explaining the american tilt in the 1971 bangladesh crisis

Explaining the American "Tilt" in the 1971 Bangladesh Crisis: A Late Dependency ApproachAuthor(s): Sanjoy BanerjeeReviewed work(s):Source: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 201-216Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600453 .Accessed: 26/11/2011 05:29

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International Studies Quarterly (1987) 31, 201-216

Explaining the American "Tilt" in the 1971 Bangladesh Crisis: A Late Dependency Approach

SANJOY BANERJEE

City University of New York

This paper develops a model based on late dependency theory of client relations between a superpower and a state in a divided society. The model is used to analyze the American "tilt" toward Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh crisis. An explanation of regime type based on class and institutional alliances is derived from the works of Cardoso, Hirschmann, and O'Donnell. This explanation is integrated with assumptions about transnational class and institutional relations to yield a model of client relations. Predicate logic is used to state the model and to derive the proposition that Pakistan was an American client from empirically supported factual claims.

The alliance between the United States and the Pakistani military and bourgeoisie is analyzed as the basis of the client relationship. When the alliance is challenged by the Bengalis and India, the United States is motivated to protect its credibility as a guarantor of client states through the tilt policy.

Introduction

On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani army began a campaign of slaughter against the Bengalis of East Pakistan. The elections of the previous December had designated the Bengali regionalist Mujibur Rehman as the Prime Minister of Pakistan. The defeated rival Zulfigar Ali Bhutto, who swept the West Pakistani vote, was unwilling to accept the radical redistribution of regional power inherent in the result. The Pakistani army, rooted almost entirely in the western wing, was also unwilling to acquiesce in the consequences of democracy.

Between March and December of 1971, the Pakistani army and local irregular forces under their control killed not less than one million unarmed civilians in East Pakistan. Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated steadily during this period as ten million refugees walked into India. In December, a series of clashes gave way to a two-week war in which India defeated the Pakistani army in the East, enabling independent Bangladesh to arise.

As the crisis persisted, the superpowers became involved. United States-Pakistani Author's note: I wish to thank Sumit Ganguly and Howard Lentner for numerous helpful comments and

discussions. Responsibility for all errors is mine alone.

0020-8833/87/02 0201-16 $03.00 ? 1987 International Studies Association

202 The American "Tilt" in the 1971 Bangladesh Crisis

relations, dormant since Washington had cut off aid to Pakistan and India during their 1965 war, had been revived in 1969 as Pakistan played an intermediary role in the secret United States-China dialog. The American administration initially refused to condemn the actions of the Pakistani army. A "tilt" in favor of Pakistan emerged. The Nixon administration gave consistent diplomatic support to Islamabad, dispatched small quantities of arms to Pakistan, and during the war sent a carrier fleet into the Indian Ocean with the intent of intimidating India. This article seeks to explain why the United States played the role it did.

One can identify three layers of conflict in this crisis. The deepest layer was in Pakistani domestic politics, pitting the marginalized majority-the Bengalis, and the Awami League party for which they had voted massively-against the West Pakistani dominated state, principally the military. While Bhutto had opposed Mujib's ascension, the events in East Pakistan were outside his control.

The next layer was in the South Asian subsystem, pitting Pakistan against India. Pakistan's loss in 1971 was as much ideological as strategic. Militarily, politically, and economically, Bengal had been a periphery of Pakistan. Yet the ideological basis of Pakistan had been the two-nation theory: that Muslims and Hindus were irreconcilably different and could not coexist justly under a common state, and that Muslims of the subcontinent were one united nation. The two-nation theory proclaimed that differences and similarities among people at the religious level transcended differences and similarities at the linguistic and ethnic levels. Given the heterogeneity of the subcontinent at the linguistic and ethnic levels, this concept of the centrality of religion was the boldest and most critical idea in the two-nation theory. The actions of the Pakistani army in Bengal and the successful Indo-Bengali alliance severely undermined the credibility of the concept of the centrality of religion. Ganguly (1986) contends that the ideological conflict between Indian pluralist secularism and the Pakistani two-nation theory lay at the heart of the Kashmir dispute and that Pakistan's ideological claim to Kashmir was weakened by the Bangladesh crisis.

The third layer of conflict was in the global system. The Bengali separatists, India, and the Soviet Union opposed the Pakistani state, the United States, and China. Global polarities became aligned with local polarities. The crisis had after-effects of global significance. It has been speculated that the movement of the American nuclear-armed fleet induced India to go forward with the test nuclear explosion of 1974 (Van Hollen, 1980; Ganguly, 1983). Indo-Soviet relations were strengthened as the crisis was perceived in India as an indication of Soviet reliability.

The explanation of the American tilt advanced here draws links among all three layers of conflict. It will be argued that the United States was allied not with the whole of Pakistan, but with a dominant coalition of the military and a private and a public sector bourgeoisie. That client relationship assisted the dominant coalition in exercising its dominion over the masses, the majority of whom were the Bengalis. And the ouster of the dominant coalition from power would have entailed the risk of the ascendance of forces less dependent on, thus less supportive of, the United States. When open repression of the Bengalis by the Pakistani military state commenced, America's credibility as guarantor in its many client relationships around the world required that it support its clients within Pakistan.

