Time

That fleeting moment of levity during the secret deliberations of the elite Washington Special Action Group enlivened the classified documents released last week by Columnist Jack Anderson. While providing a rare, fascinating glimpse of uncertainty and candor among the President's top advisers as India waged its swift war to dismember Pakistan, the papers revealed nothing new of substance and fell far short of proving the columnist's assertion that the Administration had grossly deceived the public about its pro-Pakistani stance. They did discredit Henry Kissinger's claim during the action that the U.S. was not "anti-Indian," but the Administration's lack of neutrality had been evident all along.

While not comparable in scope or substance to the Pentagon papers, the Anderson revelations similarly constitute more an embarrassment to Government than a threat to national security. They include the minutes of three meetings of the Special Action Group, a unit of the National Security Council, which were attended by up to 19 representatives of such agencies as the CIA, AID, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State and Defense departments. The dialogue at the meetings turned out to be coolly colloquial. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson referred to the emerging nation of Bangladesh as "an international basket case," while Henry Kissinger argued that at least it need not be "our basket case." Pakistanis were always called "Paks," and the two sections of that nation were the East and West "wings." An impending U.S. decision became "the next state of play." There was discussion of whether India intended to "extinguish" West Pakistan and whether the U.S. would be asked to "bail out Bangladesh."

TWELVE DAYS

More substantially, even on the second day of fighting the highest experts seemed to know little more about the action than they could have read in their newspapers. The minutes note that CIA Director Richard Helms "indicated that we do not know who started the current action." Kissinger asked the CIA to prepare a report on "who did what to whom and when." The military representatives stuck their necks out when asked how long it would take the Indian army to force a Pakistani surrender in the East. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, estimated one or two weeks; Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland said as many as three. It took twelve days.

As reported widely last month, President Nixon was furious at Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi because during her visit to Washington in November, she gave no indication that India intended to go to war with Pakistan. The Anderson papers illustrate the intensity of Nixon's anger at New Delhi: "I am getting hell every half-hour from the President that we are not being tough enough on India," Kissinger told the meeting on Dec. 3. "He has just called me again. He does not believe we are carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan. He feels everything we do comes out otherwise."

This apparently indicated that Nixon was being frustrated by lower officials at the State and Defense departments who wanted a more even-handed approach. At a later meeting Nixon was still unhappy with the bureaucratic resistance. The secret minutes later reported: "Dr. Kissinger said that whoever is putting out background information is provoking presidential wrath. The President is under the illusion that he is giving instructions, not that he is merely being kept apprised of affairs."

Among those who opposed the Nixon-Kissinger policy was the U.S. ambassador in New Delhi, Kenneth Keating. In a secret cable, he complained that Washington's policy did not fit the facts and injured American credibility in the world. The White House was also unmoved by concern in some Pentagon quarters that the Administration's policy was giving the Soviet Union new military advantages in South Asia. What motivated Nixon to reject such arguments? The Administration claims - and the documents confirm this - that a major concern was to discourage and prevent India from trying to knock over all of West Pakistan as well as the East "wing." Nixon and Kissinger evidently believed that if India were encouraged by a more or less friendly U.S. attitude, New Delhi would strike at West Pakistan (although there is no real evidence to support this); hence they reasoned that the U.S. had to cool the Indians by adopting a pro- Pakistan "tilt." Referring to the West, Kissinger told the group that "it is quite obvious that the President is not inclined to let the Paks be defeated." Kissinger even inquired whether the U.S. could secretly supply arms to West Pakistan through a third party, such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia - an action that would have totally deceived the U.S. public - but he desisted when advised by a State Department official that this would violate long standing U.S. policy.

Nixon and Kissinger obviously also believed that the Soviet Union, which signed a friendship treaty with India last August, was well entrenched in New Delhi; an evenhanded policy not tilted toward Pakistan would not have changed the basic fact of Soviet arms aid to India. But a pro-Indian policy would have antagonized Pakistan and its mentor Peking. Thus, apparently afraid that the President's Peking mission might be jeopardized, the Administration favored Pakistan over India. The Moscow summit was in hazard as well, since the big powers might have come to a direct confrontation over the war.

CARDINAL RULE

This rationale makes a certain amount of sense, but is also open to serious criticism. The most emotional but least pertinent argument is that Pakistan was a corrupt military dictatorship while India is "the world's largest democracy." The U.S. has sided, and will have to side again, with all kinds of unpleasant regimes, including Communist ones. The more serious case against the Administration's actions is that: 1) the pro-Pakistan policy may actually have encouraged the war; for instance, the Indians were infuriated that the U.S. failed to protest vigorously the imprisonment Bengali Leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and that it never spoke out forcefully against Pakistan's brutal repression in its eastern province; 2) a more careful, neutral stance rather than publicly branding India the aggressor need not have jeopardized the President's China initiative and could have reduced Soviet influence in India at least marginally.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole unhappy episode was the surprising extent to which the President seemed to be acting out of anger at what he considered India's duplicity and its threat to his grand design in foreign policy. He apparently had ignored his own cardinal rule of presidential decision making, stated only last month to TIME White House Correspondent Jerrold Schecter: "Great decisions, if they are to be good decisions, must be made coolly; and if you respond in hot blood, you cannot make good decisions."