Dan Minette wrote: > Well, I won't argue against your examples, but I am thinking > of a much more > decisive win than that. All of Germany and Japan were under > the control of > the winners of WWII. Pakistan wasn't after those two wars.
No, Pakistan was not completely under Indian control but they were in a precarious enough position anyway. In 1948, the Indian army had cut them off from the sea and was kilometers away from Lahore when Nehru ordered them back. In 1971, Pakistan had lost control over half of its territory, we had 90,000 POWs...our position was reasonably strong in both these instances. > I'm not really faulting India on this, they had constraints, Yup. We sure did. In 1948, our biggest constraint was that idiot of a Prime Minister, Nehru. I am still unable to fathom the logic by which he unilaterally surrendered all the conquered original Pakistani territory to Pakistan, without even demanding a reciprocity from Pakistan. Bah! Now, not that it would have made any difference, but I think the demand for our original territory should have at least be presented as a condition for the release of the POWs. Nope. For some reason, Indira chose to trust Bhutto, the tragi-comic Shimla agreement and did just what her father did. Yay. > I agree, BTW, that India would have been a better ally than > Pakistan for > the US. Whatever the disagreements may have been from our > standpoint, it > was a democracy. Its my understanding that India pretty well > chose the > USSR as its patron and the US got Pakistan by default. Do you know > differently? Yes. :) India was one of the founding members of the now-defunct NAM. We really didn't wish to embroiled in the mess...we had messes of our own to clear up. That didn't sit too well with the US government at that time. USSR was *evil*, y'see and anybody who wanted to sit out the fight has suspicious ulterior motives. But then, Kenndy came to power. Things improved. Especially after the US aid in 1962. But then, Nehru had his own shortcomings [it might not be wise to get me started on this particular topic - that is a fair warning :)] - he rebuffed the US President quite boorishly when the two met. I think that had a lot to do with Kennedy's charisma and Nehru's impending old age. He also found Socialism more attractive than Capitalism [have I mentioned that he as an idiot?]...so, any improvements that might have resulted just didn' go too far, simply because Nehru was not too interested. Then things got really bad in the 70s. The East Pakistani refugee problem started. India couldn't really cope with it economically. Action was needed and India was ready to take the action. Indira Gandhi undertook a world tour to garner international support. She was bluntly informed by Nixon that any Indian action on the isue would invariably meet with the US disapproval and that the US *would* support the Pakistani government, to the extent of military aid. Then she went to USSR, signd a mutual co-operation and protection pact with the USSR, just specific to this one issue, only if the Americans got involved. So when the 7th fleet was launched, the Russians dispatched theirs. But Indians never really aligned themselves with the USSR. We signed issue-specific treaties and pacts with different countries, depending on our needs and concerns. USSR was one of these countries, USA was another. Ritu _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
