Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)

**Sarah Paine** (0:00)
I need to start with a disclaimer because I work for the US government and they require you to do a disclaimer. So the ideas that you're about to hear are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the US government, the US Navy Department, the US Department of Defense, let alone the Naval War College where I work. Are we all good on this? All right, so today I'm going to tell you a story of three protagonists. Russia, the United States and China that all wanted to work their magic on India and Pakistan, which didn't exactly appreciate it. So two big topics. One is intervening in someone else's problems, a cottage industry for the United States. And also, before you do that, you really ought to check out the alignments. Who's the primary adversary of whom? How long has it been that way? And also ask these questions about all the neighbors and anyone who might want to crash the party along with you. It's also a story of a series of limited wars. What's a limited war? It means that there's something less than regime change. So however it turns out, the governments that started that war are still in place. And two of them resulted in quick victories, the ideal in warfare. The first one was the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and the other one was the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971 And these wars changed things in many short-term expected ways, and then in many long-term highly unexpected ways. So here's my game plan, and it's literally a game plan. I'm going to start out with the pivotal decisions made by different players, that then once they're made, certain things are foreclosed, and certain things are possible. And this is the playing field that's delimited by these pivotal decisions. And then I'm going to look at the teams. Some allies were prime allies, others were subprime, and they mixed and matched over time. So then I'll do teams, and then I'll do the game, the interaction, and then at the end, I'm going to do the plays, some of the techniques and things that you can do to play this game. Pivotal decision number one. When Mao won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, it didn't end. He also spent the next two years, not only eliminating nationalist remnants, but also conquering Xinjiang and Tibet. Tibet had been autonomous since 1911, when the last dynasty had collapsed. And Mao decides that he is going to reconquer Tibet. Tibet's an interesting place. It contains, I think, about 40% of China's mineral resources. So there's a lot of money being made in Tibet for those with the capital to invest in big mines. If you look at this map, the Han Chinese, the preponderant group of China, they inhabit, they dominate as far west as the Chongqing Basin and Sichuan. China has put large armies into Tibet exactly twice. Once under the Chen Lung Emperor in the late 18th century, and they didn't stay for very long. And then under Mao in 1950, and they have stayed forever and built roads so they could keep on sending more in. Between 1950 and 1957, China built a series of road systems through Tibet. And the western route there is the only one that provides year-round traffic. The problem with the other two is, well, check it out. They go through 14 or 15 mountain ranges. He means you go vertical up, vertical down, do that 14, 15 times. And then between monsoon rains and snow and mudslides are very difficult to maintain. And then the eastern one crosses the major roads, river systems of South Asia. So that's difficult. So only the western route is the really good one. And it's really important for the Chinese. If you want to conquer Tibet, you truly want that one. All right. So if you look at this, that western route provides not only the ability to control Tibet, but it also provides a pincer on a Xinjiang. If China wants to come in one way and the other way, it's a good way to get in. If you look on those two circles there, those are the disputed areas between China and India. The northern one is the Aksai Chin Plateau, which China has taken from India, and India still claims. And in the south is the Arunachal Pradesh, which India still owns, but China claims. So these are the areas that they're fighting over. But once China took Tibet, before there had been a big buffer zone between China and India, right? There's all this Tibet, and no one could really get in there. Now China's built roads, so it can get into places where India cannot deploy troops until it gets into the road races with the Chinese. And so it reduces the buffer zone between China and India to these small Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. So it changes things. So that's pivotal decision number one, deciding to conquer Tibet. Pivotal decision number two is the United States, in order to deal with the Soviet unions under Eisenhower, did what the wits back in the day called Pactomania. What is that? It's forming all sorts of bilateral relations and also regional groupings in order to counter the Soviets institutionally and wall them in that way. And part of this was what was called the Northern Tier Strategy, as seen in the Baghdad Pact, where you get Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form this thing and is to wall off the Soviet Union from the oil fields of the Middle East. And the other thing you should look at this map before it goes away, look where Pakistan is located, where you think it is, and then go to the East, and that's East Pakistan. In the 1971 war, there's going to be a civil war, and Pakistan is going to lose East Pakistan, which is Bangladesh today. So just keep that in mind. So what as part of the sweetener for Pakistan to join the Baghdad Pact, the United States allied with Pakistan and gave them a big military aid treaty. And here's Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, and he is horrified. A military pact between Pakistan and the United States changes the whole balance of power in this part of the world, affects us most, especially the United States must realize that the reaction of India is going to be, you're arming the Pakistanis. Whom do you think they're going to shoot? It'll be us. And the Indians were just appalled that we did this. And afterwards, Eisenhower admitted it was perhaps the worst kind of plan and decision we could ever have made. It was a terrible error, but now we're stuck with it. Because what the United States is slowly discovering is that if you arm either India or Pakistan in this period, it's going to aim it at the other one. And so that pact poisoned US relations with India for the duration of the Cold War and set up things in ways the United States ultimately wasn't happy with. Okay, those are two pivotal decisions. Now for a pivotal situation. It's really the devolving situation between Russia and China. Until Mao got atomic weapons in 1964, he really had to shut up. And because he needed Russian technological aid, he's been totally cut off from the West after the Korean War. He's being isolated. So he truly needs Soviet aid. And he also, if he wants nuclear weapons, he needs some of their aid to do that as well. So he has to keep his mouth shut. But once he detonates an atomic weapon, here's what he tells the Russians, and they just about lose it. There are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented a count of this list. Under the czars, the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence, territory exceeding US. East of the Mississippi. Think the Chinese didn't notice? Yes, they noticed. So Mao all of a sudden is calling that, and the Russians are appalled. But Mao has other gripes against the Russians. Stalin in the lead up to World War II had made sure to set up the Chinese to fight Japan so that he wouldn't have to. So that leaves him just fighting Nazis, not Nazis and Japanese. And then Stalin takes Mongolia, which had formerly been a part of the Chinese sphere of influence. And in the Korean War, he's more than happy to fight to the last Chinese. And then during the Chinese Civil War, the Russians tell Mao, oh stop, Yang, you need to take a little breather here because he wants a divided China, like the divided Germany he has, and then the divided Korea he's going to get. You want to be surrounded by these little broken states around you if you're a continental power. And then when Stalin dies and Mao wants to be senior statesman of communism, Khrushchev is appalled by that. Then Mao is appalled when Khrushchev does de-Stalinization because Mao has his own cult of personality. And then Khrushchev wants to do peaceful coexistence with the West while Mao is ramping it up in the Cultural Revolution. So there's no meaning of the minds. And then all this becomes very public when it hits the propaganda press of the communists of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960 All right, the Russians have their own gripes about the Chinese. And here's how they go.