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1. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২০ নভেম্বর ২০১৩ (৬:৩০ অপরাহ্ণ)

   stop #VentureIslamism in middleEast iran and southAsia, this business make Anti-Americanism, come to normal business @NishaBiswal

   — masud karim (@urumurum) November 20, 2013

   আমেরিকান প্রশাসনের একটা ব্যবসা পদ্ধতি আছে যাকে আমি #ভেনচারইসলামিজম (#VentureIslamism) বলি। মধ্যপ্রাচ্য (cont) http://t.co/jvwRmVZepn

   — masud karim (@urumurum) November 21, 2013

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     মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৩ (১:২৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

     বাংলাদেশ আমেরিকার সাথে ব্যবসা, প্রযুক্তি সহযোগিতা, বিটুবি জিটুজি বিনিয়োগ ও আদানপ্রদান উত্তরোত্তর বাড়াবে কিন্তু কোনোভাবেই তাদের #ভেনচারইসলামিজম-কে ঘুণাক্ষরেও ছিকুতকুত খেলতে দিবে না। #VentureIslamism

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2. Pingback: তোদের গায়ে মুতি | প্রাত্যহিক পাঠ

3. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ নভেম্বর ২০১৩ (৭:২৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

   November 20, 2013
   Looking Away from Genocide
   Posted by Gary Bass

   On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating military crackdown on restive Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. While the slaughter in what would soon become an independent Bangladesh was underway, the C.I.A. and State Department conservatively estimated that roughly two hundred thousand people had died (the official Bangladeshi death toll is three million). Some ten million Bengali refugees fled to India, where untold numbers died in miserable conditions in refugee camps. Pakistan was a Cold War ally of the United States, and Richard Nixon and his national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger, resolutely supported its military dictatorship; they refused to impose pressure on Pakistan’s generals to forestall further atrocities.

   My new book, “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,” tries to reconstruct this dark chapter of the Cold War, using declassified documents, investigative reporting, and countless hours of White House tapes, including about a hundred newly transcribed conversations. Thanks to the secret taping system that he installed to record his own blunt conversations, Nixon inadvertently left behind the most transparent Administration in American history. The tapes offer the most revealing account of Nixon and Kissinger’s raw thinking. Staffers at the White House and the State Department were often more pragmatic than their principals, so the documents they produced make the Administration appear more moderate than it was. It’s only on the audio tapes that Nixon and Kissinger’s full radicalism is on display.

   But the White House tapes are maddeningly hard to use. The State Department’s official historians have done excellent work in declassifying some of the most sensitive discussions, but to this day, particularly embarrassing portions of the tapes are bleeped out on the basis of specious national-security concerns. (I’ve made my own requests for a mandatory declassification review of these bleeps under the terms of an executive order.) The tapes remain a largely untapped resource, in part because they are enormous, unwieldy, badly organized, often bleeped, crackly, laborious to transcribe, and hard to understand.

   You can hear Nixon and Kissinger at work in the following audio clip, which is followed by an annotated transcript I made for “The Blood Telegram.” (Some snippets from this conversation are available in a volume of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series, but this is the first full transcript.) This discussion, which also involved the White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, took place not long after the start of the crackdown in East Pakistan. Nixon and Kissinger are having one of their typically prolix and digressive conversations, concentrating this time on foreign policy. The tape is unusually clean: the sound quality is good, and there are no bleeps, though there is some music playing in the background.

   The clip below begins just as the conversation has turned from the Vietnam War to the possibility of an opening to China. To establish communications with Mao Zedong’s regime, the White House was exploring several clandestine channels, including messages carried to the Chinese leadership by Romania’s Communist despot, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Pakistan’s military dictator, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, known as Yahya. The Pakistan channel would soon culminate in Kissinger’s first secret trip to Beijing, in July, 1971. He flew direct from Pakistan, which provided an airplane and a cloak-and-dagger cover story—another reason for the White House to support Pakistan even as the killing continued.

   WHITE HOUSE TAPES
   OVAL OFFICE 477-1
   APRIL 12, 1971, 10:24-10:33 A.M.

   NIXON: Now, another thing. I want to know about Yahya and Pakistan.

   Nixon had a great personal fondness for Pakistan’s military ruler, who was carrying out the brutal crackdown on the Bengalis. “He’s a decent man,” Nixon repeatedly said, as the death toll mounted.

   I want to be sure that we’re not caught in a crack here where State then puts out a whole lot of stuff that they’ve done. Now Bill has not said that he wants to say anything about Pakistan, has he?

   The President seems to be making sure that the distrusted State Department would not, on its own, condemn Yahya for killing Bengalis. “Bill” is William Rogers, Nixon’s ineffectual Secretary of State, who had been reduced to near-total irrelevance by his rival Kissinger.

   KISSINGER: No.

   NIXON: Has Sisco?

   Joseph Sisco, the headstrong assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, was a particular annoyance to Nixon and Kissinger, who would later call him “a maniac” and “such a whore.”

   KISSINGER: No. But it’s out there, out there [indistinct]. The Dhaka consulate is in open rebellion.

   American diplomats in East Pakistan, horrified by the slaughter, had been reporting the killing in gruesome detail. On April 6th—just a few days before this conversation—the U.S. consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent a telegram signed by almost all of the U.S. officials in East Pakistan, formally voicing “strong dissent” from the White House’s pro-Pakistan policy, which they characterized as “moral bankruptcy” in the face of “genocide.” In retaliation, Nixon and Kissinger would soon eject Blood from his post in Dhaka.

   NIXON: I understand…[indistinct] I want to know how we can respond to it [indistinct]. We’re going to be…[indistinct] you know what I mean?

   KISSINGER (emphatically): Mr. President, we’re going to wind up on the worst side if we start backing a rebellion there now.

   Though Nixon and Kissinger were discussing actual rebellions in East Pakistan and Biafra, Kissinger was also accusing Blood of “open rebellion” for having sent his formal cable of dissent through official channels. Kissinger would later call Blood “this maniac in Dacca, the Consul General who is in rebellion.”

   NIXON: But Bill—but Henry, we did not back the rebellion in Biafra, did we?

   Even before the crackdown in East Pakistan began, U.S. officials had warned that the country could descend into the kind of bloody chaos that had recently been seen in Biafra, an oil-rich region of Nigeria that attempted to secede in 1967. The Nigerian government managed to crush the Biafran resistance in 1970. As a candidate for President in 1968, Nixon had denounced genocide in Biafra; by 1971, yesterday’s inaction in Biafra had become a rationale for today’s support of Pakistan.
   
