BanglaBhoot
RETIRED TTA
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"With the conviction that US policy related to recent developments in East Pakistan serves neither our moral interests broadly defined nor our national interests narrowly defined, numerous officers of AmConGen Dacca, USAID Dacca and USIS Dacca consider it their duty to register strong dissent with fundamental aspects of this policy."
That's from the first paragraph of the amazing diplomatic cable known as the Blood Telegram. Sent from Dhaka to Washington on April 6, 1971, by US consul general Archer Kent Blood, it expressed precisely what neither National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger nor President Richard Nixon wanted to hear. Signed by 20 US officials in Dhaka, it was a reaction to Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani military crackdown to suppress nationalist sentiment in the east, which had started with the "selective genocide" of progressive intellectuals and students in Dhaka. A fine example of independence in diplomacy, the cable denounced the "moral bankruptcy" of US foreign policy, which remained indifferent to atrocities that even the reliably atrocious USSR was volubly protesting. Washington's silence was doubly ironical because Sheikh Mujib, whose people bore the brunt of the violence, was a pro-West reformist.
In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (Alfred A. Knopf), due out in September, Princeton teacher and former Economist reporter Gary J Bass revisits those strange days when, in the polarising shadow of Kissinger's détente, the US Department of State became peculiarly blind to realities in South Asia, tactical, rational and moral. That vision disorder was to persist until terrorist attacks brought catastrophic violence home to the Western powers. For decades, it coloured politics in our region.
Bass writes that the genocide in East Pakistan signalled an unusual failure of US foreign policy, more vile than errors of omission like Roosevelt failing to limit the Holocaust during World War II, or Bill Clinton's desultory approach to Rwanda. Here, "the US was allied with the killers. The White House was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime [Yahya's government in Islamabad] There was no question about whether the US should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf of a military dictatorship decimating its own people. This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in US foreign policy."
Plain dealing makes Bass's book absorbing reading, as it focuses on how US-supplied warplanes, armour and artillery, whose acquisition was legally questionable, were used by Pakistan to murder its own citizens. Having alienated colleagues in the US and Pakistan with his incisive telegram, Blood was recalled and assigned to HRD. However, his last posting brought him back to South Asia, as charge d'affairs in New Delhi in the early Eighties.
The Blood Telegram was declassified in 2003, a year before its author died in Colorado. By that time, he had receded from public memory in the US and India, though he was fondly remembered in Bangladesh. The American Centre library in Dhaka is named after him. The body of literature in which he features has grown through the last decade and The Blood Telegram is billed as the first complete account of the involvement of Kissinger and Nixon in an incident that redrew the political map of South Asia.
Apart from documents recently declassified in the US and India, Bass has relied upon US officials who were in service at the time with the notable exception of Kissinger, who apparently declined to be interviewed. His Indian sources include names like Jaswant Singh and the diplomat Arundhati Ghose, who recall the enormity of the flight of 10 million refugees into West Bengal. And he situates the Bangladesh conflict against the backdrop of Kissinger's foreign policy scorecard, in which détente and building bridges with Mao's China were top priorities. Pakistan was perceived to be crucial to both projects, and so it became necessary to arm it despite all moral arguments, and keep it armed until terrorists with Pakistani connections struck in London and rendered a pro-Pakistan policy untenable.
We in India have clucked long and fruitlessly about this morally flawed policy but even for us, this book is illuminating. Recent releases like Mujibur Rahman's The Unfinished Memoirs (Penguin Viking) and Raghu Rai's photographs from Jessore Road and Dhaka (Niyogi Books) have reminded us of what the Bangladesh war meant for South Asia. And now, against a wide geopolitical canvas, we can read the unusual story of Blood, the diplomat who protested when the US foreign policy establishment was learning to forget the difference between right and wrong. It reminds us that the "foreign hand", so frequently and laughably conjured up in Indian politics, was once a real threat.
The Foreign Hand - Indian Express
That's from the first paragraph of the amazing diplomatic cable known as the Blood Telegram. Sent from Dhaka to Washington on April 6, 1971, by US consul general Archer Kent Blood, it expressed precisely what neither National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger nor President Richard Nixon wanted to hear. Signed by 20 US officials in Dhaka, it was a reaction to Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani military crackdown to suppress nationalist sentiment in the east, which had started with the "selective genocide" of progressive intellectuals and students in Dhaka. A fine example of independence in diplomacy, the cable denounced the "moral bankruptcy" of US foreign policy, which remained indifferent to atrocities that even the reliably atrocious USSR was volubly protesting. Washington's silence was doubly ironical because Sheikh Mujib, whose people bore the brunt of the violence, was a pro-West reformist.
In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (Alfred A. Knopf), due out in September, Princeton teacher and former Economist reporter Gary J Bass revisits those strange days when, in the polarising shadow of Kissinger's détente, the US Department of State became peculiarly blind to realities in South Asia, tactical, rational and moral. That vision disorder was to persist until terrorist attacks brought catastrophic violence home to the Western powers. For decades, it coloured politics in our region.
Bass writes that the genocide in East Pakistan signalled an unusual failure of US foreign policy, more vile than errors of omission like Roosevelt failing to limit the Holocaust during World War II, or Bill Clinton's desultory approach to Rwanda. Here, "the US was allied with the killers. The White House was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime [Yahya's government in Islamabad] There was no question about whether the US should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf of a military dictatorship decimating its own people. This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in US foreign policy."
Plain dealing makes Bass's book absorbing reading, as it focuses on how US-supplied warplanes, armour and artillery, whose acquisition was legally questionable, were used by Pakistan to murder its own citizens. Having alienated colleagues in the US and Pakistan with his incisive telegram, Blood was recalled and assigned to HRD. However, his last posting brought him back to South Asia, as charge d'affairs in New Delhi in the early Eighties.
The Blood Telegram was declassified in 2003, a year before its author died in Colorado. By that time, he had receded from public memory in the US and India, though he was fondly remembered in Bangladesh. The American Centre library in Dhaka is named after him. The body of literature in which he features has grown through the last decade and The Blood Telegram is billed as the first complete account of the involvement of Kissinger and Nixon in an incident that redrew the political map of South Asia.
Apart from documents recently declassified in the US and India, Bass has relied upon US officials who were in service at the time with the notable exception of Kissinger, who apparently declined to be interviewed. His Indian sources include names like Jaswant Singh and the diplomat Arundhati Ghose, who recall the enormity of the flight of 10 million refugees into West Bengal. And he situates the Bangladesh conflict against the backdrop of Kissinger's foreign policy scorecard, in which détente and building bridges with Mao's China were top priorities. Pakistan was perceived to be crucial to both projects, and so it became necessary to arm it despite all moral arguments, and keep it armed until terrorists with Pakistani connections struck in London and rendered a pro-Pakistan policy untenable.
We in India have clucked long and fruitlessly about this morally flawed policy but even for us, this book is illuminating. Recent releases like Mujibur Rahman's The Unfinished Memoirs (Penguin Viking) and Raghu Rai's photographs from Jessore Road and Dhaka (Niyogi Books) have reminded us of what the Bangladesh war meant for South Asia. And now, against a wide geopolitical canvas, we can read the unusual story of Blood, the diplomat who protested when the US foreign policy establishment was learning to forget the difference between right and wrong. It reminds us that the "foreign hand", so frequently and laughably conjured up in Indian politics, was once a real threat.
The Foreign Hand - Indian Express
