America's moral bankruptcy in action: Geopolitics trumped Bengali lives in 1971
Nixon and Kissinger feared an emboldened Indo-Soviet axis far more than they feared the annihilation of Bengalis. The massacre in Bangladesh became, at best, an inconvenience; at worst, a price worth paying
In 1971, as rivers in Bengal ran red and mass graves filled overnight, Washington knew exactly what was happening. It simply decided it did not matter enough.
Two weeks into the slaughter, Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka, sent what would become one of the most damning dissent cables in American diplomatic history. He accused his own government of "moral bankruptcy" — of failing to denounce atrocities, failing to defend democracy, and bending over backwards to placate a military regime committing mass murder.
Blood was not speculating. He was reporting what he and his colleagues were witnessing: systematic killings of civilians, intellectuals, students, Hindu minorities, and political supporters.
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"Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities… Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy," Archer Kent Blood and his staff wrote in April 1971.
The words appear in what later became known as the Blood Telegram, a rare State Department dissent cable sent from Dhaka by the then US Consul General during the Bangladesh genocide. Decades later, the document was brought back into public focus through Gary J Bass's 2013 book The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, which meticulously reconstructs how American diplomats on the ground warned Washington of an unfolding genocide, and were ignored.
The response from Washington was not outrage. It was silence and punishment. Blood was recalled. The killings continued for 8 more months.
While the world commemorates other genocides with solemn clarity, Bangladesh's annihilation has been allowed to fade into obscurity, its staggering death toll reduced to a disputed statistic rather than a moral reckoning.
The killings continued, met not with principled outrage but with calculated indifference from the United States, a nation that still presents itself as the global custodian of human rights, democracy, and moral leadership.
This selective memory is not an aberration but a pattern. From Dhaka in 1971 to Gaza today, American responses to mass suffering have been filtered through strategic convenience, where alliances, leverage, and power routinely outweigh any obligation to human life. History shows that when morality collides with self-interest, Washington almost always chooses itself.
The roots of the 1971 genocide lay in the violent inequities of Pakistan itself. After the 1947 partition, East Pakistan was treated as a colony rather than an equal partner: economically exploited, politically marginalised, culturally demeaned.
"Over the years, West Pakistan behaved like a poorly raised, egotistical guest, devouring the best dishes and leaving nothing but scraps and leftovers for East Pakistan," said French journalist Paul Dreyfus on the situation back then.
When Bengalis asserted their democratic will in the 1970 election, giving Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League a clear majority, West Pakistan's military rulers chose bullets over ballots.
On the night of 25 March 1971, Operation Searchlight was unleashed.
Pakistani troops moved with chilling precision. University dormitories were stormed. Professors were lined up and shot. Neighbourhoods were torched. Women were raped on an industrial scale.
This was not collateral damage of war; it was a calculated attempt to crush a people's right to exist.
By conservative estimates, hundreds of thousands were killed. By others, the number reaches three million. Between 200,000 and 400,000 women were raped — a crime so vast that it still defies comprehension. And all the while, the Pakistani army used American-supplied weapons.
"Regardless of what the number is, clearly massive atrocities took place against the Bengali people," notes Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center. "I think we have to say that the atrocities committed by the Pakistan military far outstripped what we saw from the other side," Curtis states.
There was violence on multiple fronts, including clashes among Bengali factions. By May 1971, 1.5 million refugees had fled into India; by November, that number had swollen to nearly 10 million.
When Australian doctor Geoffrey Davis was brought to Dhaka by the United Nations to perform late-term abortions for raped women after the war, he believed the estimated figure of 200,000 to 400,000 raped Bengali women was, if anything, an undercount.
This fixation on arithmetic has often served a darker purpose: to blur responsibility. What remains beyond dispute is the scale and systematic nature of the violence unleashed on the Bengali population.
Even American intelligence assessments at the time acknowledged mass civilian killings, offering a deliberately conservative figure that still pointed to an extraordinary human catastrophe. Yet decades later, the debate is cynically revived, often in lockstep with a certain political party (Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami), attempting to dilute the numbers, deny complicity, and recast perpetrators as bystanders.
Genocide denial is not merely an academic dispute over numbers; it is a political project. It seeks to sanitise history by shifting focus from intent, method, and responsibility to statistical quibbling, as if reducing the body count might absolve the crime itself.
