Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back

4. The Carter and Reagon Years

81 chapter four the carter and reagan Years tampa, florida, is a long way from South Asia, but in mid-2011 I was there to attend a conference at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command on Pakistan as a guest of General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. CENTCOM is the regional command of that part of the U.S. military whose area of responsibility includes Pakistan, but not India. I have been to CENTCOM many times over the past three decades to discuss American war plans and military missions. This time I was to review Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. My message was simple: the United States was fighting a proxy war with Pakistan in Afghanistan. The audience was not thrilled with the message. They knew that I was right, but the hard truth of it was not eagerly welcomed by American commanders. After all, only twenty-five years ago the United States had fought a war against the Soviets in Afghanistan with Pakistan’s help. I was a junior player in that war effort, but even I could see that it would be much easier for the United States to win if Pakistan provided it and its allies with safe havens along the border and a sanctuary in which to train and prepare to fight. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan enjoyed Pakistan’s support and won the war. Now, in the twenty-first century, America and the carter and reagan Years 82 Pakistan are on opposite sides in the Afghan civil war. It’s a lot harder to envision success. CENTCOM planners look at Pakistan from the west. It sits at the edge of their area of responsibility (AOR), on the far end of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf; consequently, CENTCOM sees Pakistan primarily in terms of how its actions and policies affect Afghanistan and the Gulf. Pakistan’s military leaders, of course, look primarily the other way, east toward India. They are obsessed with India and the threat that they believe that it poses to their country. So American and Pakistani generals—and diplomats and spies for that matter—generally look at the world with very different priorities. Sometimes they can find common ground for shortterm reasons, like fighting communism in Kabul, but generally their strategic views are at odds with each other. Forty years of cold war diplomacy had left America’s relations with both India and Pakistan dysfunctional by the mid-1970s, and the two Indo-Pakistani wars, in 1965 and 1971, had been bad for both bilateral relationships. Seeing South Asia through the prism of the cold war had only made the difficult business of building strong ties to the two rivals harder for the United States. The next decade would see the cold war intensify to its conclusion under President Reagan. Kashmir would fall off the American agenda, a forgotten conflict. carter’s interregnum After the scandals of the Nixon administration and the discouraging end to the war in Vietnam, Americans wanted a new face in the White House. When Georgia governor James Carter was chosen to succeed President Ford, he inherited a South Asia in transition. Profound political change was under way in both India and Pakistan . Indira Gandhi had proclaimed a state of emergency in June 1975 in response to a growing wave of protests against her increasingly authoritarian practices and the corruption surrounding her younger son, Sanjay. Opposition leaders were arrested, the press the carter and reagan Years 83 was muzzled, and for the first and only time in India’s democratic history the rule of law and freedom of speech were curtailed. Then, as suddenly as she imposed the state of emergency, Indira lifted it in January 1977 and called new elections. She lost. Carter would have a new government headed by Morarji Desai, a Congress party dissident and long-time enemy of Indira, to deal with. As Carter came to office, Pakistan also was in transition. Zulfikar Bhutto, like Mrs. Gandhi, had become more and more authoritarian in his ways. Mounting protests were met with crackdowns on dissent and increasing reliance on the security services to enforce order. In February 1976, Zulfi appointed a new chief of army staff, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, skipping over several more senior officers because he was supremely confident that Zia was a loyal sycophant, totally apolitical and...