Contending Explanations of the Tilt

The most prominent explanation of the American tilt toward Pakistan during the

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Bangladesh crisis is that of one of the policy's principal architects, Henry Kissinger (1979: 842-918). His analysis can be summarized in four points.

1. Pakistan had played the role of a secret intermediary between its two friends, the United States and China, before the announcement on July 15, 1971 of President Nixon's trip to China. Since the repression of Bengalis began on March 25, 1971 the United States had to maintain a "silence" (Kissinger, 1979: 854) about the repression to retain the cooperation of Pakistan. Kissinger maintained that the secrecy of initial United States-Chinese plans was vital to diplomatic success.

2. Kissinger also advanced the argument that China was very sensitive to the reliability of the United States as an ally against the Soviet Union and was likely to perceive the Bangladesh crisis as a test of that reliability. Since Pakistan was an ally of both China and the United States, its predicament served as a test of how Washington would respond to threats to the joint United States-Chinese interest. Thus Washington had to support the Pakistani military regime to demonstrate its reliability to Beijing (Kissinger, 1979: 862, 865, 867).

3. Kissinger suggested that Indian actions in the crisis, because India received Soviet political and material support, could be interpreted as the implementation of Soviet designs in South Asia. He wrote (Kissinger, 1979: 913):

The naked recourse to force by a partner of the Soviet Union backed by Soviet arms and buttressed by Soviet assurances threatened the very structure of international order just when our whole Middle East strategy depended on proving the inefficacy of such tactics and when America's weight as a factor in the world was already being undercut by our divisions over Indochina.

4. Kissinger also claimed that the CIA had access to Indian cabinet meetings and had discovered from those meetings that India planned to destroy Pakistan's air force and army and threreby reduce West Pakistan to a vassal state (Kissinger, 1979: 901). He asserted that India accepted a ceasefire on the western front on December 17 without accomplishing those goals because the timely arrival of the American fleet in the Bay of Bengal pressured Moscow to pressure Delhi to give up its ambitions (Kissinger, 1979: 913). Kissinger claimed that as of two days before the surrender of Pakistani forces in the East, India was about to shift all its forces in the East to the West and attack within 72 hours (Kissinger, 1979: 912).

Haendel (1977) gives independent support to some of Kissinger's claims. He writes (1977: 377)

A Superpower that is acting to implement its goals in a regional subsystem, whether or not its objectives are dictated by global priorities, will behave in accordance with its previous commitments. . . . Thus, the previous commitments towards Pakistan, Nixon's and Kissinger's antipathy toward India, the objective of establishing relations with China, the perceived need to contain the Soviet Union and its client state in South Asia, as well as Nixon's and Kissinger's bias in favor of Pakistan combined to direct U.S. policy toward the "tilt to Pakistan.'"

While Haendel arrives at these conclusions, he also notes certain contradictions in Kissinger's thesis yet does not resolve them. Haendel notices that Kissinger at different points claims that India was and was not a Soviet client. Haendel (1977: 318) cites Kissinger as saying "'The Lady' is cold blooded and tough and will not turn into a Soviet satellite merely because of pique." The same contradiction is sustained in


Kissinger's White House Years (1979: 913, 916). Further, Haendel reports that several administration officials suggested that even without the China factor, the tilt would have been adopted due to support from the American defense and intelligence bureaucracies arising from their connections to Pakistan in the 1950s (Haendel, 1977: 319).

As for Kissinger's claim that India was to shift all its forces from the East to the West in order to attack in a space of 72 hours, Haendel (1977: 270; and Anderson and Clifford, 1973: 233) reports General Westmoreland's citation in early December 1971 of intelligence estimates that it would take India up to one month to achieve that feat. Haendel (1977: 269-270) concludes that "it seems unlikely that India had the specific intent to dismember West Pakistan."

Shirin Tahir-Kheli accepts Kissinger's basic points and credits Nixon with "saving West Pakistan from Indian military occupation" (1982: 49) by the dispatch of the fleet. She cites the importance of the "grand deception" of the secret channel to China in reviving United States-Pakistani relations after the discord of 1965 (1982: 31-35). Tahir-Kheli accepts that the Bangladesh crisis was a geopolitical test for American resolve, with China as the primary examiner (1982: 48). Tahir-Kheli relies on elite interviews in Pakistan as her primary source of information. However, she offers little new theory or evidence specifically to support her acceptance of the Kissinger thesis.

Christopher Van Hollen was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Bangladesh crisis and has written (1980) a rejoinder to Kissinger's explanation of the tilt. His claims can be summarized as responses to the four points earlier attributed to Kissinger.

