Thursday, September 3, 2020
Pakistan-India-Bangladesh - Opinion: The Terrible Cost of Presidential Racism - President Nixon’s racism and misogyny
Recently declassified White House tapes reveal how President Nixon’s racism and misogyny led him to ignore the genocidal violence of the Pakistani military in what is today Bangladesh.
As Americans grapple with problems of racism and power, a newly declassified trove of White House tapes provides startling evidence of the bigotry voiced by President Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser.
The full content of these tapes reveal how U.S. policy toward South Asia under Mr. Nixon was influenced by his hatred of, and sexual repulsion toward, Indians.
These new tapes are about one of the grimmest episodes of the Cold War, which brought ruin to Bangladesh in 1971. At that time, India tilted heavily toward the Soviet Union while a military dictatorship in Pakistan backed the United States. Pakistan flanked India on two sides: West Pakistan and the more populous, and mostly Bengali, East Pakistan.
In March 1971, after Bengali nationalists won a democratic election in Pakistan, the junta began a devastating crackdown on its own Bengali citizens.
Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger staunchly supported the military regime in Pakistan as it killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, with 10 million refugees fleeing into neighboring India. New Delhi secretly trained and armed Bengali guerrillas. The crisis culminated in December 1971 when India defeated Pakistan in a short war that resulted in the creation of an independent Bangladesh.
I documented the violent birth of Bangladesh and the disgraceful White House diplomacy around it in my book “The Blood Telegram,” published in 2013. Much of my evidence came from scores of White House tapes, which reveal Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger as they really operated behind closed doors. Yet many tapes still had long bleeps.In December 2012, I filed a legal request for a mandatory declassification review with the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. After considerable wrangling, the Nixon archivists at last released a few unbleeped tapes in May 2018 and July 2019, then 28 more in batches from October 2019 to this past May. (There are bleeps still remaining on a couple of the reviewed tapes, some of which I am appealing.)
It was stunning to hear a conversation between Mr. Nixon, Mr. Kissinger and H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, in the Oval Office in June 1971. “Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women,” said Mr. Nixon. “Undoubtedly,” he repeated, with a venomous tone.
He continued, “The most sexless, nothing, these people. I mean, people say, what about the Black Africans? Well, you can see something, the vitality there, I mean they have a little animallike charm, but God, those Indians, ack, pathetic. Uch.”
On Nov. 4, 1971, during a private break from a contentious White House summit with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India — a rare woman leader at the time — the president harangued Mr. Kissinger about his sexual disgust at Indians.
Mr. Nixon said: “To me, they turn me off. How the hell do they turn other people on, Henry? Tell me.” Mr. Kissinger’s response is inaudible, but it did not discourage the president from his theme.The president, in between bitter sparring matches with Mrs. Gandhi about the danger of war with Pakistan, suggested to Mr. Kissinger that his own sexual neuroses were having an impact on foreign policy: “They turn me off. They are repulsive and it’s just easy to be tough with them.”A few days later, on Nov. 12, 1971, in the middle of a discussion about India-Pakistan tensions with Mr. Kissinger and Secretary of State William P. Rogers, after Mr. Rogers mentioned reprimanding Mrs. Gandhi, the president blurted, “I don’t know how they reproduce!”
Mr. Kissinger has portrayed himself as above the racism of the Nixon White House, but the tapes show him joining in the bigotry, though the tapes cannot determine whether he truly shared the president’s prejudices or was just pandering to him. On June 3, 1971, Mr. Kissinger was indignant at the Indians, while the country was sheltering millions of traumatized Bengali refugees who had fled the Pakistan army. He blamed the Indians for causing the refugee flow, apparently by their covert sponsorship of the Bengali insurgency. He then condemned Indians as a whole, his voice oozing with contempt, “They are a scavenging people.”