   KISSINGER: That’s right.

   NIXON: That’s a hell of a lot more reasonable. I know, there are less people in Biafra. Is that the reason? Does morality become—look, there weren’t very many Jews in Germany.

   As Nixon knew, Kissinger was one of those German Jews; at least thirteen of his close relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust.

   KISSINGER (murmurs): That’s right.

   NIXON: Was it immoral—was it therefore not immoral for Hitler to kill them?

   Nixon, unprompted, is comparing the slaughter in East Pakistan to Biafra and the Holocaust.

   KISSINGER (murmurs): That’s right.

   Kissinger goes along with Nixon’s comparison of Hitler and Yahya, but still maintains his support for the Pakistani dictator.

   NIXON: See, that’s my— [indistinct] And the Biafrans are black— [indistinct] Catholics!

   This part is hard to hear, but may be about how Americans ignored the Biafrans because they were black, and about Catholic support for the Biafran cause. As Nixon later said, “Biafra stirred up a few Catholics.”

   KISSINGER: Mr. President, if we get in there now—

   NIXON (cross-talk): It’s ridiculous.

   KISSINGER: —we get West Pakistan turned against us, and we get—the Bengalis are going to go left anyway.

   The State Department had repeatedly noted that the Bengali leadership was quite pro-American, but Kissinger dismisses that.

   NIXON: Yeah.

   KISSINGER: They are by nature left. Their moderate leadership is in jail, maybe they shouldn’t have been put in jail, but that’s the way it is now, and, uh—

   Kissinger realizes he’s made a wrong turn, is actually criticizing Yahya, and falls awkwardly silent.

   NIXON: I just want to [indistinct]… get a little work… [indistinct] Is that in the West—West Pakistan thing or not? [indistinct]

   KISSINGER: Why don’t you wait ’til Wednesday, Mr. President, when we have the meeting and then we can get a paper to you.

   NIXON: All right.

   KISSINGER: Because I am afraid in the present state of the State Department if you interfere too early—

   NIXON (annoyed): I’m not interfering, I just want to know what he thinks!

   Nixon snaps at Kissinger for the nonstop bureaucratic combat against Rogers. To handle Kissinger’s obsessive feuding with the Secretary of State, the President had Haldeman set up an informal “Henry-handling committee.” In the end, Kissinger drove Rogers out, and claimed both top foreign-policy jobs, national-security advisor and Secretary of State.

   KISSINGER: Well, he’s going to submit a paper to us and then you’ll know what you think—what he thinks.

   NIXON: Oh. He’s going to submit a paper?

   KISSINGER: Yeah.

   NIXON: You’re sure he knows I want it?

   KISSINGER: Oh yes, he knows you want it. No, he’s—Bill is all right.

   Kissinger starts to walk back, trying to praise Rogers.

   Bill is—

   NIXON: I just got to know what the hell they think. I mean, I’m not trying to—… [indistinct] I think if we get in the middle of the whole thing [indistinct], it’s a hell of a mistake.

   KISSINGER: It’s a disaster. No one else is doing it.

   NIXON: Look—let’s face it. The people that bitch about Vietnam bitched about it because we intervened in what they say was a civil war.

   This was one of Nixon’s most potent arguments to silence Americans who were outraged by the suffering in East Pakistan. Democrats like Ted Kennedy, the White House argued, were simply trying to drag the United States into another civil war in Asia.
   
   KISSINGER: That’s right.

   NIXON: Now some of those same bastards, like… [indistinct] want us to intervene in Biafra. And some of those same people want us to intervene here. Both civil wars. Real civil wars. Now what in the hell are we talking about?

   KISSINGER: They want us to cut out economic aid to West Pakistan.

   NIXON (surprised): For what reason?

   Kissinger is careful to defend U.S. aid to the Pakistani military government, despite the atrocities. Blood had argued that the bloodshed in East Pakistan was a very good reason to cut off economic aid to Yahya.

   KISSINGER: It’s—pure doctrinaire reasons. Because India is screaming in turn, because they’re scared to death of their own Bengalis. Deep down the Indians don’t really want an independent East Pakistan, because within ten years of that the West Bengalis are going to start bringing pressure on them for autonomy. It’s a classic situation for us to stay out of. There’s nothing for us in there to take sides in this. And for us to cut off aid will infuriate the West Pakistanis.

   Millions of Bengalis in India were deeply shocked by the killing of their brethren across the border in East Pakistan. The Indian state of West Bengal, unstable and impoverished, was already a headache for the Indian government—and the crackdown in East Pakistan sent some ten million refugees fleeing into India’s border states, above all into West Bengal. This left the Indian government fearful of further unrest in the state, and desperate to find a way to get the refugees to return home. India secretly sponsored Bengali guerrillas fighting back against Pakistani troops. Finally, in December, 1971, India and Pakistan would fight a brief fourteen-day war, ending with an Indian victory and the creation of the new country of Bangladesh.

   Unlike Blood and the other Americans in Dhaka, Kissinger seems not to realize that the loss of so many Bengali lives might impact American foreign policy. For all his mastery of the use of American leverage, he nevertheless rules out the possibility of applying any pressure on the Pakistani military.

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4. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৩ (১:৪১ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   এরকম একটি লেখার অপেক্ষায় ছিলাম অনেক দিন।

   The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm
   Requiem for a Decade of Distraction
   By Michael J. Mazarr

   For a decade and a half, from the mid-1990s through about 2010, the dominant national security narrative in the United States stressed the dangers posed by weak or failing states. These were seen to breed terrorism, regional chaos, crime, disease, and environmental catastrophe. To deal with such problems at their roots, the argument ran, the United States had to reach out and help stabilize the countries in question, engaging in state building on a neo-imperial scale. And reach out the United States did — most obviously during the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

   After a decade of conflict and effort with precious little to show for it, however, the recent era of interventionist U.S. state building is drawing to a close. And although there are practical reasons for this shift — the United States can no longer afford such missions, and the public has tired of them — the decline of the state-building narrative reflects a more profound underlying truth: the obsession with weak states was always more of a mania than a sound strategic doctrine. Its passing will not leave the United States more isolationist and vulnerable but rather free the country to focus on its more important global roles.

   THE BIRTH OF A PARADIGM

   In the wake of the Cold War, contemplating a largely benign security environment, many U.S. national security strategists and practitioners concluded that the most important risks were posed by the fragility of state structures and recommended profound shifts in U.S. foreign and defense policy as a result. In an interconnected world, they argued, chaos, violence, and grievances anywhere had the potential to affect U.S. interests, and weak states were factories of such volatility. Experiences in Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia helped fuel the concern, and by 1994, the CIA was funding a state-failure task force to get a handle on the problem.

   In 1997, the Clinton administration released Presidential Decision Directive 56, “Managing Complex Contingency Operations,” which began with the assertion that “in the wake of the Cold War, attention has focused on a rising number of territorial disputes, armed ethnic conflicts, and civil wars that pose threats to regional and international peace.” A new focus of U.S. policy, accordingly, would be responding to such situations with “multi-dimensional operations composed of such components as political/diplomatic, humanitarian, intelligence, economic development, and security.”

   Critics of a realist persuasion objected to the emerging narrative, arguing that the Clinton administration’s forays into state building in peripheral areas represented a strategic folly. And during his 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush ran as the candidate of foreign policy humility, arguing in part that nation building was a dangerous distraction. His adviser Condoleezza Rice grumbled that U.S. troops should not be asked to escort toddlers to school; his vice presidential candidate, Dick Cheney, suggested that a Bush administration would end U.S. participation in Balkan operations; and the day before the election, Bush himself declared, “Let me tell you what else I’m worried about: I’m worried about an opponent who uses ‘nation building’ and ‘the military’ in the same sentence.”

   But the 9/11 attacks swept these hesitations aside, as the practical implications of an interventionist “war on terror” became apparent. The first page of the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy argued that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the hands of the embittered few.”

   The new consensus was bipartisan. The Democratic foreign policy hand Susan Rice, for example, wrote in 2003 that Bush was “wise to draw attention to the significant threats to our national security posed by failed and failing states.” Where the right emphasized security and terrorism, the left added humanitarian concerns. Development specialists jumped on the bandwagon as well, thanks to new studies that highlighted the importance of institutions and good governance as requirements for sustained economic success. In his 2004 book, State-Building, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote, “Weak and failing states have arguably become the single most important problem for international order.” The Washington Post editorialized the same year that “weak states can compromise security — most obviously by providing havens for terrorists but also by incubating organized crime, spurring waves of migrants, and undermining global efforts to control environmental threats and disease.” This argument, the paper concluded, “is no longer much contested.” A year later, the State Department’s director of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, and its newly minted coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, Carlos Pascual, argued in these pages that “in today’s increasingly interconnected world, weak and failed states pose an acute risk to U.S. and global security. Indeed, they present one of the most important foreign policy challenges of the contemporary era.”

   From one angle, the concern with weak states could be seen as a response to actual conditions on the ground. Problems had always festered in disordered parts of the developing world. Without great- power conflict as an urgent national security priority, those problems were more clearly visible and harder to ignore. From another angle, it could be seen as a classic meme — a concept or intellectual fad riding to prominence through social diffusion, articles by prominent thinkers, a flurry of attention from the mainstream press, and a series of foundation grants, think-tank projects, roundtables, and conferences.

   From a third angle, however, it could be seen as a solution to an unusual concern confronting U.S. policymakers in this era: what to do with a surplus of national power. The United States entered the 1990s with a dominant international position and no immediate threats. Embracing a substantially reduced U.S. global role would have required a fundamental reassessment of the prevailing consensus in favor of continued primacy, something few in or around the U.S. national security establishment were prepared to consider. Instead, therefore, whether consciously or not, that establishment generated a new rationale for global engagement, one involving the application of power and influence to issues that at any other time would have been seen as secondary or tertiary. Without a near-peer competitor (or several) to deter or a major war on the horizon, Washington found a new foreign policy calling: renovating weak or failing states.

   THE DECLINE OF A STRATEGIC NARRATIVE

   The practical challenges of state-building missions are now widely appreciated. They tend to be long, difficult, and expensive, with success demanding an open-ended commitment to a messy, violent, and confusing endeavor — something unlikely to be sustained in an era of budgetary austerity. But the last decade has driven home intellectual challenges to the concept as well.

   The threat posed by weak and fragile states, for example, turned out to be both less urgent and more complex and diffuse than was originally suggested. Foreign Policy’s Failed States Index for 2013 is not exactly a roster of national security priorities; of its top 20 weak states, very few (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan) boast geostrategic significance, and they do so mostly because of their connection to terrorism. But even the threat of terrorism isn’t highly correlated with the current roster of weak states; only one of the top 20, Sudan, appears on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and most other weak states have only a marginal connection to terrorism at best.

   A lack of definitional rigor posed a second problem. There has never been a coherent set of factors that define failed states: As the political scientist Charles Call argued in a powerful 2008 corrective, the concept resulted in the “agglomeration of diverse criteria” that worked to “throw a monolithic cloak over disparate problems that require tailored solutions.” This basic methodological flaw would distort state-building missions for years, as outside powers forced generic, universal solutions onto very distinct contexts.

   The specified dangers were never unique to weak states, moreover, nor would state-building campaigns necessarily have mitigated them. Take terrorism. The most effective terrorists tend to be products of the middle class, often from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, not impoverished citizens of failed states. And terrorist groups operating in weak states can shift their bases of operations: if Afghanistan becomes too risky, they can uproot themselves and move to Somalia, Yemen, or even Europe. As a result, “stabilizing” three or four sources of extremist violence would not render the United States secure. The same could be said of threats such as organized crime, which finds comfortable homes in functioning but troubled states in Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America.

   As the scholar Stewart Patrick noted in a 2006 examination of the purported threats issuing from weak states, “What is striking is how little empirical evidence underpins these assertions and policy developments. Analysts and policymakers alike have simply presumed the existence of a blanket connection between state weakness and threats to the national security of developed countries and have begun to recommend and implement policy responses.”

   And although interconnectedness and interdependence may create risks, the dangers in such a world are more likely to come from strong, well-governed states with imperfect regulations than weak ones with governance deficiencies. Financial volatility that can shake the foundations of leading nations and cyberattacks that could destabilize energy or information networks pose more immediate and persistent risks than, say, terrorism.

   A third problem was misplaced confidence about the possibility of the mission’s feasibility. The last decade has offered an extended, tragic reminder of the fact that forcible state building simply cannot be accomplished by outsiders in any sustainable or authentic way. When a social order has become maladapted to the globalizing world — when governing institutions are weak, personalized, or kleptocratic; corruption is rampant; and the rule of law is noticeable by its absence — there are simply no proven methods for generating major social, political, economic, or cultural change relatively quickly.

