.........As recently declassified documents and White House tapes show, Nixon and Kissinger stood stoutly behind Pakistan's generals, supporting the murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. This largely overlooked horror ranks among the darkest chapters in the entire cold war.
Of course, no country, not even the United States, can prevent massacres everywhere in the world — but this was a close American ally, which prized its warm relationship with the United States and used American weapons and military supplies against its own people.
Nixon and Kissinger barely tried to exert leverage over Pakistan's military government. In the pivotal days before the crackdown began on March 25, they consciously decided not to warn the Pakistani generals against opening fire on their population. They did not press for respecting the election results, nor did they prod the military to cut a power-sharing deal with the Bengali leadership. They did not offer warnings or impose conditions that might have dissuaded the Pakistani junta from atrocities. Nor did they threaten the loss of American military or economic support after the slaughter began.
Nixon and Kissinger were not just motivated by dispassionate realpolitik, weighing Pakistan's help with the secret opening to China or India's pro-Soviet leanings. The White House tapes capture their emotional rage, going far beyond Nixon's habitual vulgarity. In the Oval Office, Nixon told Kissinger that the Indians needed "a mass famine." Kissinger sneered at people who "bleed" for "the dying Bengalis."
They were unmoved by the suffering of Bengalis, despite detailed reporting about the killing from Archer K. Blood, the brave United States consul general in East Pakistan. Nor did Nixon and Kissinger waver when Kenneth B. Keating, a former Republican senator from New York then serving as the American ambassador to India, personally confronted them in the Oval Office about "a matter of genocide" that targeted the Hindu minority among the Bengalis.
After Mr. Blood's consulate sent an extraordinary cable formally dissenting from American policy, decrying what it called genocide, Nixon and Kissinger ousted Mr. Blood from his post in East Pakistan. Kissinger privately scorned Mr. Blood as "this maniac"; Nixon called Mr. Keating "a traitor."