Genocide denial is often the last refuge of perpetrators — the only tool left to mask their shame, if they possess any conscience at all. When faced with overwhelming evidence of systematic mass killings, those responsible frequently seek to erase, distort, or trivialise the events to evade moral and legal responsibility.
And this is nothing new, similar patterns are seen globally: Turkey continues to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915 despite extensive historical documentation; some in Rwanda attempted to rewrite or minimise the 1994 genocide in the aftermath; and Holocaust denial has persisted for decades among extremist groups, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. In every case, denial is not a neutral debate over facts; it is a deliberate strategy to obscure guilt, rewrite history, and shield perpetrators from accountability, leaving the memory of victims under constant attack.
There's no absence of evidence of what happened in 1971; the facts are exhaustively documented in diplomatic cables, intelligence reports, refugee records, and survivor testimonies. The real question, then, is not whether the truth is unclear, but whether there remains a wilful blindness, a readiness to erase history when it becomes politically inconvenient, and to insult the memory of the dead by pretending uncertainty where none truly exists.
The United States cannot claim ignorance. CIA assessments acknowledged massive civilian deaths. American diplomats on the ground used the word "genocide" as it was unfolding. India called it genocide. Journalists reported it. Senators protested it. Yet President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger chose to "tilt" towards Pakistan.
Why?
Cold War calculus.
Overshadowing the slaughter was Washington's obsession with global power politics. Nixon and Kissinger regarded Pakistan as a "close ally" in South Asia, a reliable military partner and, more crucially, a secret diplomatic bridge to China. Even as Pakistani troops razed cities and villages in East Pakistan, the United States continued to arm the regime and shield it diplomatically.
India's position only deepened American hostility. New Delhi's growing proximity to the Soviet Union, formalised in August 1971 through the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, triggered alarm in the White House.
Nixon and Kissinger feared an emboldened Indo-Soviet axis far more than they feared the annihilation of Bengalis. The massacre in Bangladesh became, at best, an inconvenience; at worst, a price worth paying.
Bengali lives were weighed against geopolitical advantage and found expendable.
Nixon's own recorded words expose the racism and moral emptiness that underpinned this policy. Dismissing public concern, he sneered, "Biafra stirred up a few Catholics. But you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan, they're just a bunch of brown goddamn Muslims." This was not a slip of the tongue; it was the worldview from which policy flowed.
As political scientist Gary J Bass writes, "Above all, Bangladesh's experience shows the primacy of international security over justice."
Human lives were subordinated to strategy. Democracy was sacrificed at the altar of convenience.
Even when Congress formally cut off military aid, the White House manoeuvred around the law, facilitating third-party arms transfers, greenlighting weapons shipments, and dispatching the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal in a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate India.
Publicly, the United States claimed neutrality. Privately, it enabled slaughter.
This is the real face of American "quiet diplomacy".
Bangladesh eventually emerged independent, but victory came too late for millions.
Entire families were erased. A generation grew up with trauma woven into its national memory. The intellectual heart of the nation was deliberately destroyed in the final days of the war — a wound that has never fully healed.
In the decades since, Bangladesh has struggled to reckon with its past, often imperfectly and contentiously. But remembrance itself has never been optional. Memory is survival. Forgetting would mean surrendering the dead a second time.
In contrast, the United States has largely erased 1971 from its moral ledger.
Henry Kissinger died lauded as a grand strategist. Obituaries spoke of diplomacy and détente, rarely of Dhaka's burning streets. For most Americans, the Bangladesh genocide barely exists — an inconvenient footnote, if that.
Yet this silence matters. It matters because the same rhetoric of "national interest" continues to excuse atrocities elsewhere. It matters because the self-appointed "white saviour" of global politics still decides which lives are grievable and which are strategic losses.
On this 54th Victory Day, Bangladesh remembers not only its liberation but the cost of being abandoned. The genocide of 1971 was not just a crime of the Pakistani military; it was a failure of international conscience, with the United States playing a central, shameful role.
History may be written by the powerful, but memory belongs to the wounded. And Bangladesh has not forgotten.
Zarin Tasnim is an Online journalist at The Business Standard
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard
