McMahon, Robert J., The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

 “The blunt truth is that the hundreds of millions of dollars we have given these countries has equipped them to mount war against each other.” (McMahon, p. 329) With these words of Congressman James A. Hailey of Florida, the United States withdrew military support for India and Pakistan in 1965.  The two countries of South Asia were once again at war.  They were not fighting the battles of communism versus capitalism, but enacting another round of their own battle for territory, legitimacy, and regional supremacy.  In 1965, the United States opted to discontinue their interference in South Asia and let it revert back to the Cold War periphery.

 In his book, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India and Pakistan, Robert McMahon analyzes the major phases of United States policy toward India and Pakistan from independence and partition in 1947 through the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war.  His overall argument is very straightforward: the United States believed that they could maintain friendly diplomatic relations with both India and Pakistan, and keep both as allies strategically aligned with the West and against communism.  The United States, McMahon asserts, was wrong.

 McMahon takes a chronological approach to South Asian diplomacy.  First, he traces the general disinterest in South Asia prevalent among politicians immediately after World War II.  With the “loss” of China to communism and war breaking out in Korea, McMahon establishes why American goals toward the region gained more importance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Due to disagreement over the relative benefits of either country’s friendship, as well as changing geopolitical concerns throughout the post-war years, the United States hesitated to choose one country upon which to focus their overtures.
 
Although the United States attempted to establish bilateral relations with India and Pakistan, most American analysts still considered India to be the jewel of the region.  However, India’s staunch non-alignment policy quickly proved problematic.  India wished to remain friendly with both the United States and the Soviet Union, thus allowing them to ask both sides for aid to combat widespread famine and underdeveloped industry.  Plus, after struggling for independence from colonialism, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian Congress Party defied any action that they viewed threatened their national independence.   At the same time, Pakistan – unstable, incredibly poor, and well as much smaller than their unfriendly neighbor, India – actively sought U.S. aid.   McMahon analyzes the numerous factors that led to the United States/Pakistan alliance of 1954, including instability in Egypt, Iran, and perceived threats to Middle East oil fields.   Formal alliance with Pakistan proved disastrous to already rocky relations with India.  While military equipment and aid to Pakistan was supposed to protect Pakistan from communist aggression, India viewed the aid as the United States arming Pakistan to do battle with India.
 
As China established itself as a major communist threat in Asia, India’s symbolic importance soared.  India became the world’s largest democracy (by population), and the most prominent non-aligned nation in Asia. Despite crippling famine and poverty, India refused to have political stipulations tied to their acceptance of aid.  Conversely, Pakistan emerged, as some diplomats joked, as the “most aligned” of America’s friends, joining the Baghdad Pact and SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization).  Yet the United States, citing the importance of India as a model of Asian nationhood to rival China, continued to aid India despite protests from Pakistan.  “The Truman administration analysts possessed a reasonably shrewd understanding of the underlying causes of regional ferment.  But the gap between the problems they identified and the solutions they advanced… was enormous.”  (McMahon, p. 152)  No matter what the United States did to aid one country, the other would take it as an open threat.

 A major strength of McMahon’s work is his willingness to see the Cold War as more than a dichotomy between East and West or Communist and Free World.  McMahon accepts that there may have been a third way, one taken by Nehru and advocated by the immensely popular Congress Party in India immediately following Independence.  Other historians suggest that the Cold War would have come to South Asia even if the United States had not interfered, a possibility McMahon does not consider.

India, a subject of invasion from all sides throughout their turbulent history, had for the first time in 1947 viewed themselves as an independent and self-determining modern nation.  Nehru and the Congress party couched overtures from both sides as throwing off the yoke of colonialism only to replace it with other obligations that would undercut the new nation’s freedom.  Whereas the United States tended to view the choice between capitalism and Communism as a choice between good and evil, Nehru drew a moral equivalency between Washington and Moscow, what McMahon refers to as the “plague o’er both your houses” approach.

 McMahon tends to overemphasize the personalities of the actors defining South Asian policy, however.  Nehru, while no doubt the dominating figure of Indian foreign affairs for two decades following partition, did not single-handedly determine the non-alignment policies so popular in India.  Nor did the personal relationships between Nehru and various American presidents, no matter how good or bad, shape American goals in South Asia.  McMahon’s strength of demonstrating the interrelationships of multiple causes (geopolitical, economic, military, and historical considerations) cannot all be contained in the figure of one man, even one so popular as Nehru.  His staunch opinions toward non-alignment, his religious and historical biases, and his moral condemnation of both Moscow and Washington all reflected the nationalist atmosphere in India.  Without Nehru, is it impossible to imagine another Indian leader reacting in the same way?  It is logical that the successor to M. K. Gandhi’s independence movement would defend the new nation’s independence at all costs, even when that dictated actions that would hurt the fledgling nation.

 The United States viewed the two new independent nations of South Asia as possible allies who would align themselves either with the “Free World” or with the Communists.  Communal violence and divisive territory disputes marked the partition of British India into two countries: India and Pakistan.  Pakistan itself was geographically divided into East Pakistan and West Pakistan, sharing no common border between them.  Issues such as the plebiscite in Kashmir, a territory both nations claimed political power over, exemplified the Cold War difficulties between the two new nations.  Both nations suffered from widespread famine and unstable political and economic situations.

The Muslim League and the Indian Congress Party failed to find a lasting peace, or even a lasting compromise, under the legendary shadow of Gandhi in 1947.  What made the United States think that a man like Lyndon B. Johnson could bring peace to the region?  McMahon asserts, “an investment that totaled nearly $12 billion in combined development, commodity, and military assistance in the years since partition had produced amazingly little support or understanding for the United States in either [India or Pakistan].” (McMahon, p. 333)  A corollary could be derived that after 17 years, intense involvement produced amazingly little understanding for either India or Pakistan in the United States.  Instead, foreign policy came full circle, and 1965 saw South Asia pushed back to the periphery of the Cold War, where it had originally been at the end of World War II.