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The Cold War on the Periphery, by Robert J. McMahon
AMERICAN OFFICIALS initially responded to the emergence of independent nation-states in India and Pakistan with a casual concern bordering on indifference. Despite dense populations and vast territorial expanses, neither nation possessed the essential prerequisites for genuine military or economic power. Neither boasted the advanced industrial plant, skilled workforce, or strategic raw materials that made Western Europe and Japan such critical elements in the overall distribution of global power. Nor did the Indian subcontinent offer any major military advantages to the West should the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union suddenly metamorphose into a hot war. During the first several years following partition, consequently, the Truman administration devoted minimal attention to both India and Pakistan. Preoccupied with the epic contests being waged in the industrial heartlands of Western Europe and East Asia, senior State and Defense Department officials had little time for the problems of two poor, weak countries located along the Third World periphery.
American planners radically revised their assessments of South Asia's importance following the outbreak of the Korean War. Given previous attitudes, the speed and scope of the ensuing transformation in U.S. policy toward the subcontinent is nothing short of stunning. Well before Truman left office, a growing number of U.S. strategists were insisting upon South Asia's salience to a host of crucial American foreign policy objectives. Some argued that the administration should make a concerted effort to win India's favor; they found particularly appealing the presumed politico-ideological benefits Washington could reap from the alignment of the Third World's most prominent neutralist state with the West. Others found Pakistan the more alluring target of opportunity, largely for military-strategic reasons stemming from its proximity both to the Soviet Union and to the Middle East.
The latter view of course ultimately prevailed, culminating in the Eisenhower administration's decision early in 1954 to conclude a mutual security agreement with Pakistan. Yet the American commitment to Pakistan rested from its inception on a set of spurious assumptions. The notion that Pakistan, in conjunction with other "northern tier" states, could mobilize sufficient forces to help deter or retard a Soviet military sweep into the Middle East was almost farcical. The belief that a defensive alliance between Pakistan, Turkey, and other nations willing to stand with the West might help bring down the fever of anti-Western nationalism infecting the region stands as a glaring example of how wishful thinking can badly distort reality. The other principal rationale for a defense pact with Pakistan--the possibility that the United States might secure from Karachi's leaders a green light for the establishment of military bases and intelligence installations on Pakistani soil--played only a secondary role in American planning. The alliance was essentially the product of a grossly inflated fear of the Soviet threat to the Middle East and a series of illusory projections about Pakistan's likely contribution to Western defense efforts in that vital region. The single most important U.S. policy decision toward South Asia in the two decades following partition thus ironically sprang from strategic calculations not about South Asia but about the Middle East.
Analyzed dispassionately and with the benefit of hindsight, the American alliance with Pakistan appears a monumental strategic blunder. It contributed little to Western defense efforts in the Middle East, the alliance's basic raison d'être, and added almost nothing to the overall global strength of the United States--not militarily, not politically, and certainly not economically. Quite to the contrary, the alliance unavoidably fostered a patron-client relationship between Washington and Karachi that proved satisfying to neither side. Further, it drained U.S. resources, provided Washington with little return on its sizable investment, bound the United States awkwardly to the fate of one of the Third World's most troubled and least stable nations, and made Pakistan dependent on the largesse of a distant and not always reliable superpower for its very national survival. American diplomatic and defense officials quickly learned that their newest protégé's needs could not easily be satisfied, a lesson eerily familiar to those being taught at the same time in such diverse places as South Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Iran, and Turkey.
Although the alliance with Pakistan affected Middle Eastern political and diplomatic developments only marginally, it bore far- reaching consequences for the nations of South Asia. Washington's choice of Karachi as an ally inevitably came at the expense of New Delhi, causing a profound, if temporary, distortion in the balance of regional power and inviting the intervention of other states external to the region. As Indian observers correctly surmised from the outset, the Eisenhower administration's decision to build up Pakistani armed forces with substantial military assistance meant not only that India would need to increase its own defense expenditures in order to keep pace, but that its regional rival would be much less inclined to settle Kashmir and other outstanding bilateral disputes on terms acceptable to India. The American initiative undercut the assumption of India's leaders that their nation's vastly superior size, population, resources, and economic base guaranteed Indian regional hegemony. It destroyed as well Nehru's hope that South Asia could avoid being sucked into the Cold War vortex, a hope nurtured as much by calculations of national self-interest as by ideals and ideology.