1. From March 25 until the announcement of Nixon's trip to China on July 15, the United States did not need to refrain from criticizing the Pakistani repression because there was an alternative channel to Beijing in use in March-Romania, and because Yahya "was honored to have been tapped by Nixon as a communication link with China and desperately wanted to retain the goodwill of both Washington and Beijing" (Van Hollen, 1980: 343). Van Hollen points out that after the secrecy of the China trip was removed onJuly 15 and before the announcement of the Indo- Soviet Friendship treaty on August 9, and while both the State Department and the CIA judged that war was not imminent, "Henry Kissinger was exhorting the bureaucracy to tilt toward Pakistan and discouraging any serious efforts to move toward political accommodation . . ." (Van Hollen, 1980: 347).

2. Regarding the need to demonstrate American resolve to China, Van Hollen cites Kissinger's statement in December 1971 that he did not have the impression that China considered agreement with the United States on other issues as "a pre- requisite to a successful trip" (Van Hollen, 1980: 353). Moreover, Van Hollen maintains that the Bangladesh crisis was peripheral to Chinese concerns in developing their link to the United States (Van Hollen, 1980: 353).

3. Van Hollen disparages Kissinger's geopolitical analysis that Indian actions toward Pakistan extended Soviet power in the subcontinent. "Kissinger's 'client state' philosophy caused him to misjudge the more balanced character of the Soviet- Indian relationship . . ." (Van Hollen, 1980: 355).

4. As for India's intentions toward West Pakistan, Van Hollen notes that Kissinger misquotes the critical CIA report which actually said India intended to destroy Pakistan's air force and armor, not its "air force and army" (Van Hollen, 1980: 351-352). Van Hollen writes that while the CIA report may well have reflected Indian military contingency planning for the post-East Pakistan phase of fighting,

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"Nixon and Kissinger were virtually alone in the U.S. government in interpreting the report as they did" (Van Hollen, 1980: 351).

Van Hollen's critique and Haendel's discovery of contradictions and errors in Kissinger's argument suggest the possible fruitfulness of an alternative approach to explaining American behavior in the Bangladesh crisis.

Clients

1. Late Dependency Theory and the Client Relationship

Between 1945 and 1971 the United States developed an elaborate approach toward conflicts pitting certain states against domestic opponents and other states allied with the latter. American policy in the Bangladesh crisis was an instance of that approach. As the United States acquired superpower status, it entered into a distinctive form of relationship with some Third World states. Relatively strong and well defined alliance relations bound America to the advanced Western democracies and Japan. But a different form of unequal alliance-the superpower-client relation-bound it to Third World states such as South Vietnam, Imperial Iran, the Philippines, Nicaragua-and Pakistan (Liska, 1978; Girling, 1980).

The client relationship is an alliance between a superpower and the dominant coalition of society in the client state. The division between the dominant coalition and the rest of society is a key feature of the client relationship. By contrast, the alliance between the United States and Britain bound the whole societies. The greater internal integration of those two societies was a key feature in that alliance. Since the dominant coalition was American's ally in the client relationship, Washington's interests in domestic and foreign conflicts involving the client state were shaped by the class and institutional interests of the dominant coalition. Examples of other client relations were Soviet relations with some East European states including Czechoslovakia and Poland, where the dominant coalitions were communist parties and state bureaucracies.

The American role in client relationships was that of a guarantor (Liska, 1978: 272). When client states faced threats to their existence from internal or external forces, the United States extended diplomacy, arms and training, or direct military intervention in support of the client state. Given the existence of a global network of client states with many internal and external foes, the United States had an interest in deterring those foes from attacking the client states by demonstrating its will and capacity to assist endangered clients. The objectives of American intervention in Vietnam are set out in the famous passage in the Pentagon Papers as: 70 percent to preserve America's 4"reputation as a guarantor," 20 percent to keep South Vietnam out of Chinese hands, and 10 percent to promote a "better, freer way of life" for the South Vietnamese people (Sheehan, Smith, Keyworthy, and Butterfield, 1971: 432).

The American interest in its reputation as a gurantor was limited by countervailing interests. The ultimate constraint was the relation of nuclear deterrence with the Soviet Union and the consequent need to avoid a direct armed clash with it. Other constraints were revealed in the Vietnam War: those of a limited tolerance in the American polity for sacrifice in foreign interventions and of the political and moral opposition of liberal opinion to certain guarantor actions. While such constraints were important in the determination of America's discharge of the guarantor role, space does not permit further exploration of them here. (Ostrom and Job [1986] analyze domestic constraints on the presidential use of force.)


The client relationship will be defined here as a generalization of the dependency relationship as discussed by Cardoso and Faletto (1979). They (1979: xvi) view dependency as "rooted in coincidences of interests between local dominant classes and international ones, and, on the other side, challenged by local dominated groups and classes. " The client relationship is a transnational relationship binding a superpower to social classes and other sociopolitical institutions-such as military forces, administrative bureaucracies, or political parties.

