| শিরোনাম | সূত্র | তারিখ |
| ১২৭। নিক্সন এবং দক্ষিণ এশিয়া | নিউইয়র্ক টাইমস | ৯ ডিসেম্বর, ১৯৭১ |
THE NEW YORK TIMES, DECEMBER 9, 1971
MR. NIXON AND SOUTH ASIA
By John P. Lewis
Princeton, N. J. - The Nixon Administration's South Asia policy, which had been edging toward disaster for the last cight months, finally, in a cloud of pious inanitics, plunged over the brink this last weekend. Presumably for the time being the policy is beyond redemption. What now selfishly concerns me as an American is that India's leaders may exaggerate the degree to which the Administration's present aberrations represent thoughtful and enduring American opinion. All the evidence suggests that within the Administration the aberrations trace directly and primarily to Mr. Nixon himself. For cight months he has remained officially blind to the most massive calculated savagery that has been visited on a civil population in recent times. He has been faithful to his good friend' the Chairman of the savagery Yahya khan. Neither his hand holding nor any hidden leverage on the Pakistan Regime has had evident effect in advancing a political solution in East Bengal.
To an Indian Government that in the face of moral and human outrage next door and of an outlandish refugee burden, was showing remarkable restraint until recently. Mr. Nixon offered mainly counsels of restraint. Ic supplied no moral support instead for months he continued to trickle arms to Pakistan like to much gasoline on to smouldering. Indian passions. The Pakistan has been fully aware both of the explosive domestic political risks the refugee posed in Indian Bengal and of the way they have totally derailed the cause of Indian development at its very moment of greatest opportunity.
Historians are bound to boggle at the cumulative intepitude of this performance. In one scries of strokes we have managed to align ourselves with the wrong side of about as big and simple a moral issue as the world has been lately we have sided with a minor military dictatorship against the world's second largest nation which happens also to be the staunchest of all developing countries in its adherence to our own deepest political values. We have joined the surefire loser in a sub continental confrontation, and we have depleted a once abundant, durable fund of Indo-American goodwill at a sickening rate.
It certainly would be wrong to claim to our Indian friends that in all this, the president is swimming against a tide of public opinion. There is little American tide of opinion of any kind about the subcontinent, and its surface flow is considerably influenced by what any President does and says. Moreover many of our best editorial writers and columnists have such an absolute abhorrence of war especially when esealated by others-whatever the provocation and whatever the closure of other options, that they cannot just now. See much beyond the proximate cause of the Bengal border crossing.
