Confidential report from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
'The US – Pakistani Pact.'
(Confidential)

In its principal leader of the 17th November last, the ‘Times’ drew attention to what is certainly one of the most important revolutions in world strategy which have come about since the war, namely, the build-up of American armed strength in the Mediterranean area.

2. For two centuries, the Mediterranean was virtually a British lake. With the aid of her naval bases – Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Palestine and Egypt – Britain dominated the main sea route to the Middle East and Southern Asia, and exerted a powerful political influence on the countries of the Mediterranean littoral, particularly Spain, Italy and Greece. American intervention in the area hardly extended beyond occasional courtesy visits.
3. The last war and the expansion of Middle East oil production changed all this. Britain is moving out of the Mediterranean and the United States has moved in. The salient feature of the Mediterranean strategic picture today is the permanent presence in those waters of the US Sixth Fleet backed by a powerful medium-range bomber force based on new and projected airfields in Morocco, Libya, Spain, Greece, the Greek islands and Turkey. The change which began in 1946, has already diminished Britain’s influence and authority in the area considerably, and continues to do so. The Palestine mandate has gone; Malta is demanding a wider measure of freedom; the ‘Enosis’ movement has revived in Cyprus;² Spain has renewed her claim to Gibraltar; and Egyptian pressure for the return of the Canal base has reached dangerous proportions. The British are under no illusion that these challenges to their position result from the rise of American power and the decline of their own. They recognise, however, that they have virtually no choice. Much as they dislike it, their reduced resources of wealth and manpower simply don’t permit them to play their former role, and the presence of a powerful American striking force so close to the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe is too important a reinforcement of Britain’s own security to be boggled at for the sake of vain repinings about the past.
4. It is now clear that the British government has reconciled itself to the inevitability of a development in Southern Asia similar to that which has taken place in the Mediterranean. When Britain vacated India, Burma and Ceylon after the war, she gave up a strategic position which for two centuries had enabled her to shape the course of history from Aden to Bahrain and from Rangoon to the Caspian. It is probable that neither the British government nor anyone else fully realised at the time the problems and risks which the power vacuum created by this retreat was apt to entail. There were reasons for this lack of foresight. One was that Asian Communism had not yet developed the aggressive aspects it has since assumed in Korea, Indo-China and Malaya. Another was that Britain (which had defence agreements with Burma and Ceylon) expected that whatever vacuum resulted from her withdrawal from India, could be satisfactorily filled by the highly efficient armies of India and Pakistan. Having used the Indian army for decades to police the British possessions in the Middle East and Asia in conjunction with the British Navy, Britain had a high opinion of its efficiency and fighting strength; and she hoped and believed that, now that India and Pakistan were members of the Commonwealth, the forces of both countries would take their place in a concerted scheme of Commonwealth defence in Southern Asia, thus obviating any danger of the vital Middle Eastern oil area being outflanked through the Indian sub-Continent. Two developments combined to defeat this hope. One was the Kashmir dispute, which has concentrated all the defence and security pre-occupations of both India and Pakistan into an intense distrust and fear of one another. The second was Pandit Nehru’s espousal of the idea of neutrality, which he finally carried to the length of refusing to attend the Commonwealth conference in London in January, 1951, unless it were accepted beforehand that ‘India would not accept a role in Commonwealth defence nor sacrifice her neutrality’. The Korean crisis and the Persian oil dispute, coming on top of these developments, awakened the British to the realization that a power vacuum of dangerous dimensions now existed in the area in which she had once been supreme, and that in consequence both the principal sources of Middle East oil and the main air communications between Europe and the East were open to easy attack by the Communist enemy in the North.