No Indian ruler could have accepted with equanimity such a blatant assault on India's "natural" regional supremacy. Nehru's response to the American initiative--a diplomatic counterstrategy that pivoted on his cultivation of close ties with Moscow--was as logical as it was predictable. Indeed, Bowles, Allen, and other South Asia specialists had forecast precisely such a response when registering their vehement objections to the proposed Pakistani- American alliance. They were convinced that an American-armed Pakistan would just encourage closer Indo-Soviet relations, and they were sure that the open alignment of Pakistan with the West would foster rather than curb regional instability. On both counts, the critics proved absolutely correct.
The Pakistani-American alliance exerted a profound influence on subsequent U.S. policy decisions in South Asia, severely circumscribing the options available to American planners. Within a few years of its consummation, the alliance became much like a huge millstone around Washington's neck. American efforts to balance the scales in South Asia invariably risked the alienation and disaffection of Pakistan without any assurance of compensatory gains in Indo-American relations. When, in the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration sought to reduce Soviet influence in India through a massive commitment to that country's ambitious economic development program, the initiative just infuriated its Pakistani ally without fatally undercutting the Indo-Soviet relationship. When, in the wake of the Sino-Indian war of 1962, the Kennedy administration rushed emergency military aid to India, the commitment drove a wedge between Washington and Karachi. Those measures failed to provide India with enough support to justify curtailing its valuable economic and military links to the Soviet Union; yet they provided more than enough support to provoke a crisis in Pakistani-American relations. Pakistan's heightened sense of mistrust, vulnerability, and betrayal led ultimately to the Sino-Pakistani entente, a relationship that made a mockery of Pakistan's commitment to an anticommunist alliance system.
When Eisenhower and Kennedy sought to defuse Pakistani anxieties by launching mediation efforts designed to resolve Kashmir and other Indo-Pakistani disputes, their carefully planned initiatives always foundered on the rock of Indian intransigence. Johnson's more heavy-handed attempts to resolve the increasingly frustrating regional conundrum by using U.S. aid as a club just intensified the core problems. The Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 finally exposed for all to see the illusory nature of the policy agenda Washington had pursued for more than a decade.
Given the counterproductive results of American actions in South Asia, what policies should the United States have followed? And how might alternative policies have produced more positive results? Those tantalizing counterfactual questions must at least be raised, even if entirely satisfactory answers to them can never be provided. The most obvious alternative to a regional policy centered on Pakistan, of course, would have been one based on a strong Indo-American relationship--the option advocated most eloquently and most consistently by Bowles and the State Department's South Asia hands. In view of India's decided military and economic superiority over its fractious neighbor, and in view of India's greater international prestige and influence, a clear American tilt toward India would arguably have been much more advantageous to U.S. regional and global interests than the formal embrace of Pakistan. India would surely have resisted open alignment with the West regardless of the inducements offered by the United States. Even so, it would happily have accepted greater understanding and tolerance from Washington, increased economic assistance, and a recognition of its regional primacy. If the principal objective of the United States in South Asia was to establish the most cooperative relationship possible with the region's dominant power, such a course of action would have made eminent sense.
The other broad option available to the United States might, however, have served American interests even more effectively. A policy of careful evenhandedness, which eschewed formal political or security ties with either Pakistan or with India, would have carried substantially fewer risks than a pro-Indian--or a pro-Pakistani--policy. Given the absence of any vital strategic, geopolitical, or material stake in South Asia, the United States could certainly have avoided such ties without any appreciable damage to its global position or power. By prohibiting grant military assistance to Pakistan and to India, seeking to align neither formally with the West, maintaining a posture of absolute neutrality toward Kashmir and other emotionally charged bilateral problems, and using every opportunity to press for equitable settlements of those disputes under UN auspices, the United States could have maintained relatively cordial relations--and thus maximized its leverage--with both states. Developmental assistance offered the most effective policy instrument available to U.S. decision makers; if offered generously and without the attachment of political strings, such aid could have enhanced the stature of the United States in the subcontinent. Such an orientation would have failed to satisfy fully either India or Pakistan, to be sure, but it would have enabled the United States to sidestep the enormous problems inherent in choosing one nation over the other.
Indo-American differences, rooted as they were in fundamentally divergent views of international affairs, a divergence compounded by conflicting cultural values, undoubtedly would still have generated sparks from time to time. Congressional and public opposition to foreign aid for a nonaligned state would have continued to plague the executive branch's ability to secure the needed funds from a skeptical, tight-fisted legislature. Yet the most virulent opposition to such programs resulted from India's apparent tilt toward the Soviet Union, a policy choice made only after the American commitment to Pakistan. A policy of measured evenhandedness would likely have precluded India's move toward the Soviet Union and thus served to eliminate the issue that fueled much of the congressional opposition to the India aid program from the mid 1950s onward.