   As the Australian political scientist Michael Wesley argued in a brilliant 2008 essay, state weakness is primarily a political problem, and yet state building is often conceived and executed as if it were an apolitical exercise. “The intention of remaining aloof from politics while concentrating on technocratic reforms has proved unrealistic,” he wrote. “Even seemingly technocratic tasks confront international administrators with essentially political decisions: the nature and basis of elections; which pressure groups to consult; the reintegration or de facto separation of ethnic communities; school curricula; degrees of public ownership of enterprises; the status of women; and so on. However technocratic their intention, state-building missions inevitably find themselves factored into local rivalries.”

   In trying to force change on recalcitrant governments and societies, moreover, outside interventions undermine internal motives for reform by transferring responsibility for a better future from local leaders to external actors. The outside power needs cooperation from its local clients more than they need its sponsorship. The result is a dependency paradox that impedes reform. As success stories from South Korea to Chile show, the path from state weakness to strength has to be traveled by the states themselves, gradually and fitfully, most often under the influence of strong, decisive leadership from visionary architects of governance. It is an organic, grass-roots process that must respect the unique social, cultural, economic, political, and religious contexts of each country. And although it can be encouraged and even modestly shaped by outside contributions and pressure, it cannot be imposed.

   A fourth problem with the state-building obsession was that it distorted the United States’ sense of its central purpose and role in global politics. Ever since World War II, the United States has labored mightily to underwrite the stability of the international system. It has done this by assembling military alliances to protect its friends and deter its enemies, by helping construct a global architecture of trade and finance, and by policing the global commons. These actions have helped buttress an interdependent system of states that see their dominant interests in stability rather than conquest.

   Playing this role well demands sustained attention at all levels of government, in part to nurture the relationships essential to crisis management, diplomacy, and multilateral cooperation of all kinds. Indeed, the leading danger in the international system today is the peril that, assaulted by a dozen causes of rivalry and mistrust, the system will fragment into geopolitical chaos. The U.S. experience since the 1990s, and growing evidence from Northeast Asia, suggests that if the relatively stable post–Cold War era devolves into interstate rivalry, it will be not the result of weak states but that of the escalating regional ambitions, bitter historical memories, and flourishing nationalisms of increasingly competitive states. The U.S. role in counteracting the broader trends of systemic disintegration is therefore critical. The United States is the linchpin of a number of key alliances and networks; it provides the leadership and attractive force for many global diplomatic endeavors, and its dominant military position helps rule out thoughts of aggression in many quarters.

   The weak-state obsession has drawn attention away from such pursuits and made a resurgence of traditional threats more likely. Focusing on two seemingly endless wars and half a dozen other potential “stability operations” has eroded U.S. global engagement, diminished U.S. diplomatic creativity, and distracted U.S. officials from responding appropriately to changes in the global landscape.

   When one reads the memoirs of Bush administration officials, the dozen or more leading global issues beyond Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “war on terror” begin to sound like background noise. Top U.S. officials appear to have spent far more time between 2003 and 2011, for example, managing the fractious mess of Iraqi politics than tending to relationships with key global powers. As a consequence, senior U.S. officials have had less time to cultivate the leaders of rising regional powers, from Brazil to India to Turkey. Sometimes, U.S. actions or demands in state-building adventures have directly undermined other important relationships or diplomatic initiatives, as when Washington faced the global political reaction to the Iraq war.

   Such tradeoffs reflect a hallmark of the era of state building: secondary issues became dominant ones. To be fair, this was partly the fault of globalization; around-the-clock media coverage now constantly shoves problems a world away onto the daily agendas of national leaders. Combined with the United States’ self-image as the indispensable nation, this intrusive awareness created political pressure to act on issues of limited significance to core U.S. interests. Yet this is precisely the problem: U.S. perceptions of global threats and of the country’s responsibility to address them have become badly and perhaps permanently skewed. A great power’s reservoir of strategic attention is not infinite. And the United States has become geopolitically hobbled, seemingly uninterested in grand strategic initiatives or transformative diplomacy, as its attention constantly dances from one crisis to another.

   A fifth problem flowed directly from the fourth. To perform its global stabilizing role, the United States needs appropriately designed, trained, and equipped armed forces — forces that can provide a global presence, prevail in high-end conflict contingencies, enable quick long-range strike and interdiction capabilities, and build and support local partners’ capacities. The state-building mission has skewed the operations, training, equipping, and self-conception of the U.S. military in ways that detract from these responsibilities.

   Much of the U.S. military has spent a decade focusing on state building and counterinsurgency (COIN), especially in its training and doctrine, to the partial neglect of more traditional tasks. Massive investments have gone into COIN-related equipment, such as the MRAP (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) vehicles built to protect U.S. troops from improvised explosive devices, draining billions of dollars from other national security resources. The result of these choices has been to weaken the U.S. military’s ability to play more geostrategic and, ultimately, more important roles. Between a demanding operational tempo, the requirements of refitting between deployments, and a shift in training to emphasize COIN, the U.S. military, especially its ground forces, lost much of its proficiency in full-spectrum combat operations. Simply put, the U.S. military would be far better positioned today — better aligned with the most important roles for U.S. power, better trained for its traditional missions, better equipped for an emerging period of austerity — had the state-building diversion never occurred.

   AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL

   None of this is meant to suggest that a concern for the problems posed by weak or failing states can or should disappear entirely from the U.S. foreign policy and national security agendas. Counterterrorism and its associated tasks will surely remain important, and across the greater Middle East — including Afghanistan after 2014 — internal turmoil may well have external consequences requiring some response from Washington. Effective local institutions do contribute to stability and growth, and the United States should do what it can to nurture them where possible. The difference is likely to be in the priority Washington accords such efforts. The January 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, for example, reflected the judgment that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations” and announced an intention to pursue “innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches” to achieving objectives. Recently, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld, went even further: “I simply don’t know where the security interests of our nation are threatened enough to cause us to lead a future major, extended COIN campaign.”