5. It was with this realization in mind, that some three or four years ago, the British Government began discussions with the Government of the United States with a view to the possible establishment of a Middle East Security Pact and a Middle East Command. The discussions did not proceed too smoothly. Apart from the ‘colonialism’ issue – a perpetual source of difficulty in all Anglo-American discussions about Asiatic and African affairs – London and Washington found they were arguing from two entirely different strategic conceptions. Washington tended to look at the Middle East from the Mediterranean side and to regard the proposed Pact primarily as a means of closing the right flank of the NATO system in Europe and providing points of counter attack by air. London (which has opposed the admission of Greece and Turkey to NATO largely for this reason) took a more ‘global’ view of the Middle East area regarding it as embracing the Eastern Mediterranean on the one side and the Persian Gulf and the west coast of India on the other. For the British this whole area presented a defence problem in itself, quite separate and distinct from the problem of the defence of Europe. In accordance with this conception the British envisaged a regional security pact which would have its command post in Egypt and its supply depots in the Canal Zone, and which, taking the principle of Islamic solidarity as its basis, would embrace not only the Arab States and Persia but Turkey and Pakistan as well. In the end, of course, the Anglo-American efforts to secure the agreement of the Middle Eastern states to any kind of defence pact came to nothing. The Anglo-Egyptian dispute, and the difficulty of strengthening the defences of Middle Eastern countries without heightening Arab-Israeli tensions, proved to be insurmountable obstacles. Egypt took a firm stand on the principle that there could be no co-operation with the West in defence arrangements covering the Middle East unless outstanding Arab problems were satisfactorily settled first; and using her influence as the cultural centre of Islam, she set about the task of securing acceptance of this principle not only by the Arab League, but by other Moslem States such as Iran and Pakistan.
6. Mr. Dulles’ visit to Egypt and the other Arab countries last May is an important landmark in this whole business. Apparently, Mr. Dulles went back to Washington convinced that it would be impossible to arrive at a satisfactory system of combined defence for the Middle East by common agreement between all the states concerned; so that if an effective means of assuring the defence of the area were to be found, a different approach would have to be tried. There is some evidence – although it is impossible to get official confirmation – that, as a result of negotiations between London and Washington, this new approach has now assumed the form of an Anglo-American understanding based on the Pentagon’s conception of a ‘Turkey-Suez-Pakistan triangle’ – an understanding under which Britain would support Pakistan’s acceptance of American military aid in return for American diplomatic support against Egypt on the Suez issue, and both countries would co-operate in an effort to link up the five Moslem countries which are farthest from Israel and nearest to Russia (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) in a common defence system, on the calculation that other Middle Eastern countries would tend to be drawn into the system by degrees and that, even if they were not, the co-operation of these five countries, coupled with possession of the Suez base, would be sufficient to safeguard the essentials of the position in any case.
7. That the British government takes a benevolent view of the pacts made by Pakistan with Turkey and the United States, there can be no doubt. The diplomatic correspondent of the ‘Times’ so reported and Lord Swinton³ and Mr. Garner (Deputy Under-Secretary of the CRO)⁴ both assured me to the same effect most emphatically. Indeed, I would say that, notwithstanding that Britain is never too keen on the conclusion of bilateral defence pacts between members of the Commonwealth and foreign states, she not only welcomes Pakistan’s new agreements, but is highly pleased with them, and that for three principal reasons. In the first place, they give expression to Britain’s ‘global’ conception of Middle Eastern defence, so important to the security of British positions in the Persian Gulf. Secondly, they represent a blow to the diplomacy of the Arab League and a major defeat for Egypt’s effort to rally the Moslem world in support of her stand on the Suez issue. Finally, they constitute a set-back for Pandit Nehru’s advocacy of Asian neutrality in the present world struggle – an idea which, if it were generally accepted, would open up the danger of the whole Middle Eastern position being outflanked from the North through the Indian peninsula. I suspect – but once again, I have no proof – that a principal object of Lord Swinton’s visit to Commonwealth countries in the late autumn was to secure their concurrence to this plan for the defence of the Middle East and Southern Asia, before a final understanding was reached with the United States. If this guess is well-founded, Lord Swinton would seem to have succeeded everywhere except in Delhi.