Stepan (1971, 1973) provides a useful example within the late dependency school of a non-class-based dependency analysis. Stepan (1973) explains the Brazilian coup of 1964 as a consequence of the transformation of Brazilian military doctrine due to its ties with the American military and the latter's promotion of counterinsurgency doctrines in Latin America in the early 1960s. The client analysis being advanced here will combine Cardoso and Faletto's focus on the politics of transnational class alliances with institutional analyses like Stepan's.

Cardoso and Faletto (1979: 208-209) draw a distinction between the pact of domination among the dominant classes, and the political regime-the framework of political competition and authority. Similar capitalist pacts of domination can be found within diverse-pluralist and authoritarian-regimes. But within capitalism, any regime must carry out the interests of its dominant coalition. In the framework employed here, the dominant coalition may include institutions other than social classes, such as the military and mass-based political parties.

2. Methods. Case Study and Predicate Logic

The method of this work is what George and McKeown (1985) have called a "congruence procedure" case study. The objective of such a study is to show that the case fits a theory. A theory synthesized from late dependency theory will be set out below and the Bangladesh crisis and its background will be analyzed according to the theoretically salient variables.

With the aim of promoting rigor, the theory in the next subsection is set out in a kind of mathematical logic called predicate logic (or predicate calculus) (Kowalski, 1979). In predicate logic there are two types of statements: factual claims and rules. Rules correlate factual claims. Rules and one set of factual claims permit rigorous deduction of another set of factual claims.

The theory below is represented by rules. Certain factual claims are supported by empirical evidence and other factual claims are deduced from them through the theoretical rules.

The factual claim:

President(Nixon, US, 1971)

means that the predicate "President" is true of the three ordered constant arguments Nixon, US, and 1971. It can be interpreted as "Nixon was the US President in 1971." To sustain this interpretation, all use of the predicate "President" would require three arguments-a person, a country, and a time-in that order.

The rule with variable arguments:

President(name, country, time) if Regular-elections(country) and Previous-election(country, time, election-year) and Elected(name, election-year).

SANJOY BANERJEE 207

means "a person is president of a country at a time if that country has regular elections and the preceding election was held in some election year and that person was elected in that election year." The rule:

Regular-elections(country) if (Election-held(country, year) if Election-due(country, year))

means "A country has regular elections if: if an election was due in any year in the data, then an election will have been held in that year according to the data."

Given the two rules above, the dataset:

Election-due( US, 1964), Election-due( US, 1968), Election-held( US, 1964), Election-held( US, 1968), Previous-election( US, 1971, 1968), Election(Nixon, 1968)

is sufficient to deduce the conclusion: President( Nixon, US, 1971). The first four factual claims imply Regular-elections(US) through the second rule, and that and the last two claims imply the conclusion through the first rule.

Arguments of predicates may be singletons or ordered lists. The list: A, b, C, d is represented as: "A.b.C.d." In this article constant arguments will start with capital letters and variables with small letters.

3. The Theory What emerges from late dependency theory is the interdependence between the domestic political power of the local dominant classes and their allied military establish- ments and the links that bound them to their superpower patron. If these groups lost political power, their domestic adversaries would cut them off from the flow of institu- tionally critical resources from the superpower. And deprivation of such resources would undermine their political power.

A client relation between a superpower and another state is defined to exist when the latter's regime has a dominant coalition dependent on the former for its critical developmental resources, and when the regime serves in turn as the necessary guarantor of that resource flow.

Rule 1 A regime with an external ally and a domestic dominant coalition is defined as a client regime if: it can survive if and only if it receives critical resources from the external ally. Client(superpower, dominant-coalition, society) if (Regime[type, dominant-coalition, society] if and only if Receives critical resources[dominant-coalition, resources, superpower])

Cardoso and Faletto (1979) highlight the integral relationship between domestic conflict processes and dependency relations. They focus on the conflict between the dominated classes and the transnational class alliance. Amin (1976) theorizes that dependency is characterized by the marginalization of segments of society from the central developmental processes of the society, which are controlled by the dominant coalition.

In this model, conflict is seen to emerge between the dominant coalition and those marginalized sectors of society which are mobilized by a mass-based party or political movement. The marginalized sectors seek to overcome the economic and political dis-

208 The Amerzcan "Tilt " in the 1971 Bangladesh Crisis

advantage arising from their marginalization while the dominant coalition seeks to preserve its dominance in society as well as its access to critical resources from its superpower patron, thus averting the possibility of the transformation of society to a position where the masses are not marginalized.

Rule 2 Conflict exists between a dominant coalition and an opposing movement in a society if some segment of that society is marginalized from the developmental processes controlled by the dominant coalition and the opposing movement mobilizes that segment. Conflict(dominant-coalition, opposition-movement, society) if Marginalized(segment, society, dominant-coalition) and Mobilizes(segment, opposition-movement).