   In the future, the United States is likely to rely less on power projection and more on domestic preparedness, replacing an urgent civilizing zeal with defensive self-protection. This makes sense, because the most appropriate answer to the dangers inherent in an era of interdependence and turbulence is domestic resilience: hardened and redundant networks of information and energy, an emphasis on local or regional self-sufficiency to reduce the cascading effects of systemic shocks, improved domestic emergency-response and cybersecurity capacities, sufficient investments in pandemic response, and so forth. Equally important is a resilient mindset, one that treats perturbations as inevitable rather than calamitous and resists the urge to overreact. In this sense, the global reaction to the recent surge in piracy — partly a product of poor governance in African states — should be taken as a model: no state-building missions, but arming and protecting the ships at risk.

   When it does reach out into the world to deal with weak states, the United States should rely on gradual progress through patient, long-term advisory and aid relationships, based on such activities as direct economic assistance tailored to local needs; training, exchanges, and other human-capacity-development programs; military-to-military ties; trade and investment policies; and more. The watchwords should be patience, gradualism, and tailored responses: enhancing effective governance through a variety of models attuned to local patterns and needs, in advisory and supportive ways.

   As weak states continue to generate specific threats, such as terrorism, the United States has a range of more limited tools available to mitigate them. It can, for example, return terrorism to its proper place as a law enforcement task and continue to work closely with foreign law enforcement agencies. It can help train and develop such agencies, as well as local militaries, to lead in the fight. When necessary, it can employ targeted coercive instruments — classic intelligence work and clandestine operations, raids by special operations forces, and, with far greater selectivity than today, remote strikes — to deal with particular threats, ideally in concert with the militaries of local allies.

   Some will contend that U.S. officials can never rule out expeditionary state building because events may force it back onto the agenda. If al Qaeda were to launch an attack that was planned in restored Taliban strongholds in a post-2014 Afghanistan, or if a fragmentation and radicalization of Pakistani society were to place nuclear control at risk, some would recommend a return to interventionist state building. Yet after the United States’ recent experiences, it is doubtful that such a call would resonate.

   The idea of a neo-imperial mission to strengthen weak states and stabilize chaotic societies always flew in the face of more important U.S. global roles and real mechanisms of social change. There is still work to be done in such contexts, but in more prudent and discriminate ways. Moving on from the civilizing mission will, in turn, make possible a more sustainable and effective national security strategy, allowing the United States to return its full attention to the roles and missions that mean far more to long-term peace and security. One of the benefits of this change, ironically, will be to allow local institutional development to proceed more organically and authentically, in its own ways and at its own pace. Most of all, the new mindset will reflect a simple facing up to reality after a decade of distraction.

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5. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৫ জানুয়ারি ২০১৪ (১০:২৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   Archer Blood: The conscientious civil servant

   On 3 September 2004, an octogenarian American diplomat died nondescriptly with hardly a mention in US newspapers. However, his death made headlines in a country halfway across the world. Archer Blood, an American Foreign Service officer, was posted in Dacca (now Dhaka) during the tumultuous years when East Pakistan was in the throes of becoming an independent nation. It was the early 1970s and East Pakistan had been devastated in more ways than one. A level-three cyclone had struck, killing over half a million people and Yahya Khan, the military dictator ruling from what was then known as West Pakistan, had been deliberately slow in responding to the crisis.
   In early 1971, popular Awami League leader Mujibur Rahman, who had swept the recent elections, was arrested in a crackdown along with thousands of students and intelligentsia by West Pakistan’s military juggernaut. As recorded by Robert Payne, the author of Massacre, Yahya Khan ordered his brutal General Tikka Khan to kill millions of Bengalis so that the survivors either “eat out of their hands” or flee to India.
   In a major military surge, West Pakistani troops were airlifted into Dacca using American-supplied C-130 military transport aircraft to suppress Bangladeshis with an iron hand. Yahya Khan enjoyed a specially close rapport with the US President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, both of whom supported Pakistan as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc and despised Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Indians. Despite domestic protests in the US, Nixon subverted the oversight mechanisms and supplied Pakistan with vast quantities of arms and ammunition knowing fully well that they were being used to commit selective genocide in East Pakistan. The Pakistani war machine was butchering poorly armed and disorganized local populace, killing hundreds of thousands and deliberately creating a massive refugee influx into India. According to Mujibur Rahman, three million died and over 10 million were forced to flee into India; rivalling the scale of the India-Pakistan partition.
   This humanitarian crisis was largely because of the policy of “The Tilt” as Nixon’s support for Yahya Khan came to be known. Declassified US government documents disclose that Nixon staunchly stood by the dictator while Pakistan used US weapons against its own citizenry to such devastating effect. The refugee situation became a full-blown crisis for India, which could barely afford to feed its own poor. In addition, cadres of the Bengali freedom movement Mukti Bahini started using refugee camps within Indian territory as their base. After appeals for international intervention proved ineffectual, largely because of US pressure, India had no choice but to intervene militarily.
   Nixon immediately painted India as an aggressor, accusing it of interfering in Pakistan’s “internal” affairs and continued to discount atrocities committed by Pakistan. In a bid to deter India, he deployed a naval task force, led by nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise, in the Bay of Bengal in thinly disguised “gunboat diplomacy”. In addition, Nixon used his recent bonhomie with the Chinese to prod them into troop movements threatening India on its north-eastern front. He also asked Jordan to replenish Pakistan’s depleted air force with its own squadrons of fighter aircraft. Despite such assistance, Pakistan could not subdue its eastern wing and the Bangladeshi movement began to gain ground.
   However, the world was largely unaware of the true horror of events in East Pakistan, primarily because of the news blackout imposed by Pakistan and the US. Foreign journalists were not permitted to travel or witness events first-hand and the US populace remained oblivious of what their president was doing.
   Archer Blood changed that. In what became famously known as “The Blood Telegrams”, he began sending a series of dissent cables to the US exposing the true horror of Nixon’s policies and the blatant lies and chicanery he was resorting to. Nixon and Kissinger tried their best to silence him, but Blood stood his ground and gathered momentum among other officers who were equally disgusted by the duplicity of their president; Kenneth Keating, US ambassador to India, was one of them. Blood’s cable dispatched on 6 April 1971 is considered to be the most strongly worded dissent ever to be sent by a foreign services officer to the state department. Gary Bass’s book The Blood Telegram brilliantly captures the saga of how a relatively low ranking, but conscientious civil servant could start a collective movement of dissent against the US policy of abetting human rights violation of such magnitude and make a difference that would eventually force Nixon and Kissinger to reduce their support to a dictatorial regime if not altogether abandon it.
   In many ways, world histories tend to repeat themselves. Countries professing promotion of democracies and free will of people continue to support dictatorial regimes when it suits them. Citizenries, who believe they are abreast of events, continue to be oblivious of parochial policies their leaders practice. And millions continue to die because their torments are unknown to the rest of the world. But the moral courage of conscientious bureaucrats like Archer Blood may still prove to be inspiration to take on the powerful—especially when the powerful are in the wrong.