8. I asked both Lord Swinton and Mr. Garner whether they were not afraid that Pakistan’s acceptance of US aid would precipitate a crisis between Pakistan and India. They both pooh-poohed the idea. They said that Nehru wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of an attack on India by Pakistan; India’s army is three times as strong as that of Pakistan and the most Pakistan was likely to get from the United States, in the immediate future at any rate, was the means of equipping or modernising two divisions. Mr. Garner said that, even if Pakistan got more, there would still be no danger; relations between India and Pakistan couldn’t be worse than they were, but the two countries were deterred from attacking one another by the knowledge that, once fighting began, the result would be one of the most appalling blood-baths in history! In agreement with the views recently expressed to the Minister at the Hague⁵ and the Ambassador in Paris, Lord Swinton – who obviously dislikes Pandit Nehru and described him at one point of our conversation as ‘an awful liar’ – attributes Nehru’s protests against the US-Pakistani pact to wounded vanity – the ‘hurt reflexes of a man with delusions of world leadership’, as an English paper put it. In telling me this, he added: ‘Even the members of Nehru’s own cabinet, whom of course he treats like the Lower Sixth, will tell you that!’ I gather that the relations between London and Delhi are anything but good at the moment, which indeed is not surprising considering the attitude which Churchill, Swinton and other Conservative leaders have consistently adopted towards India’s achievement of freedom in 1947.
9. It is clear, however, that much as the British government may welcome Pakistan’s new agreements, it is by no means free of anxiety with regard to the eventual outcome of the new policy. Saudi Arabia’s rejection of US aid at the instance of Egypt was a set-back for the new tactic. Even more serious was the success of press and radio propaganda from Cairo in preventing the Iraqi government from following the example of Turkey and Pakistan, for the time being at any rate, in spite of the determined efforts of the Prime Minister, Fadl el-Jamali,⁶ and Senator Nuri Said⁷ to lead the country in that direction. Then, there is the uncertainty about the stability of Mahomet Ali’s⁸ government. The result of the East Bengal elections is hardly a safe guide in this context because the new Pact was not an issue in them; but if Mahomet Ali’s opponents once start appealing to Asian nationalism and Islamic solidarity against the new Pact, it is doubtful whether he will prove strong enough to weather the storm and, if he goes down, the whole idea of defence co-operation with the West may be discredited for a long time. Fears have been expressed in the press here that the policy of arming Russia’s neighbours in Southern Asia may eventually lead to local conflicts which may be hard to keep within narrow limits. There seems to be quite a widespread opinion, too, that the policy is more provocative to Soviet Russia than is wise or necessary in the present international situation; and a very prevalent doubt is whether a strengthened Pakistan is worth a disaffected India, and whether the new policy may not ultimately have the effect of furthering Russian designs in India in the same way as Allied policy has strengthened Russia’s hold on China.
10. The new High Commissioner for Ceylon⁹ who has recently arrived here from Washington told me that Mahomet Ali fully realises that the new pact commits Pakistan to take her stand with the West in the event of war, and had frankly admitted as much to the Prime Minister of Ceylon.¹⁰ That, he said, was the point of Mahomet Ali’s recent statement that in the next war there could be no neutrality. In the High Commissioner’s view, there is considerable doubt whether this commitment is fully accepted by public opinion in Pakistan; to people in Pakistan, the only reason for accepting the pact is concern about the Kashmir problem and not any interest in the world situation which, indeed, the Finance Minister of Pakistan described only a few months ago as ‘a struggle between two groups of powers for the domination of the world, neither of which is inspired by universal moral values and both of which appear to the peoples of the East as oppressors’. The High Commissioner said that, as I had probably seen, his Prime Minister had invited the Prime Ministers of India, Pakistan, Burma and Indonesia to meet him in Colombo to discuss means by which the foreign policies of the South Asian countries might be prevented from moving too far apart; but frankly, he didn’t expect the meeting to achieve anything.¹¹
11. What the whole thing boils down to, however, is that, with the apparent acquiescence and co-operation of Britain, the United States seems now to be embarked on an effort to build up, along the base of the inverted Turkey-Suez-Pakistan triangle (that is to say, in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan), one of those ‘positions of strength’ which George Kennan¹² thought it should be the major aim of US foreign policy to develop; and the inevitable consequence of this must be that the shift of power which has taken place in the Mediterranean since the war will now reproduce itself in the Middle East and Southern Asia. The United States will take Britain’s place as the dominant political influence in the area; Britain will have in future no more than a secondary role; and the peoples and territories in the area which are still in political or economic subjection to Britain will tend to assert their freedom and independence with increasing determination and emphasis.