THE REPUBLICget involved in a written guarantee of Pakistan’s good behaviour, but
Shastri could assume that by bringing about the Tashkent Accord the
Soviet Union would be interested in preserving it.
Shastri’s death at the end of this strenuous conference was a heavy price
paid for a meagre result. Pakistan tried to forget about the declaration as
soon as the Indian troops had been removed. For Ayub, any reference to
this declaration was only a reminder of his humiliation. As a soldier he had
lost a military venture and, on top of that, he had been compelled to
promise that he would never do it again. His authority was undermined.
He fired Bhutto who had greatly encouraged him in this venture, but this
did not help him to restore his authority. On the contrary, Bhutto soon
emerged as the leader of the opposition to Ayub’s regime and nobody
seemed to remember that it was he who had aided and abetted Ayub.
Ayub’s loss of popular support was hastened by the necessity of restoring
Pakistan’s military capacity at the expense of the taxpayer. About 300
tanks were lost in 1965 and an arms embargo by the Western powers
deprived Pakistan of its usual sources of free supply of military hardware.
Consequently, Ayub was happy when the Soviet Union—playing its new
role of umpire in South Asian affairs—sent such hardware to Pakistan in
1968 in an attempt to do evenhanded justice to India and Pakistan.
Indo-Soviet friendship and the liberation of BangladeshIndira Gandhi had not yet won the respect of the Soviet Union in 1968.
These were the days when she was still to make a mark in Indian politics and
her protest against Soviet military aid to Pakistan could be easily ignored.
But in 1969 several events contributed to a change in the Soviet attitude. The
border clashes with China made the Soviet leadership more concerned about
security in Asia. Pakistan could not be weaned away from China, in spite of
Soviet pressure. India, however, did not need to be converted in this respect
and so the Soviet Union and India established closer relations once more. A
draft of what later became known as the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty was
prepared in Moscow in September 1969 and Soviet military aid to Pakistan
was stopped in 1970. Indira Gandhi had split the Congress in the summer of
1969, projecting a ‘left’ image which impressed the Soviet Union. But she
was not yet in full control of the political situation and the signing of the
Friendship Treaty before she had won the next elections would have been
inopportune. After her great electoral victory of March 1971 she
nevertheless did not rush to sign this treaty. It was only in the context of the
deteriorating situation in East Pakistan that she found it useful to enlist the
Soviet Union as a potential ally.
In July 1971 President Nixon revealed that Henry Kissinger had secretly
flown from Islamabad to Peking in order to prepare the ground for a
presidential visit. A Washington-Islamabad-Peking axis seemed to emerge