On Cold War Realpolitik

By: GARY BASS

Archer Blood, the US’ consul general in Dacca, was a gentlemanly diplomat raised in Virginia... On the night of March 25, 1971, the Pakistan army had begun a crackdown on Bengalis across what was then East Pakistan and is today Bangladesh. Thousands were shot, bombed, or burned to death in Dacca alone. Blood had spent that grim night on the roof of his official residence, watching as tracer bullets lit up the sky, listening to clattering machine guns and thumping tank guns....

It was, Blood and his staffers thought, their job to relay as much of this as possible to Washington. Witnessing one of the worst atrocities of the Cold War, Blood's consulate documented the slaughter: an area the size of two dozen city blocks that had been razed by gunfire; two newspaper office buildings in ruins; thatch-roofed villages in flames; specific targeting of the Bengali Hindu minority...This was, Blood knew, the last thing his superiors in Washington wanted to hear.

Pakistan wasan ally — a military dictatorship, but fiercely anti-communist. In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Nixon had lined up the US with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the USSR found themselves standing behind democratic India.

From “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide”