Bangladesh War #3: The Chinese Connection

As the refugee count in India kept increasing, surely the US could see that the situation was becoming unbearable for India. War was looking inevitable, unless the refugees would return to East P. That would never happen with Yahya in charge, so why didn’t the US just dump Yahya? After all, countries have no loyalties to other countries. Replace Yahya, avoid a war, and the US would continue to have Pakistan as its Cold War ally. Gary Bass’ The Blood Telegram has the answer to these questions.

 

The answer starts off a few decades earlier. Mao had just taken control of China. The US refused to recognize Mao under China. Until war broke out between the Soviets and China. The US now saw an opening: the enemy of my enemy…

 

There was a problem though. Since the US didn’t recognize China, it didn’t have any embassy in Beijing. Ergo, they needed a middleman - Yahya fit the bill. He was a common friend of China and Nixon. The initiative started in 1970, before the elections or the genocide. During the genocide in East P, Nixon believed that having to “hold your nose with some of your allies (Yahya)” was worth it in the bigger scheme of things: “constraining the Soviets”. The US needed Yahya until the China deal had been struck. Or so Nixon thought.

 

In a very cloak and dagger operation right out of a spy novel, Yahya had Henry Kissinger secretly flown out from Pakistan to China. The (secret) meeting was fruitful – both sides agreed to establish ties. China agreed to extend a formal invite to Nixon to come to Beijing. It would be a very high-profile feather in the cap for both Nixon and Kissinger.

 

Now you may be thinking: At this point, the US could have dumped Yahya – he had outlived his usefulness, right? Nixon did consider it, but:

“The White House did not want to let the Chinese leadership think that the United States was a fickle friend, cutting Pakistan loose for what it did to its own people. That would be a troubling prospect for Mao, whose own body counts exceeded even Yahya’s, soaring into millions.”

 

It was this reason – the optics of how the US would appear to their new “friend”, China – that ensured that Nixon would never abandon Yahya. As we’ll see later, from this point onwards, Nixon even broke American laws to help Yahya.

 

All this in turn emboldened Yahya even further, who misinterpreted all this as a sign that America would support Pakistan, even if war came. Which meant he’d not back down or try to frame a half-decent truce in East P. And so the genocide would continue, the refugees would continue to pour into India, and India would find itself being forced even further down the road to an inevitable war in East P…