পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড).pdf/৩৪৬

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
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 Should Last Pakistan be handed over to local political parity tomorrow, there simply will not be many leaders or intellectuals of the Awarni League brand to take over responsibility. In one murderous week the army wrought a vacuum which it will take a generation or more to fill

U.S. INVOLVEMENT

 Mr. CHURCH. Mr. President, what has been America's involvement in these startling events? When did it begin? How should it be altered?  For its savage crackdown the Bengalis, the Pakistan Army used imported guns, automatic weapons, mortars, artillery, trucks, armored personnel carriers, tanks. airplanes, and ammunition. The Officers in charge were men trained in the United States or Great Britain. Most of the ordnance and supplies came from the United States, acquired over the years through our lavish grants of military assistance and subsidized arms sale programs. The Bengalis, on the other hand, have literally used bows and arrows, knives, rocks, homemade bombs, and captured hand weapons to resist.

 Starting in 1954, When Secretary of State John Foster Dunes negotiated a large arms agreement with Pakistan, the U. S. Government developed a special relationship with the ruling feudal oligarchy of West Pakistan-the generals, the handful of landowning families who control 80 per cent of the wealth and the civil servants. We furnished immense quantities of arms, and more than $4 billion worth of economic and food assistance, the bulk of which was channeled into West Pakistan.

 The military largesse, costing the United States nearly $2 billion in arms, was perenially justified to Congress and the American people as a shield to protect the Pakistan is and the United States-against Communist aggression. Pakistan joined SEATO and CENTO; in turn, the United States built a communications and air base complex at Peshawar to gather intelligence data from Central Asia, Far from containing the Russian bear or the Chinese dragon, however Pakistan has used its American. Furnished military equipment first against Indian in 1969 and now against the won people. Indeed, in 1969, Pakistan unabashedly closed down our electronic listening post at Peshawar in order to placate Russian and Chinese feelings. By all standards then, our military assistance policy has proved a failure-but it has been kept alive by the persistence of our arms bureaucracy and the insistence of the Pakistan junta.

 In October, 1970, the United States lifted its embargo on lethal arms to Pakistan that had been imposed “after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war. When this policy turnabout was announced. I warned in the Senate, as I had in the early 1960's, against fucling the Pakistan-Indian rivalry, that trouble and violence would be the end product. “It could be,” I said on October 14 of last year, “only a matter of time before recent history repeats itself-and the United States is burned again.” This has happened, but in another, unforeseen way.

 When a policy goes sour but is not changed, the results are sordid. New public information reveals this about the Pakistan case. In April 1967, the United States altered its arms embargo to case military transactions. We permitted commercial sales of what could