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7. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৬ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১:৫০ অপরাহ্ণ)

   Unholy Alliances
   Nixon, Kissinger, and the Bangladesh genocide.
   By Pankaj Mishra

   “Did you read today about what America is doing?” one of the Indian characters in Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey” asks. “CIA bastards are up to their usual anus-fingering tactics.” The novel is set in 1971, the year that India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war and helped create a new nation-state—Bangladesh—from the Bengali-speaking province of East Pakistan. Like Mistry’s characters, Indians were confused and incensed by President Richard Nixon’s support for Pakistan’s military rulers and by his hostility toward India. After all, Pakistan had launched a murderous campaign against the Bengalis, leaving India’s impoverished and volatile border states to cope with ultimately some ten million refugees fleeing the carnage. The total number of the dead is unknown, but Bangladesh’s official estimate is three million. (Pakistan’s clearly understated figure is twenty-six thousand.)

   When, during the short ensuing war between India and Pakistan, Nixon implicitly threatened India by ordering a nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal, millions of Indian minds went dark with geopolitical paranoia. Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, became, as Mistry puts it, “names to curse with.” Mistry’s protagonist amplifies a commonplace conjecture: “The CIA plan” involves supporting Pakistan against India, because India’s friendship with the Soviet Union “makes Nixon shit, lying awake in bed and thinking about it. His house is white, but his pyjamas become brown every night.”

   Little did such Indians know that their wildest suppositions were indeed being ratified by Nixon, himself a gifted conspiracy theorist, who wholly reciprocated Indian antipathy. The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. But it is still startling to hear Nixon musing that what “the Indians,” then lucklessly hosting millions of refugees, “need—what they really need—is . . . a mass famine.” Kissinger loyally chimes in: “They’re such bastards.”

   The explanation for Nixon’s bizarre apportionment of blame lies in a complicated network of regional loyalties. Pakistan was a trusted American ally, to be protected against any threats from India and the Soviet Union, two countries that were on the verge of signing a “friendship treaty.” Nixon and Kissinger tried to persuade China, which they were hoping to befriend, to open up a front against India, its enemy since the Sino-Indian War of 1962. When India moved decisively against the overstretched Pakistani military—the war ended in just two weeks—the Oval Office, like the alleys of Calcutta, became feverish with speculation. The White House tapes contain this extraordinary exchange during the war’s final days:

   Kissinger: If the Soviets move against them [the Chinese] and then we don’t do anything, we’ll be finished.

   Nixon: So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?

   That’s indeed what Kissinger meant. “That will be the final showdown,” he said. Nixon quickly backed off from “Armageddon,” as he called it, but thinking seriously about this option evidently had its consolations. “At least we’re coming off like men,” Kissinger said. Nixon, too, was pleased to advertise that “the man in the White House” is “tough.” In this Washington bubble, reality had receded. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her review of the Pentagon Papers, later that year, the assertion of American machismo had weirdly supplanted all strategic and military aims and interests. The U.S. had to behave like the greatest power on earth for no other reason than to convince the world of it.

   How did the President of the United States find himself contemplating nuclear assault against the Soviet Union on behalf of Mao Zedong’s China while still embroiled in Vietnam? And why did he choose not to abandon Pakistani allies who were clearly guilty of mass killings? Two absorbing new books—Srinath Raghavan’s “1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh” (Harvard) and Gary Bass’s “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide” (Knopf)—describe, from different perspectives, this strangely neglected episode of the Cold War. Raghavan covers a range of mentalities, choices, and decisions in Islamabad, Moscow, Beijing, Washington, New Delhi, and other capitals. Bass focusses mainly on American actions and inaction. His previous book, “Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention,” has been cited by advocates of a United Nations doctrine, known as Responsibility to Protect, that enjoins the international community to intervene when a state cannot protect its citizens from genocide or war crimes. His heroes are such Americans as Archer Blood, the consul-general in Dhaka, whose office lambasted Washington for supporting a murderous Pakistani regime, in a cable subsequently known as the Blood telegram.

   “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy,” the telegram said. “Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. . . . Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.” Kenneth Keating, the U.S. Ambassador to India, likewise called on the Nixon Administration to “promptly, publicly, and prominently deplore this brutality.” But Nixon stonewalled Keating, and recalled Archer Blood from Dhaka. He and Kissinger showed contempt for dissenting American voices both within the Administration and in the Democratic opposition and the media. Bass draws up a severe indictment of Nixon and Kissinger, holding them responsible for “significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis.” He writes, “In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda.”

   This is not how Nixon would have liked to be remembered. By the nineteen-seventies, he had abandoned his reflexive anti-Communism of the forties and fifties. He had come to pride himself on taking a “long view” of things, believing that a balance of power, rather than the standoffs of the Cold War, was the best way to insure international stability. He and Kissinger were pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and laying the groundwork for his spectacular visit to China, in 1972. Nixon also fancied himself, after several tours to the region, to be a “man who knows Asia.” But, as Bass’s book makes clear, neither he nor Kissinger took a deep interest in Pakistan. In 1947, the violent partition of British India had divided the subcontinent into separate homelands for the Hindus (India) and the Muslims (Pakistan). Pakistan was created out of two regions that were separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory and that had little in common except religion. West Pakistan’s Punjabi-speaking military-feudal élite looked down on the Bengali-speaking natives of East Pakistan, whom they saw as racially inferior. They treated the province, which contained more than half of Pakistan’s population, as little better than a colony, a source of revenue for West Pakistan and a captive market for its goods.

   Nixon preferred Pakistan’s straight-talking Sandhurst-accented military strongmen to India’s elected leaders, especially those—Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for instance—who seemed to be snootily intellectual and were admired by East Coast liberals. As for the Bengalis, Nixon was unable to pronounce or even to recognize the name of their leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, popularly known as Mujib, who had been campaigning for autonomy for East Pakistan. And Nixon was as surprised as everyone else in December, 1970, when Mujib’s party gained a clear majority in Pakistan’s parliamentary election.

