Magnificent Delusions (14 page)

The back and forth on the subject became even more intense after a 1958 coup. Days before the coup, leaders of the Muslim League, supported by Islamic parties, had started calling for Jihad against India over Kashmir. Westerners saw this not as a sober policy recommendation but instead as oratory designed to “exercise a powerfully unifying influence within the country.”
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While imposing martial
law, Mirza had cited those “screaming for war with India” as being among the negative influences that martial law was intended to counter. Ayub had attempted to sound reasonable when he told the press, soon after removing Mirza and taking power for himself days later, that “Once there is a solution of the canal waters and the Kashmir disputes, we have no other grouse against India.”
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Ayub spoke of Kashmir and the issue of sharing waters from the network of canals the British had built for irrigation in the divided Punjab province as solvable problems and did not describe India as an existential threat to Pakistan. But soon it was apparent that anxiety about India would be invoked with even greater passion than before.

Even before becoming Pakistan's all-powerful ruler, Ayub had expressed concerns about the need to define and consolidate Pakistani national identity. The country needed a new narrative of its history and a strong nationalism. Ayub adapted the ideology of Pakistan to mean demonization of India's Brahmin Hinduism and a zealous hostility toward India.

A strong stance against India, Ayub thought, would help in “liberating the basic concept of our ideology from the dust of vagueness.” Thus, the nation would unite against India. Militarism would help overcome the difficulty Pakistan's unique origins posed. Ayub wanted to change what he described as Pakistan's foundational dilemma: Until 1947, he wrote, “our nationalism was based more on an idea than on any territorial definition. Till then, ideologically we were Muslims; territorially we happened to be Indians; and parochially we were a conglomeration of at least eleven, smaller provincial loyalties.”
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Western diplomats in Karachi saw Ayub as a modernizing reformer. As a British-trained general, he could be expected to defer to economic experts, minimize the role of divisive politicians, and isolate the clerics. So they took his anti-India assertions with a pinch of salt.

For the benefit of Americans, Ayub tried to connect his anti-India stance with his anticommunism. He told a US delegation early in his long administration that “one of India's aims was to get the United States out of Asia.”
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If only the United States and Britain
coerced India, he reasoned, then it would be forced to concede Pakistan's fair demands about canal waters and in Kashmir. But if the United States refused to help Pakistan defend itself against India, Pakistanis would turn against the United States, and this would cause the United States to lose both Pakistan and India.

Even though the martial law regime tightly controlled debate and discussion within Pakistan, that did not stop Pakistani officials from invoking the argument about anti-American public opinion. Occasionally American officials responded by pointing to the manner in which that opinion was being created. They observed that the Pakistan government made little effort to explain to the public its motives for pursuing alliances. Anti-Western propaganda, however, was often unleashed precisely so Pakistani officials could argue that the United States had to support Pakistan against India so as to preserve its alliance with them. Few Pakistanis knew how much their country and its armed forces had become dependent on US assistance.

Ayub and members of his military regime were very conscious of the need to manage a positive image in the United States. Aziz Ahmed, a Cambridge-educated career civil servant, arrived in Washington in March 1959 and tried to persuade any American who would listen that Pakistan faced a serious military threat from India. In a meeting with Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy he conveyed Ayub's concern that “influential circles of the intelligentsia, some legislators, and to some degree the general public” in the United States were becoming unsympathetic to Pakistan's security needs.

Ahmed observed that many Americans commented that Pakistan was “supporting armed forces in excess of her needs at the expense of sorely needed economic development.” He then went on to suggest that “the ordinary Pakistani” was likely to interpret this criticism as reflecting American hostility. After all, the Indian army was much stronger than that of Pakistan and could mount an offensive against Pakistan in ten days. “It would be almost impossible to convince those Pakistanis living near the Indian border that any reduction in the strength of the Pakistan Army was a reasonable course of action,” he stated.

The ambassador pointed out that Pakistan had not received from the United States, either privately or publicly, any assurances guaranteeing her territorial integrity. He then dwelt at some length on how it was “very difficult for the ordinary Pakistani” to understand why the US press criticized Pakistan. Ahmed implied that US officials should help mitigate criticism of Pakistan by informing American journalists of Pakistan's difficulties as well as its value to US security.
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Browsing through media reports at the time, it seems that the Pentagon undertook background briefings in response to the ambassador's request. Some positive reports and editorials followed, especially in the
New York Times
. But generally Americans continued to wonder whether they were getting their money's worth by aiding Pakistan's military. The reverse question was being asked in Pakistan. If Pakistan would gain nothing in its conflicts with India and Afghanistan, why should it commit itself to the US-led military alliances?

The answer, of course, was that alliance with the United States was the only way of securing crucial military equipment as aid. Between 1954 and 1959 $425 million in American aid had been pumped into Pakistan's military. Pakistan's army received Patton tanks, modern artillery, howitzers, and state-of-the-art communications and transportation equipment. The Air Force was armed with F-86 jet fighters that could effectively defend against an attack across Pakistan's borders. The only ships added to the Pakistan navy since 1947 were used American vessels transferred mostly as grants.