To understand the control of state coercive power, one must understand the political regime. A model predicting the political regime from the composition of the dominant coalition is emergent in the works of Cardoso, O'Donnell, and Hirschmann in a volume edited by David Collier (1979). Their writings support the following synthesis.

The nature of the political regime in capitalist societies-pluralist or authoritarian- depends on the relations among a triad of protagonists: the armed forces, the dominant classes, and mass-based parties and organizations. Two of these three will coalesce and exclude the other from power, or repress it. Which regime emerges depends on which alliance forms.

(a) An alliance between the armed forces and the dominant classes to demobilize the masses and their representatives results in an authoritarian regime.

O'Donnell (1973 and 1979) characterizes bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes as alliances between the military, civilian technocrats, and the transnational bourgeoisie aimed at deactivating the popular sector and their allies. Cardoso (1979) analyses the bureaucratic-authoritarian systems as formal "regimes" of military and techno- bureaucratic rule in "states" characterized by the capitalist pact of domination among the economically dominant classes. The aim of these repressive regimes is "above all, to produce apathy among the masses" (Cardoso, 1979: 36).

(b) A reconciliation between mass-based organizations and parties and the dominant classes yields a pluralist regime subordinating the armed forces.

Hirschmann argues that pluralism comes from a reconciliation between the entre- preneurial elite and the reform elite. The latter are those "determined to correct the imbalances and inequities that have arisen in the course of growth," and are prone to mass-mobilization (Hirschmann, 1979: 88). O'Donnell (1973) regards the populist regime preceding bureaucratic-authoritarianism in Latin America to be based on an alliance between the new import-substituting industrialists and the popular sector to overthrow the preceding dominance of the oligarchy.

(c) An alliance between the armed forces and mass-based parties and organizations excluding the dominant classes is impossible within capitalism.

Cardoso (1979) characterizes the capitalist state as a "pact of domination" among the dominant classes. A coalition of dominant classes is able to "articulate their diverse and occasionally contradictory objectives through state agencies and bureaucracies" (Cardoso, 1979: 39). Thus exclusion of the dominant classes from effective power would undermine the basic structure of capitalism.

Rule 3 A military authoritarian regime with a dominant coalition of the military and a

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class coalition will exist if those classes are economically dominant, and the military force is the state's sole armed force, and the military and the dominant classes are political allies. Regime(Military-authoritarian, military.classes, society) if Dominant(classes) and Sole-state-force(military) and Allies(military. classes).

An alliance among groups of the kind described above is likely to form if they are interdependent on each other for access to their critical resources. Groups in the dominant coalition receive critical resources from a variety of sources. The receipt of critical developmental resources is the fundamental interests of each group in the dominant coalition. Access to these resources is typically problematic-the threats to access are myriad-and cannot be secured unilaterally by a single group.

Rule 4 If groups discover that they can secure access to their respective critical resources collectively, they sustain an alliance. Allies(groups) if Receives critical resources(groups, resources, sources) and Interdependent access(groups, resources, sources).

If a social coalition is not in conflict with any other segment of society, it can continue to receive its critical resources from their source without interference. However, if a social coalition is in conflict with a major segment of society, access to its critical resources is assured only if that coalition is the dominant coalition in the political regime.

Rule 5 A coalition will receive its critical resources from its source if it is in conflict with a segment of society but (and) the coalition is the dominant coalition in the existing regime. Receives critical resources(dominant-coalition, resources, source) if Conflict(segment, dominant-coalition, society) and Regime(type, dominant-coalition, society).

Pakistan and America

The task now is to provide empirical support for the factual claims of predicate logic. The next section contains the deduction of the claim that Pakistan was an American client from the claims supported in this section.

1. Military Ascendance and the American Connection

The military was of course the Pakistani state's sole armed force. Sole-state-force(Military). American military aid was a critical resource for the Pakistani military. Receives critical resources(Military, Military aid, US).

In 1947, the Pakistani army was in disarray. Muslim soldiers from the colonial army opting for Pakistan had to be organized into new units. All colonial ordinance factories were in what became independent India, which declined to give Pakistan its propor-


tionate share of ordinances (Rizvi, 1974: 34-40). More seriously, Pakistan faced a shortage of officers with advanced training (Cohen, 1984: 33). By 1958 the army and the civil bureaucracy were the only national institutions that had successfully expanded their capacity to carry out even self-defined "national" purposes. By 1954, the Muslim League had suffered an organizational and political collapse in both wings of Pakistan (Sayeed, 1980). The army, in alliance with the bureaucracy, had evolved a techno- bureaucratic rationality of administratively depoliticized problem-solving. After 1954, this approach was partially extended to the problem of government, and after the military coup of 1958, it reigned supreme.

This ascendance was the result of a particular institutional doctrine. The critical resources of the military were defined by that doctrine. It focused upon the kinship ties among the soldiers and upon the conflict with India.

