The Blood Telegram

A riveting history--the first full account--of the involvement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1971 atrocities in Bangladesh that led to war between India and Pakistan, shaped the fate of Asia, and left in its wake a host of major strategic consequences for the world today.

Drawing on recently declassified documents, unheard White House tapes, and investigative re...

A riveting history--the first full account--of the involvement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1971 atrocities in Bangladesh that led to war between India and Pakistan, shaped the fate of Asia, and left in its wake a host of major strategic consequences for the world today.

Drawing on recently declassified documents, unheard White House tapes, and investigative reporting, Gary Bass gives us an unprecedented chronicle of a crucial but little-known chapter of the Cold War. He shows how Nixon and Kissinger supported Pakistan's military dictatorship as it brutally quashed the results of a historic free election. The Pakistani army launched a crackdown on what was then East Pakistan (today an independent Bangladesh), killing hundreds of thousands of people, and sending ten million refugees fleeing into India--one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. It soon sparked a major war. But Nixon and Kissinger remained untroubled by Pakistan's massacres, secretly encouraged China to mass troops on the Indian border, and illegally supplied weapons to the Pakistani military--an unknown scandal that presages Watergate. And Bass makes clear how the United States's embrace of the military dictatorship in Islamabad would affect geopolitics for decades. A revelatory, compulsively readable work of essential recent history.