   The military junta—led by General Yahya Khan, who had assumed power in 1969—was reluctant to accept the election results, and Khan postponed convening Pakistan’s National Assembly. Mujib feared collusion between Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist West Pakistani politician whose party Mujib’s had beaten. As Mujib, Yahya Khan, and Bhutto fruitlessly negotiated, Bengali separatist anger began to erupt in mass demonstrations. On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a full-scale campaign, known as Operation Searchlight. After arresting Mujib and abducting him to West Pakistan and banning his party, it set about massacring his supporters, with American weapons.

   Firing squads spread out across East Pakistan, sometimes assisted by local collaborators from Islamist groups that had been humiliated in the elections. In the countryside, where the armed resistance was strongest, the Pakistani military burned and strafed villages, killing thousands and turning many more into refugees. Hindus, who composed more than ten per cent of the population, were targeted, their un-Muslimness ascertained by a quick inspection underneath their lungis. Tens of thousands of women were raped in a campaign of terror. (Bengalis also murdered and raped Urdu-speaking Muslims whom they suspected of being fifth columnists for West Pakistan.) Archer Blood, among others, reported the slaughter of professors and students at Dhaka University, an attempt to silence the intellectual class who had eloquently articulated Bengali grievances.

   At first, Nixon and Kissinger were impressed by the ferocity of Yahya Khan’s crackdown. “The use of power against seeming odds pays off,” Kissinger said. Bass examines in detail how their attitude reflected the important role they had given Pakistan in their plans for China. Yahya Khan was the principal intermediary between Beijing and Washington, personally conveying to Chinese leaders the Americans’ desire for a closer dialogue. In April, 1971, the same month that the Blood telegram’s unwelcome report on Pakistan’s atrocities arrived, Nixon received his eagerly awaited invitation from the Chinese. He excitedly proposed that Kissinger secretly go to China, to prepare the way. He boasted that it was going to be a “great watershed in history, clearly the greatest since WWII”; the reliably boosterish Kissinger ranked it even higher, as “the greatest since the Civil War.” In July, Kissinger, feigning a stomach upset in Pakistan, flew from Islamabad to Beijing, where he began his long infatuation with China’s mighty philosopher-kings, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

   Reporting back to Nixon on Pakistan’s help with the “cloak and dagger exercise,” Kissinger joshed, “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” Still, he realized that the Pakistani generals had behaved recklessly in East Pakistan. He saw that India was likely to go to war to resolve its intolerable refugee problem and that it was bound to win. He concurred with Nixon’s description of the Indians, who were secretly training and arming Bengali guerrillas, as “a slippery, treacherous people,” who “would like nothing better than to use this tragedy to destroy Pakistan.” Yahya Khan had to be supported until the great Presidential visit to China was confirmed.

   In addition, as Bass writes, “Kissinger now argued that U.S. demonstrations of fealty to Pakistan would play well for the Chinese,” who had distrusted India since their border clashes in 1962. Supporting the insupportable was part of an image-making strategy, a demonstration to the Chinese that, as the Pentagon Papers said, the United States was “willing to keep promises, be tough, take risks, get bloodied and hurt the enemy badly.” And the need to project American credibility and toughness grew: on August 9th, India signed its friendship treaty with the Soviet Union—a “bombshell,” in Kissinger’s panicked appraisal, that could spoil “everything we have done with China.”

   Public opinion had also been shifting against West Pakistan. In June, a report by an intrepid Pakistani journalist named Anthony Mascarenhas had appeared in London’s Sunday Times, with the headline “GENOCIDE.” Edward Kennedy returned from a visit to the refugee camps in August, hailing India’s “way of compassion.” That same month, a concert in New York in support of Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, directed the countercultural energies of the nineteen-sixties to a new cause. Nixon, however, put his faith in the proverbial American indifference to foreign affairs: “Biafra stirred up a few Catholics. But you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan they’re just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.”

   A visit to Washington in November by Indira Gandhi did not improve Nixon and Kissinger’s chances of postponing war between India and Pakistan until after the summit with Mao Zedong. Bass enumerates the various temptations Kissinger prepared for her: “famine relief, international relief presence, civilian governor, amnesty, unilateral withdrawal.” But she seemed implacable, talking to Nixon with the tone, Kissinger recalled, of “a professor praising a slightly backward student.”

   On December 4th, Yahya Khan, fed up with Indian infringements on Pakistan’s territory, declared war. Nixon and Kissinger blamed Indira Gandhi. It “makes your heart sick,” Nixon told Kissinger, for the Pakistanis “to be done so by the Indians, and after we have warned the bitch.” Nixon and Kissinger, desperate not to lose face with the Chinese and the Soviets, responded to Pakistan’s looming defeat with the crazy logic of escalation. Kissinger threatened the Soviet Union and encouraged the Chinese to intervene against India, and, as Nixon put it, “scare those goddamn Indians to death.” Nixon, contemplating Armageddon, dispatched the U.S.S. Enterprise.

   The Soviets, the Chinese, and the Indians proved to be more levelheaded than the self-styled exponents of Realpolitik in the Oval Office. The Soviet Union, Srinath Raghavan shows in his book, was no less averse than the United States to the breakup of Pakistan, to which it had sold armaments. Raghavan’s narrative, which contradicts Bass’s at several points, argues that there was nothing inevitable about the dissolution of Pakistan. The creation of Bangladesh was the product of “conjuncture and contingency, choice and chance.” India was initially reluctant to arm Bengali rebels and to engage Pakistan militarily, and it would probably not have signed its friendship treaty with the Soviet Union had it not been for threats from Kissinger. And all that Nixon’s bluffing with the U.S.S. Enterprise achieved was, according to Raghavan, to “spur the Indians to capture Dhaka and seal their victory—objectives that had not been on their strategic horizons when the war began.”

   On December 16th, India forced Pakistan into an unconditional surrender in Dhaka. Ninety thousand Pakistani soldiers and civilians became prisoners of war—they remained in India until 1973—and Pakistan lost its most populous province. Defeat shocked many West Pakistanis, who had come to believe that one brave Muslim soldier equalled ten Hindu ones. From then on, shame and humiliation drove Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment to seek “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and a policy of “death by a thousand cuts” in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

   Bass describes the devious way that Nixon and Kissinger managed to bury their role in the debacle. Americans have also “absorbed some of Nixon and Kissinger’s contempt for Bangladesh,” he laments. “Faraway, poor, brown—the place is all too easily ignored or mocked.” It is also true that Nixon in 1971 was far more worried about America’s protracted war in Vietnam, which, typically, he wished to end without admitting defeat. He recognized that “peace with honor,” an unfulfilled promise from his 1968 Presidential campaign, was key to his reëlection, in 1972. But neither intensified bombing of North Vietnam nor secret talks with Hanoi were producing the result he desired, and an increasing majority of the American public thought the war a mistake. In June, 1971, the Times began to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers; the same month, the Democratic-majority Senate voted for the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam.

   These setbacks made Nixon more desperate for successes abroad. As he saw it, resetting relations with Hanoi’s main allies, the Soviet Union and China, could not only insure his place in history; it could also persuade North Vietnam to end the war on terms favorable to the United States. Insofar as the India-Pakistan imbroglio featured in these intricate plans, it was a nuisance, along with the conflicts of many other remote countries, including those in the Middle East.

   Nixon had no doubt that publicly taking sides in East Pakistan would be, as he told Kissinger, “a hell of a mistake.” Kissinger, too, while concluding that the U.S. should not condemn the crackdown in East Pakistan, made it privately clear to Yahya Khan that Pakistan couldn’t expect American assistance while the slaughter continued. Such a course of public restraint and private pressure—echoed today in President Obama’s studied refusal to call the Egyptian coup a coup—offered, he felt, “the best chance of conserving our limited ability to influence” events.

   Kissinger and Nixon were quick to accept the fait accompli of an independent Bangladesh, and the ensuing ouster of Yahya Khan by Bhutto, whom they detested. And Nixon could cease fretting about South Asia, when, just two months after Pakistan’s defeat, he made his momentous visit to China, then inaugurated détente with the Soviet Union, and, in November, disingenuously claiming to be nearing peace with honor in Vietnam, won a landslide reëlection. As Kissinger told Zhou Enlai, “the future of our relationship with Peking is infinitely more important for the future of Asia than what happens in Phnom Penh, in Hanoi or in Saigon”—or, he could have added, in Dhaka.

   Nixon and Kissinger were clearly not burdened with an excessively moralistic view of foreign policy, but many postwar Administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, violated American ideals of democracy and human rights while pursuing what they saw—mostly wrongly—as national interests. In Latin America, for instance, counter-insurgency practices, including the use of death squads, honed by C.I.A.-sponsored forces in Guatemala in 1954 were diffused by pro-American regimes across the region—Brazil in 1964, Chile and Uruguay in 1973, Argentina in 1976, and El Salvador in the late seventies.

   Nixon and Kissinger’s pursuit of international credibility through macho posturing was rash. But such forceful efforts to deter potential enemies and influence friends can be dated back, as Arendt wrote, to “the fateful war crime that ended the last world war,” the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The imperative to look tough at all costs, most recently embodied by George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” tactics in Iraq, also weighed ominously on President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and on President Johnson in Vietnam. (It now weighs on Barack Obama as he contemplates punitive action in Syria.) The decision in 1979 by the human-rights-friendly Carter Administration to give the Soviet Union “its own Vietnam” in Afghanistan with the help of Islamist mujahideen sowed a more extensive geopolitical disorder than what William Bundy called the “unnecessary risk-taking” of Nixon and Kissinger.

   At the same time, to focus on the moral capacity or culpability of American leaders can obscure the ruthless gambits of ruling classes in less powerful countries. Mujib, the founding father of Bangladesh, supported Islamists against progressive forces, amnestied Bengali collaborators of Pakistani war criminals, and banned all opposition political parties, before he was assassinated by Bangladeshi Army officers, in 1975. Bangladesh is still struggling to overcome the tormented legacy of his misrule. Two years after the revelations of Watergate, Indira Gandhi exceeded Nixon’s most flagrant illegalities by suspending civil liberties and arresting major opposition leaders. Bhutto, a champion of social justice for the poor, did not deny the necessity of a crackdown in East Pakistan. “I would have done it with more intelligence, more scientifically, less brutally,” he said in an interview. In 1974, he was able to demonstrate his refined approach by unleashing helicopter gunships on secessionists in Pakistan’s western province of Balochistan. West Pakistan’s leaders recognized the rebellious Bengalis as a threat to their military, economic, and political hegemony, and there is not much that the United States could have done to change their perception.

   Disappointed by America’s failure to stand up for human rights, Bass sees a more inspiring example in “India’s democratic response to the plight of the Bengalis.” In a footnote, he writes, “This book extends my argument that liberal states can be driven toward humanitarian intervention.” Although many Indians experienced, as Bass writes, “real solidarity with the Bengalis,” Indira Gandhi was driven to war by the politically explosive and economically catastrophic presence of refugees in India, and the fear of unrest in the border areas where she had just crushed a major left-wing insurgency.

   In many ways, the region is still dealing with the demons unleashed by the great territorial scission of 1971. India’s successful nuclear tests, three years later, spurred Pakistan’s urgent and costly attempts to achieve parity. The desire for revenge motivated Pakistani soldiers and spies, as they organized anti-Indian militant proxies in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, despite the proliferation of new external and internal enemies, has remained institutionally obsessed with India. India, in turn, has governed Kashmir with the help of security forces and Draconian laws, and has been building a security fence on its border with Bangladesh.

   Such an aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh presents a challenge to liberal interventionists who wish to draw guidance for future actions. Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies. Today, a multitude of newly empowered actors make a series of choices—the Muslim Brotherhood President appeasing the military, say, or liberal Egyptians backing a coup—that have wholly unpredictable consequences.

   The leader of the lone superpower finds his freedom of action ever more constrained by domestic political dysfunction and the complexities of geopolitical turmoil. Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantánamo. It is difficult to imagine him risking Israel’s security by taking a hard line against the Egyptian generals—especially not while he weighs the appropriate response to Syrian war crimes, copes with the human costs of the Iraq occupation and of the intervention in Libya, seeks peace with honor in Afghanistan, re-starts peace talks between Israel and Palestine, and controls the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations. Against this backdrop of permanent crisis, of ineluctable compromises and trade-offs, the moral responsibilities of liberal democracies seem arduous. Resources are meagre, intentions troublingly ambiguous. India’s rulers in 1971, Bass writes, were “driven by an impure mix of humanitarian and strategic motives.” The same contaminated blend also drives those who choose war as a means to end violence. As another such intercession looms, we should be mindful of the aftereffects and the people who are left to cope with them. ♦

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8. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৭:৩৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

   গায়ে মুতে দেয় নিক্সন মারা গেলেও পেটে অসুখ হয় কিসিঞ্জার আজো বেঁচে।

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 30, 2015

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