Would such a policy have led Pakistan, so desperate for an external ally, to drift into the Soviet orbit? Although fear and insecurity can produce the strangest of bedfellows in world affairs, a Soviet-Pakistani entente would have been highly unlikely. Powerful interests within Pakistan, in addition to that Muslim nation's deep-seated religious predilections and cultural values, militated against a rapprochement with Moscow. Karachi might have sought common cause with Beijing earlier had its overtures to Washington failed to bear fruit. It seems equally likely, however, that the Pakistani leadership might have been forced to reach at least a modest accommodation with India. Would Pakistan, absent a military tie with the United States, have been more willing to reach a Kashmir compromise acceptable to India? Could the United States have used its good offices to greater effect in the promotion of a reasonable settlement if it maintained a stance of strict impartiality? Or would the dispute have remained an emotional touchstone that continued to defy all attempts at external mediation? Although those questions cannot be answered definitively, the prospects for a breakthrough certainly would have been much stronger in the absence of a Pakistani-American alliance. Indo-Pakistani bitterness, even though it likely would have remained a formidable impediment to regional stability, would not have assumed the degree of explosiveness that it did had the United States avoided a security link with Pakistan.
A stance of strict impartiality would have carried far fewer risks for the United States than a policy of open alignment with one nation. Among other matters, it would have prevented the United States from becoming the central player in a self-defeating regional arms race. In sum, the United States could--and probably should--have avoided active intervention and side-choosing in South Asia. American efforts to turn Pakistan and India into strategic Cold War assets ultimately backfired, creating a host of problems for the regional and global interests of the United States that a more limited and judicious policy could have avoided. Had Washington not brought the Cold War to South Asia, moreover, it remains highly unlikely that Moscow, Beijing, or any other power would have. Nehru's dream of South Asia as a zone of peace that remained outside the entangling web of superpower conflict might actually have been realized; and, in the process, America's interest in a stable and peaceful subcontinent could have been served much more effectively.
It may be objected, of course, that the United States did gain something tangible and valuable from the Pakistani alliance: the bases and listening posts that made possible the U-2 overflights of Soviet territory and the sophisticated intelligence-gathering operations that allowed U.S. analysts to monitor Soviet military and atomic capabilities. Unfortunately, the precise contribution of those installations to overall national security planning cannot be pinpointed--at least not without access to still-classified Defense Department and CIA records. One can speculate, however, that those intelligence facilities, while almost certainly useful, fell well short of indispensable. American analysts, even in the pre-satellite era, had access to reams of human and electronic intelligence about Soviet intentions and capabilities. It seems exceedingly improbable that the additional intelligence yielded by the facilities at Peshawar and Lahore could alone have justified the exorbitant diplomatic costs that the United States paid for maintaining those facilities.
Placed within a wider angle of vision, the American relationship with India and Pakistan during the 1947-1965 period sheds light on some of the broader forces shaping U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War era. It suggests, first and foremost, how powerfully fears about the global nature of the communist threat conditioned American thinking and actions. If nearly all foreign policy decisions derive from assessments about threats, on the one hand, and opportunities, on the other, then American actions in the Indian subcontinent appear dominated to an unusual degree by the former. The United States deliberately extended the Cold War into South Asia, and sought to align both Pakistan and India with the West, principally because of a set of misplaced and exaggerated concerns about American vulnerability in the face of communism's presumed military and ideological threat. U.S. policy was driven not by the pursuit of material gain or geopolitical advantage, as the policies of so many expansionist powers of the past have been. It was driven, instead, by a series of amorphous--and largely illusory--military, strategic, and psychological fears: the fear that the Soviet Union would capitalize on the nationalist ferment sweeping the Middle East; the fear that the Kremlin would risk a military incursion into the oil-rich Persian Gulf region; the fear that Soviet aid and trade inducements might draw India into the Soviet orbit; the fear that China might spill beyond its borders into South and Southeast Asia; and the fear that China might "win" the economic competition with India, thus discrediting the capitalist-democratic path to development. Underneath all those fears lay an even deeper one: the fear that any additional victories for communism might spark a bandwagon effect among the uncommitted nations, leading over time to a dangerous diminution in the strength and prestige of the "free world."