By the start of the 20th century, the colonial army had recruited most of its soldiers from what the British had designated "martial races"-located mostly in the north- western regions of the British Indian empire. The Pakistani army in 1947 had largely that ethnic composition. The Pakistani army continued to prefer its own kinsmen after independence. About three-fourths of the army came from five districts in the western wing containing less than 5 percent of the male population of united Pakistan (Cohen, 1984: 44). Pakistani officers do appear to have believed before 1971 in the inherent superiority of their martial race soldiers over Indian soldiers, who came from a pro- gressively broadened ethnic base after independence (Cohen, 1984: 42).

The Pakistani military made a bargain with America. In exchange for participation in United States-sponsored military pacts and the granting of base facilities for operations against the Soviet Union, the Pakistani military expected weapons, training, and diplomatic support against India. The Pakistani military hoped that American arms would balance the greater size and industrial capability of India-and would do so while averting the need for a larger base of recruitment.

The American arms relationship enabled the Pakistani military to expand its capabilities without using a mass-mobilization strategy. Such a strategy would have conflicted with the goal of concentrating recruitment among a small section of the population. Stephen Cohen names the generation of officers joining the Pakistani military during 1950-1965, and entering the middle ranks in 1971, the "American generation" (Cohen, 1984: 70). He writes that "along with American equipment and training came American military doctrines, American approaches to problem solving, and-a mixed blessing-American pop culture" (Cohen, 1984: 70). An associate of President Ayub Khan told Cohen (1984: 72):

The Americans affected everything-the scales were completely different, hundreds of our officers went to America, and now we had new standards of comparison.

Cohen notes that their experience with America created a profound personal affinity for America among the officers of this generation. Hence the relation between the Pakistani military and the United States transcended the role of the latter as the primary arms supplier to Pakistan and influenced the organizational culture of the Pakistani armed forces. The intimacy of the relationship made American aid all the more critical.

2. The Dominant Classes

The dominant classes of Pakistan had consisted of a bourgeoisie of public sector technocrats and private industrialists, both groups centered in the western wing.

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They will be called the bourgeoisie. Dominant(Bourgeoisie).

I have argued elsewhere (Banerjee, 1984) that the dominant classes are those which control the fastest accumulating property forms while prevailing in the fastest growing sectors of the economy. Pakistan's dominant classes between independence and 1971 were a narrow class of business families and a public-sector elite who prevailed in the fastest growing sector of the economy, large-scale manufacturing (Ahmed and Amjad, 1984: 20). A strong alliance developed between this elite, especially the narrow private- sector elite, and the military-civil bureaucracy in the Ayub Khan era (1958-1969). The convergence of government incentive policies with elite interests accompanied the growth of intermarriage among the families of industrialists and of the ruling bureaucracy (Ziring, 1971: 88). Industrialists gained five- to tenfold increases in their membership in national and provincial assemblies during the Ayub era (Jahan, 1972: 61). Government policies encouraged the concentration of private capital, ostensibly to promote reinvestment of profits (Ziring, 1971: 88). The resulting concentration of capital was fairly extreme, with 20 families controlling 66 percent of Pakistani industrial profits in 1968 (Jahan, 1972: 60).

A critical resource of the Pakistani bourgeoisie was American capital. Receives critical resources(Bourgeoisie, Capital, US).

Direct investment by multinational corporations played a minor role in Pakistani development. One form of foreign dependence was extreme, however: foreign aid. America provided three-fourths of all grants and nearly half of all loans (Brecher and Abbas, 1972: 25). Griffin and Khan estimated that, given the overvaluation of the Pakistani rupee, foreign capital inflows in the mid-1960s accounted for 53.9 percent of total Pakistani involvement, and 74.5 percent in the western wing (Griffin and Khan, 1972: 193-194).

3. The Dominant Coalition

The last two predicates can be consolidated as:

Receives critical resources( Military.Bourgeoisie, Military aid.Capital, US).

The Pakistani military and bourgeoisie were interdependent for access to their respective critical resources. Interdependent access( Military.Bourgeoisie, Military aid.Capital, US).

To understand this interdependence one must examine the structure of capital accumulation in Pakistan in the Ayub era of 1958-1969. As noted, most of Pakistani investment capital came from foreign capital inflows, mostly from the United States. Foreign capital flowed in through the government bureaucracy. The Planning Commission distributed American aid funds (Sayeed, 1980: 50-51). Other government agencies regulated other foreign exchange funds.

This control of capital gave the state direct power over the private sector. Success in Pakistani business was dependent not upon success in market competition, but on connections with the government (Kochanek, 1983: 77). Kochanek (1983) found that independent organizations of business interests were virtually absent in Pakistan in the 1960s. All business interest representation occurred in state-controlled forms, that is, in corporatist (Stepan, 1979) forms. Further, the Pakistani bourgeoisie which emerged from this structure was small in size-with the dominance of 20 families-and narrow in


its kinship base. Fifty percent of all Pakistani assets in 1959 were held in endogamous Muslim caste groups containing less than 0.5 percent of the population of Pakistan (Papanek, 1967: 42). Some broadening of ownership did occur during the Ayub era, but due to the overall concentration of capital in that period, kinship ties between the bourgeoisie and the vast majority of the population, especially the Bengalis, remained very weak.