This was on top of $855 million in economic assistance over the same period. But the Pakistanis still felt they were not getting enough of the items on their wish lists fast enough, just as American officials realized they were giving too much to Pakistan in return for too little. The issue came to a head when Eisenhower questioned his own administration's Pakistan policy at an NSC meeting. The president observed that having Pakistan as a military ally was proving costly.

A very large proportion of total US assistance at the time was allocated to Pakistan's military. Eisenhower said that the United States
was “doing practically nothing for Pakistan except in the form of military aid,” which “was perhaps the worst kind of a plan and decision we could have made.” Describing it as “a terrible error,” the president wondered why the United States was “hopelessly involved in it.” He also commented that the United States had “the same damned problem with Turkey” and that America's “tendency to rush out and seek allies was not very sensible.”

Interestingly, Eisenhower recognized intellectually that “in some instances the neutrality of a foreign nation was to the direct advantage of the United States.” If the option of buying an ally with aid had been exercised in case of India, “there wouldn't be enough money in the United States to provide the support that India would require as an ally of the United States,” he exclaimed.

The president confessed that he did not quite know what to do about the military program for Pakistan, so he proposed that “some skillful negotiator ought to try to induce the Pakistanis themselves to suggest changes in this military assistance program over a period of time.” The State Department told him that it wanted “to work toward some reduction of our military assistance program in Pakistan while avoiding serious political repercussions.”
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Thus, the American honeymoon with Pakistan had started to go sour. Dulles's policy toward the Middle East had not been particularly effective. Gamal Abdel Nasser had emerged as the strongman of Egypt, and his anti-Western and anti-Israeli idiom was finding increasing favor among Arabs. Pakistan's pro-Western leaders wanted to persist with their strategy of building their military and maintaining their economy with American funds, but there was no will to rally public opinion behind that strategy. The Pakistani people continued to be fed a steady diet of anti-India and Pan-Islamist slogans that had been the staple since partition.

Pakistan found itself distrusted by Arabs as well as by two crucial neighbors, Afghanistan and India. Its leaders also failed to read correctly the extent to which the United States was committed to spending money on Pakistan's security and economic well-being. Moreover, the Pakistani and American definitions of security were very different. Pakistan measured its security in terms of militarily
defeating India and securing territory in Kashmir that it felt had been cheated from them in 1947. Conversely, the United States was content with seeing Pakistan protect its international borders and stave off a communist insurrection if one ever happened.

T
EN YEARS HAD PASSED
since Pakistan's founding when James M. Langley, owner and editor of the
Concord Monitor
in New Hampshire, arrived in Karachi as the new US ambassador. Langley was one of the earliest supporters of Eisenhower's nomination as the Republican candidate for president in 1952, and Eisenhower rewarded that support and loyalty with the ambassadorial appointment soon after beginning his second term as president. Langley was not part of the emerging national security establishment and was, therefore, able to look at Pakistan with relative detachment.

Six months into his job the new ambassador realized that US aid was the only thing that kept Pakistan going. In detailed reports and letters to the State Department, Langley shared his impressions and analysis of Pakistan. He wrote about the economic, military, and psychological dimensions of what he described as “the Pakistan problem.”

According to Langley, a “small thinking elite,” including the army's officer corps, ran the country, while the masses were restricted to preserving their “inadequate South Asian standard of living.” The army, “with its excellent morale and fine equipment,” had become the country's “safe anchor,” but relying primarily on the army as “the framework of the Pakistan state” was “questionable statesmanship,” he argued.

In Langley's opinion the overall situation in Pakistan was deteriorating. The country was dysfunctional, and the United States was inadvertently exacerbating that dysfunction with its support for a militarized Pakistan. He pointed out that “Military strength, without a sound economic and political base, does not constitute real strength in South Asia or elsewhere.” The editor-turned-ambassador wanted Americans to rethink their approach to this ally.

The problem that Langley spoke of related to Pakistan's lack of internal cohesion and the unending personal and factional rivalries that plagued the country's politics. After much debate the Pakistani leadership had finally written a constitution in 1956. The document combined Westminster-style parliamentary democracy with Islamic pronouncements. But whereas India had held two national elections since independence, Pakistan had yet to hold one.

Nehru was unifying India by recognizing its diversity. British-created Provinces were broken into states within the Indian Union based on ethnicity and language. In one such state, Kerala, an elected communist government had taken office. Conversely, Pakistan tried to impose unity from the top down. The British provinces were eliminated to create one unit in West Pakistan and another in the east.

After initially insisting on Urdu as the sole national language, Bengali had been grudgingly accepted. But other languages were removed from schools and offices. Politicians from some ethnicities were labeled as enemies of the state. East and West Pakistan were drifting apart. The prospect of integrating the nation on religious basis had met its first challenge during sectarian disturbances in Lahore in 1953. Mainstream Muslim sects had rioted to demand that the Ahmadiyya sect be legally declared to be non-Muslim. Defining who was or was not a Muslim would open Pandora's box.

In the midst of ideological arguments and grandiloquence about restoring Islam's lost glory, Pakistan's leaders tended to ignore fundamental economic realities. Even though 65 percent of the country's revenue went toward military spending, Pakistan still needed aid to pay for expensive equipment. Land reform and modernization of agriculture were totally ignored. Instead of utilizing aid as the means to an efficient, self-sustaining economy for the future, Pakistan's government considered aid to be a substitute for revenue.