On June 17, 1971 — in the same conversation as Mr. Nixon’s outburst at “sexless” Indian women — the president was furious at Kenneth B. Keating, his ambassador to India, who two days earlier had confronted Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger in the Oval Office, calling Pakistan’s crackdown “almost entirely a matter of genocide.”
Mr. Nixon now asked what “do the Indians have that takes even a Keating, for Christ, a 70-year-old” — here there is cross-talk, but the word seems to be “bachelor” or “bastard.” In reply, Mr. Kissinger sweepingly explained: “They are superb flatterers, Mr. President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That’s how they survived 600 years. They suck up — their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions.”
Mr. Kissinger voiced prejudices about Pakistanis, too. On Aug. 10, 1971, while discussing with Mr. Nixon whether the Pakistani junta would execute the imprisoned leader of the Bengali nationalists, Mr. Kissinger told the president, “I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure.” He added, “They just don’t have the subtlety of the Indians.”
These emotional displays of prejudice help to explain a foreign policy debacle. Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger’s policies toward South Asia in 1971 were not just a moral disaster but a strategic fiasco on their own Cold War terms.
While Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had some reasons to favor Pakistan, an American ally which was secretly helping to bring about their historic opening to China, their biases and emotions contributed to their excessive support for Pakistan’s murderous dictatorship throughout its atrocities.
As Mr. Kissinger’s own staff members had warned him, this one-sided approach handed India the opportunity to rip Pakistan in half, first by sponsoring the Bengali guerrillas and then with the war in December 1971 — resulting in a Cold War victory for the Soviet camp.
For decades, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger have portrayed themselves as brilliant practitioners of realpolitik, running a foreign policy that dispassionately served the interests of the United States. But these declassified White House tapes confirm a starkly different picture: racism and misogyny at the highest levels, covered up for decades under ludicrous claims of national security. A fair historical assessment of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger must include the full truth, unbleeped.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/opinion/nixon-racism-india.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
#Pakistan - A story of failure - #PTI government and polio
- A story of failure
The PTI had come to power without any preparation for the arduous job of running a country with a population of over 213 million and scores of serious problems. It was claimed that once an honest Prime Minister was holding the levers of power, every serious problem would soon get resolved. Within two years the self-serving claim has turned out to be false in several spheres, including polio eradication. WPV cases that were gradually going down from 54 in 2015 to 20 in 2016, 8 in 2017 and 12 in 2018, sharply rose under PTI rule to 147 in 2019. During the last few months the number has already reached 67. Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries in the world reporting polio cases and being considered a potential source of dissemination of the virus to other countries.
The two years of the PTI rule are marked by an upsurge in polio cases. There are two major reasons behind the phenomenon. First, appointment of incompetent focal persons handpicked by the PM, like Mr Babar bin Ata and Dr Zafar Mirza. In both cases the government discovered, though much after the harm had been done, that the choice was inappropriate. The second reason was the sheer political opportunism which stood in the way of enforcing the writ of the state. The PTI government was simply reluctant to alienate the clerics, especially in KP, who opposed vaccination. The PTI feared that if the religious leaders turned hostile, this could result in loss of votes.
The task of controlling polio has now been handed over to the newly appointed Special Assistant to PM (SAPM) on health Dr Faisal Sultan. On Wednesday Dr Sultan paid his first visit to the National Emergency Operation Centre (NEOC) where he expressed the government’s determination to eradicate the virus. The task ahead will test the new focal person’s competence. But as long as political exigencies are allowed to stand in the way of the enforcement of the state’s writ, polio cannot be eradicated. Two years after paying monthly salaries to prayer leaders, who deliver Friday sermons in KP, and allocating millions of rupees to seminaries, the time has come when he who pays the piper must call the tune.
#Pakistan - Coronavirus in South Asia: Is low testing hiding scale of the outbreak?
Shruti MenonIndia has the third-largest number of coronavirus cases in the world after the US and Brazil with over 3.8 million infections reported so far.
That's not surprising given its huge population, but what is the scale of the epidemic in neighbouring countries?