The dependence of the bourgeoisie on the military for access to their critical resource -foreign capital-is clear. The control of the state over capital inflows, and the role of the military as the ultimate arbiter of state power, made the bourgeoisie dependent on the military for access to capital. Yet the military was also dependent on the bourgeoisie remaining what it was, to avoid mobilizing the former's rivals in society. Being itself narrowly based within Pakistani society, the military had to minimize the emergence of strong autonomous interest groups which could mobilize mass support on their side. The success of the narrow bourgeoisie allowed the simultaneous fulfillment, temporarily, of the requirements of a capitalist form of development and those of the political demobilization of society. A bourgeoisie with broader kinship ties would have intensified the military's problems with "vernacular elites" of the kind described in the next section. Such elites could then have advanced their causes through the resources of their bourgeois kin.

4. The Bengalis and the Awami League

The Bengalis were marginalized from the Pakistani development process. Marginalized(Bengalis, Pakistan, Military.Bourgeoisie).

East Pakistan contained 54 percent of the population. However, during 1963- 1968 the percentage of national private investment in the East fluctuated between 21 and 24 (Jahan, 1972: 75). While the East's share of what Islamabad designated as public development outlays did reach 54 percent in the 1960s, if infrastructure replacement projects and administrative and military expenditures were counted, government spending was higher in the West than in the East (Jahan, 1972: 76).

Bengalis were marginal to the military as well. The Pakistani army followed stable recruitment practices concentrated in the western wing (Cohen, 1984: 40-47). In 1963, Bengalis constituted 7.4 percent of ranks below commissioned officer and 5 percent of that rank (Jahan, 1972: 62).

The Awami League became the mobilizing movement of the marginalized Bengali masses. Mobilizes(Awami League, Bengalis).

After 1947, the Muslim League emerged as the dominant political party in East Pakistan, as in the other wing. However, the fortunes of the party in the East soon began to subside. The Muslim League supported the use of Urdu as the sole national language of Pakistan, while most Bengalis favored the inclusion of their own language as an official national language (Sayeed, 1980: 40). With the introduction of universal suffrage in provincial and local elections, new segments of Bengali society were mobilized into politics.

Lower middle class groups educated exclusively in Bengali discovered their own strength, partly in their own numbers, but mostly in their ability to mobilize the peasant masses through linguistic nationalism and economic populism. They formed a new "vernacular elite" (Jahan, 1972: 26).

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In 1954, the Muslim League was wiped out in provincial elections in East Pakistan. The vernacular elite created a new party to lead the Bengali masses-the Awami League.

Results: Theoretical and Historical

1. The Theorem

The story of Pakistani politics during 1947-1971 is largely one of the West Pakistani elites contriving various methods to prevent the Bengali vernacular elites from capturing national, or even regional, power. The primary motive of the military in the 1958 coup was most likely to prevent the Bengali elites from winning the scheduled 1959 elections (Jahan, 1972: 53; Sayeed, 1980: 45-56). The Ayub era led to further deterioration in relations between the military and the vernacular elite (Jahan, 1972). And the victory in the 1970 general elections of the Awami League, the vernacular elite's political party, led to the Bangladesh massacre. This process is summarized by the factual claim:

Conflict(Awami-league, Military. Bourgeoisie, Pakistan).

The claim above follows from two empirical claims in the previous section.

Marginalized(Bengalis, Military.Bourgeoisie, Pakistan) and Mobilization (Awami-league, Bengalis) through Rule 2 yield the conclusion.

The central theorem of this article can now be proven.

Theorem: Client(US,Military. Bourgeoisie, Pakistan).

Proof: Following Rule 1, one must first show Regime(type, Military.Bourgeoisie, Pakistan) if Receives critical resources( Military.Bourgeoisie, resources, US). This formulation is obtained by substituting the constant entries in the present theorem into Rule 1. The only emp-irical instance of Receives critical resources(Military. Bourgeoisie, resources, US) is Receives critical resources( Military.Bourgeoisie, Military aid.Capital, US). The last predicate, along with the empirical predicate Interdependent access(Military.Bourgeoisie, Military aid.Capital, US) yields through Rule 4: Allies(Military.Bourgeoisie). Combining that last predicate with Sole-state-force(Military) and Dominant( Bourgeoisie), Rule 3 yields Regime ( Military-authoritarian, Military.Bourgeoisie, Pakistan), which fulfills the condition to be shown.

Next, one must show Receives critical resources( Military.Bourgeoisie, resources, US) if Regime( type, Military.Bourgeoisie, Pakistan). Regime(Military-authoritarian, Military.Bourgeoisie, Pakistan) is by Rule 3 the only possible instance of the condition. When it is combined with Conflict( Awami-league, Military. Bourgeoisie, Pakistan), Rule 3 yields Receives critical resources( Military. Bourgeoisie, resources, source), the only instance of which is Receives critical resources( Military.Bourgeoisie, Military aid.Capital, US). That implies the desired conclusion.