Each of the major initiatives pursued by the United States in the subcontinent between 1947 and 1965 was a product of those fears. That the threats actually posed to American interests by Moscow and Beijing were greatly exaggerated seems, in retrospect, blindingly obvious. Yet those fears, even if unwarranted, were real. They colored perceptions and shaped actions throughout the Cold War era. Those fears led the United States to accept all the risks associated with building positions of strength and accumulating allies not only in South Asia but in nearly every corner of the globe. They formed the principal impetus behind the creation of one of history's most expansive empires.
The extension of American influence into the Indian subcontinent forms a small, but highly instructive, part of that larger story. It highlights the extent to which exaggerated perceptions about external threats produced deep, if misplaced, anxieties about American vulnerability. It demonstrates that a heightened sense of insecurity, more than any other factor, impelled policymakers in Washington to push superpower competition far beyond the industrial heartland of Eurasia. It shows how that insecurity led to the foolish and unnecessary transformation of areas lacking the essential prerequisites for military-industrial power into Cold War pawns. And, finally, the Indo-Pakistani prism suggests that the strategic vision undergirding American expansion remained surprisingly ill defined, inconsistent, and even contradictory.
The arrogant self-confidence with which U.S. officials invariably approached the problems of South Asia stands in ironic contrast to the deep-rooted fears, anxieties, and insecurities that prompted U.S. involvement in the first place. Yet, taken together, both tendencies are consistent with the overall pattern of American behavior in the Third World during these years. Just as U.S. policymakers exaggerated the dangers Moscow and Beijing posed to the independence of India and Pakistan, so too did they misjudge threats posed to other developing nations throughout the Cold War epoch. And just as American policymakers overrated their ability to transform two struggling young Asian nations into muscular components of a global containment strategy, so too did similar miscalculations undermine U.S. relations with a host of reluctant allies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As with so many developing nations of the postwar era, India and Pakistan proved highly resistant to external dictation and manipulation. The various policy instruments through which the United States sought to achieve its objectives in South Asia--ranging from military aid and sales to developmental assistance, security commitments, political alliances, and mediation offers--never proved adequate to the task.
The failure of the United States to translate its power into influence in the subcontinent and, in an even more fundamental sense, its overestimation of the region's importance to the United States, both bespeak a broader conceptual problem that plagued American policy toward the Third World. Decision makers in Washington rarely accepted the interests, priorities, and needs of developing nations on their own terms; rather, they habitually evaluated those countries with a Cold War yardstick that distorted far more than it illuminated. Perhaps the most profound lesson that prudent observers might have learned from the South Asian experience was one that somehow eluded most U.S. officials: namely, that the power of any nation, however vast, was limited. Not even a superpower could determine developments within foreign lands; it could no more guarantee the external orientations of other countries than it could dictate their internal social structures, economic priorities, or political values. America's subsequent failures in Vietnam wound up driving home an identical lesson--but in a far more painful and costly manner.
Following the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, the United States moved toward a limited disengagement from the subcontinent. Never again would its involvement in South Asia approach the intense levels of the 1950s and early 1960s. Yet American policy toward the region continued to be determined by global geopolitical priorities for the next quarter-century. The importance of South Asia to the United States oscillated wildly during those years, waxing and waning along with shifting American perceptions of global interests and threats in an ever-changing Cold War.
For much of that time, India and Pakistan ranked as little more than marginal concerns to the United States. The Nixon administration's opening toward China in 1971, however, magically transformed Pakistan once again into a strategic asset, its close diplomatic ties with China permitting National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger's initial contacts with Beijing's secretive rulers. The infamous Nixon-Kissinger "tilt" toward Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 was determined by a similar set of global geopolitical variables. Nixon and Kissinger sided openly with Pakistan because they believed it essential to reassure their new Chinese partner about American resolve and reliability. They also sought to prevent India, which they erroneously viewed as a Soviet proxy, from humiliating Pakistan--and, by implication, the United States and China. Then, in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ushered in a renewed Cold War. Pakistan, which served as an invaluable funnel for U.S. supplies to the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels, once again assumed great strategic salience to the United States.
Broader American perceptions about Cold War strategic priorities conditioned those responses, much as they had determined the policies of the 1947-1965 period. With the sudden end to the Cold War at the close of the 1980s, and the subsequent fragmentation of the former Soviet Union, those perceptions lost whatever validity they might once have held. For the first time since partition, American decision makers needed to conceptualize the national interests, opportunities, and risks at stake in the subcontinent without reference to the distorting paradigms of the Cold War. Whether current--and future--U.S. leaders can fashion policies toward India, Pakistan, and other nations of the Third World periphery that ultimately prove wiser, more judicious, and less divisive than those of the past will constitute one of the great challenges of the post-Cold War era.
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