Is the outbreak growing in South Asia? India's numbers have been rising fast after it relaxed a strict lockdown, imposed in the last week of March.
It's seen record numbers of daily cases, as it continues to expand its testing, doing one million tests in a single day on 21 August.
Can India test a million people a day?
But other countries in South Asia seem to be witnessing a downward trend in cases after steep increases in May and June, although Nepal is currently witnessing a surge.
In Pakistan, cases have fallen from a peak in mid-June of almost 6,000 new infections each day, to about a few hundred a day in September.Afghanistan's numbers have been falling after a spike in mid-June, although there are questions about the reliability of its official figures.
A recent survey conducted by their health ministry showed that more than a third of the country's population could have been infected.
In Nepal, the government imposed a lockdown which went on for 100 days, during which time most cases were in areas bordering India. It's imposed new local restrictions in several provinces, as infections have been going up in some densely-populated urban areas.
The health ministry announced on Tuesday that the virus has entered the community in 12 of Nepal's districts including the capital, Kathmandu.
Sri Lanka has much lower levels of infection. It has had spikes in cases since April, but has had relatively low numbers. It implemented a tight lockdown, traced contacts of positive cases and imposed strict quarantine rules.
"A thorough contact-tracing system was in place using public health officers, local police, intelligence officials and local administrative officials," says BBC Sinhala's Saroj Pathirana.
How much testing is done in South Asia?
"Total number of cases per million in India and the rest of South Asia are low, but so is the number of tests per million," says virologist Dr Shahid Jameel.
He says that while total numbers of tests in these countries seem high, they are not when you factor in population sizes.
India has has so far conducted 43 million tests. Pakistan has carried out more than 2.6 million.
But per capita tests in these countries are far lower than in other countries.
And in Pakistan and Bangladesh, testing levels have fallen, which will have had an impact on the number of positive cases recorded.
Pakistan conducted over 31,000 tests per day in June. And on 27 July, a record 41,666 tests were conducted - the highest number ever done in Pakistan.
But the numbers of tests fell sharply over the following days, declining to a low of 10,759 on 3 August, before rising again.
A government survey conducted in July around the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, suggested that nearly 300,000 people may have been infected by the virus there alone, a majority of them asymptomatic.
Bangladesh's testing numbers have also gone down after the government introduced a high testing fee in July. There's also been a scandal around the sale of fake negative test certificates.
In Nepal, a total of 705,560 tests had been conducted as of 1 September, with just over 10,000 tests a day.
Testing data for Afghanistan is not available and the Red Crescent has expressed concern that the actual number of cases could be much higher than officially announced.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has set a benchmark range for adequate testing of between 10 and 30 per confirmed case in a country or region.
South Asian countries fare poorly on this measure.
Russia and Japan, which have populations similar to Bangladesh, are testing far more widely, finding a positive case for every 37 and 27 tests respectively. But Bangladesh is identifying one positive case for every five tests carried out - well below the WHO benchmark.
Nepal was finding a positive case for every 20 tests until August 19, down from 25 tests as of June 14.
What about the death rate in South Asia?
The overall death toll in India is now the third largest largest in the world, although the proportion of people who become ill and then die remains low compared to the global average.
Deaths recorded in other countries in the region are lower than in other countries where the virus took hold, whether we look at absolute numbers or per capita.
Click here to see the BBC interactive
This appears to be an encouraging sign, but there are questions about the reliability of data in a region with relatively low levels of public health spending.
"Many deaths are not reported within the vital registration system and the causes of deaths are incorrectly classified," said Professor Kamran Siddiqi, a public health expert at the University of York.
But Dr Shahid Jameel says even if deaths are under-reported, the difference from other areas of the world is "quite stark".
"The most plausible explanation is that the populations in South Asia are made up of far younger people than say in Europe and the US," Prof Siddiqi says.
https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-south-asia-lack-testing-233844660.html
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