Now the claim that Pakistan was an American client has been deduced in predicate logic from empirically supported factual claims through theoretical rules. The validity of the conclusion of course remains dependent on the credibility of the empirical support for the factual claims and of the theory.


2. Evolution of the United States-Pakistani Client Relationship

The client relation created a fundamental common interest between Washington and Islamabad: the political survival of the military regime. However, there were also conflicting interests between the United States and the Pakistani state. The United States sought to integrate Pakistan into a network of client relationships with minimum prejudice to its relations with third states outside the Soviet alliance system. In particular, Washington wanted to retain the option of upgrading its relations with India. What the Muslim League and the Pakistani military had in common was hostility to India and, most concretely, the desire to wrest Kashmir from India. The Muslim- Hindu rivalry animating Pakistani attitudes toward India was alien to America's western sensibilities.

The Pakistani-American relationship began soon after Pakistan's independence in 1947. By the late 1940s the United States was gaining interest in developing an anti- Soviet alliance system in Asia. The Muslim League leadersJinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan had initiated discussions with Washington for a military alliance. However, Liaqat had insisted on obtaining American support on the Kashmir issue (Foreign Relations of the United States 1951, 1 97 7: 2205).

American refusal to provide this support had obstructed the conclusion of an arms agreement in 1951. But within days of Liaqat's assassination, a Pakistani bureaucrat was in Washington and the two sides negotiated an arms agreement without requiring American support for Pakistan's Kashmir position (Venkataramani, 1982: 181-189). A State Department policy statement on Pakistan in 1951 held that if "properly equipped," the Pakistani army could play in the Near East a role similar to that of the "British-Indian Army in past wars" (Foreign Relations of the United States 1951, 1977: 2208). The military-bureaucratic elite, which became ascendant after Liaqat's assassination, was less abrasive to American sensitivities than the civilian leadership had been. In 1954 Pakistan joined two formal pro-American alliances: SEATO and CENTO. Four years later, the military took full power.

The Kashmir issue, and Pakistan-India relations generally, while set aside temporarily in initiation of the client relation, remained a major point of disagreement between the United States and Pakistan. The United States was unwilling to incur the cost in relations with India it expected from a policy of specific support to Pakistan on the Kashmir issue.

Further, in the early 1960s, India and China became increasingly hostile to each other and in 1962 went to war. This led to a rapid improvement in United States- Indian relations and to the commencement of a small-scale American arms supply to India. The Pakistani state was caught in a contradiction between its dependence on America and opposition to the latter's military support to India.

In 1965, Pakistan went to war with India over the Kashmir issue. Never having accepted the full validity of the Pakistani claim on Kashmir, the United States was now unwilling to support it in a war initiated to destabilize Indian control over Kashmir. Washington cut off arms to both countries. The cutoff affected Pakistan more since it had been far more dependent on America.

But in 1969 a combination of circumstances revived the client relationship. President Nixon took office with a favorable view of Pakistan, and the role of Pakistan in the China initiative upgraded United States-Pakistani relations. However, the military component of United States-Pakistani relations was not upgraded significantly between the inauguration of Nixon and the Bangladesh massacre. The Pakistani regime

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remained essentially unchanged, despite the replacement of General Ayub Khan by General Yahya Khan.

The flow of arms and training that had led to the evolution of the client structure in Pakistan was not revived oefore the Bangaldesh crisis. But the American reputation as a guarantor of client regimes was built to instill confidence in present and prospective clients, and fear in their opponents; thus a recent client like Pakistan had to be covered by the guarantee.

American diplomatic support for Pakistan, its snmiall-scale arms supply, and above all, the dispatch of the fleet, can be explained as the discharge of the role of guarantor of client states. The United States backed the Pakistani state not only against India, but also against the Bengalis. As Van Hollen observes, in the period between the removal of secrecy on Nixon's China trip and the Indo-Soviet treaty, Washington was tilting toward Islamabad and not pushing for a political settlement in East Pakistan. Kissinger (1979) claims that the United States was urging Yahya to grant autonomy to the Bengalis, but the credibility of that claim is undermined by the failure of the Nixon administration to insist on a halt to the ongoing massacre of the Bengalis.

As neutral India, and indirectly the Soviet enerny, became involved in the conflict, the challenge to the client structure became intensified. Yet the United States faced severe constraints upon its guarantor role. The war in Vietnam had heavily taxed the American domestic political capability to play the guarantor role. And the American military position in South Asia was relatively weak. Internally, liberal opposition to administration policy in the crisis was far stronger than opposition to the Vietnam intervention had been in the early 1960s. These constraints forced a relatively weak, and in the event unsuccessful, discharge of the guarantor role.

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explaining the american tilt in the 1971 bangladesh crisis

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