Book Review: JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War – Bruce Riedel

Ford, G. (2015). JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War by Bruce Riedel, Asian Review of Books, 27 December.

Buried beneath the unwinding Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was the palimpsest of a second crisis that could equally have tipped the world into nuclear war. This was the prospect opened up by India’s China War when Beijing and Mao decided that the only way to deter what they saw as Indian adventurism, both in providing arms and equipment to the Tibetan insurgents, and its tactics of “forward deployment” along the disputed Sino-Indian border, was by force of arms.

India’s politicians and military were totally out of step with each other. In December of the previous year, India had invaded the Portuguese enclave of Goa settling a minor leftover issue of Indian Independence. As a feat of military might it ranked alongside Washington’s invasion of Grenada twenty years later. Yet in its wake Delhi’s politicians saw an “invincible army” rather than the reality of a shambolic ill-equipped and badly led rabble. As a result China brushed the Indian Army aside and threatened to advance well beyond its initial objectives and cut off the whole of eastern India from the nation’s core by occupying the Siliguri Corridor.

Nehru appealed for help to Washington and the Commonwealth and within days America, Britain, Canada and Australia were signed up to provide military equipment, fighter aircraft and possibly ground troops as they reprised the opening stanzas of the Korean War. Washington deployed an aircraft carrier battle group to India. As was put more formally in 1963 Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence, told Kennedy “we should recognize that in order to carry out any commitment to defend India against a substantial Chinese attack, we would have to use nuclear weapons.”

It was Mao who saved the day. After Beijing’s overachievement, Mao called a halt and withdrew to China’s own definition of the  border. Washington recognized neither Chinese prudence nor principle fully expecting and planning for the war to be renewed in Spring 1963.

How did we get here? It was a combination of American provocation and Chinese misperceptions. As the author says,

before 1962 the United States was engaged in a highly provocative effort to destabilize Tibet at a time when Nehru was trying for the most part to avoid war with China.

The provocation for Washington wasn’t sending Communist troops into Tibet; rather it was Mao’s regime itself. There was no record of US concern regarding Taiwan’s claim that both Tibet and Mongolia were an integral part of the country. Almost from the time of the Communist Party’s victory in China the CIA engaged in clandestine military operations inside the country. One particular target was Tibet and the Tibetans. Certainly from 1957—and possibly 1954—the US was assisting and promoting insurgency in Tibet, exfiltrating recruits, training them in Saipan and Colorado and parachuting them back into Tibet to fight. On top, the US was overflying China—and the Soviet Union—with its U2 spy planes.

This was the provocation, but the misconception was that in this Washington was being aided and abetted by India, when it was (East) Pakistan that was host to the secret bases for both the spy flights and the Tibetan rebels return. After the Dalai Lama was “escorted to freedom”—as the CIA put it—when he fled Lhasa in March 1959 the US redoubled their efforts. It was this coupled with Nehru’s policy of “forward deployment” of troops that slowly built up from this time with Delhi sending Indian military forces forward into contested and disputed territory and building military outposts behind Chinese troops. By November 1961, this got to the point where the Army was ordered to patrol as far forward as possible in Aksai Chin threatening China’s vital communication links between Xinjiang and Tibet. Like with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it should not have been a surprise that Mao given the choice between fighting or running chose the former.

The consequence was to totally remake the alliances in the region. When Kennedy backed Delhi, Pakistan turned to China—even if the clandestine US bases were allowed to continue to operate for a while. Delhi also signed up for Washington’s Tibetan campaigns retrospectively justifying Beijing’s concerns.

Pakistan and India meanwhile kicked off an arms race that continues to this day punctuated by wars and nuclear tests. Those who promoted the clandestine operations in Tibet may not have appreciated their unintended consequences, but that is not to say that they were not a welcome bonus at the time for Washington’s “cold war warriors” nor that they would be repudiated by today’s “neo-cons”.

After all, it was a cheap price to pay to keep apart—and often at each other’s throats—the erstwhile twin leaders of a non-aligned movement that would have threatened US hegemony. President Kennedy saw the need not just to bring India on side, but on board making it an economic and industrial challenger to China. He wanted a Marshall Plan for India. Sadly for Delhi, this died with him in Dallas.

Reidel’s well-written book offers a glimpse of a different Kennedy—not that the author would necessarily agree. For him, JFK’s Forgotten Crisis is a second supplementary demonstration of Kennedy’s inspired leadership and diplomacy as illustrated by his successful management and the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Here the India crisis, which started and finished almost simultaneously with Cuba, is intended to retell the same tale. But in this second crisis Kennedy seems less sure-footed and perspicacious in taking on Washington’s military industrial complex.

Nevertheless the author is generous enough in his writing to let others see Mao as even more the unsung hero here in the Himalayas than Khrushchev was in the Caribbean.