resources that the United States poured into the subcontinent--amounting to nearly $12 billion in total aid during these years--powerfully shaped a wide range of internal developments in both countries. America's impact on Pakistan proved especially far-reaching. Its alliance with Washington, forged at a critical, formative stage in that young country's existence, played a crucial role in the evolution of Pakistan's political and military institutions, its social structure, and its economic development program. A group of predominantly West Pakistani civil servants and military officers actively pursued an alliance relationship with the United States, convinced that such a partnership could help them overcome daunting economic and security problems and at the same time ensure their own grip on power. The Pakistani elite sought to use the United States for its own purposes, then, much as U.S. policymakers sought to use Pakistan for theirs.
The extent to which the Pakistanis at least partially achieved their goals illustrates two additional themes developed herein: namely, that the unintended consequences of American actions often proved at least as important as the intended ones; and that Washington's ability to realize its ambitions in the subcontinent were often thwarted by the contrary interests, priorities, commitments, and decisions of other actors. America's economic vitality and military strength were unparalleled during the first two decades of the postwar era. The United States straddled the globe during those heady days like a modern-day Colossus, inviting comparisons to the Roman Empire at its height. But that power, however vast, was limited. Not only were American resources finite, but in the Indian subcontinent as elsewhere the United States confronted countries whose heightened nationalism often conflicted with American Cold War policy goals. The subcontinent's historic religious, ethnic, and linguistic animosities, grafted onto the competing political and security interests of two new nation-states, made South Asia a cauldron of simmering tensions. As American policymakers painfully learned, it was hardly an environment susceptible to external direction and manipulation. Rather, it was an environment that would repeatedly wreak havoc with even the most carefully formulated of American policy initiatives.
This story, then, is about America's illusory search for order, stability, and allies in one part of the Third World. It takes as its central focus the evolution of U.S. strategic designs, commitments, and actions during four different presidential administrations. In order to explicate more fully the failure of American policymakers to achieve their objectives in the subcontinent, the chapters that follow also discuss the fluid and complex external environment within which the United States operated. They examine briefly some of the major internal developments within India and Pakistan, especially those which exerted a significant effect on U.S. diplomacy. Likewise, the chapters that follow consider the interests and actions of a variety of other important actors, including Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. The conflicting interests of the various external powers in the subcontinent, in conjunction with deep-seated Indo-Pakistani hostility, combined to create a regional climate inhospitable to U.S. plans for converting South Asia into a bastion of "free world" solidarity. Nearly as much as the limitations of American power and the inadequacies of the American strategic vision, it was the realities of the subcontinent that made Washington's grandiose ambitions for India and Pakistan so elusive.
Note 1: Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), pp. 286-90; Nehru's speech is reprinted in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology, edited by Sarvepalli Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 76-77. Back.
Note 2: Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 332-43; Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, pp. 271-76; Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (New York: Dutton, 1953), pp. 154-57; Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 422-23. Back.
Note 3: Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, pp. 340-413. Back.
Note 4: For the broader strategic framework that shaped U.S. foreign policy priorities at this time, see especially Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). Back.
Note 5: Celler, quoted in Iftikhar M. Malik, US-South Asian Relations, 1940-47 (New York: St. MartinŐs, 1991), p. 235. Back.
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