250. Message From Secretary of State Vance to President Carter1
Subject: Evening Report for the President.
[Omitted here is material unrelated to Pakistan.]
6. I met today with Pakistani Foreign Minister, Aziz Ahmed, for almost an hour and a half. He clearly had a precise brief from Prime Minister Bhutto and spent the first 45 minutes of our meeting reviewing [Page 610] the course of U.S.-Pakistani relations over the past 25 years.2 The thrust of his presentation was that Pakistan had made many sacrifices over the years to support American interests and that it had been frequently let down by the U.S. He cited in particular our failure to support Pakistan more strongly in the 1966 and the 1971 Indo-Pakistani wars and our ten-[omission in the original] discriminatory against Pakistan since India had ready access to Soviet arms. He reviewed the evolution of Pakistan’s arrangements with France for a nuclear reprocessing plant, pointing out (with some justification) that the U.S. had waited until 1976 (3 years after the project was started) to make its opposition to the reprocessing project known to the Pakistanis. Finally, Aziz Ahmed repeated the charge that Pakistan has extensive evidence of massive U.S. support for the opposition parties in the recent elections—evidence which he said he had with him if we wanted it. I did not ask for the material he said he had.
7. Aziz Ahmed said that U.S.-Pakistani relations are at a crossroads and can go either in the direction of confrontation or of restoring mutual confidence between us. If the choice is confrontation, he foreshadowed a Pakistani withdrawal from the Central Treaty Organization, a turning to the Soviet option, and a continuation of Bhutto’s anti-American campaign. Having said all that, Aziz Ahmed emphasized that Pakistan would prefer to treat what has happened as a closed chapter and approach the future of our relationship in a constructive spirit. He, at the same time, clearly implied that our future position on Pakistan’s reprocessing project, and Bhutto’s evaluation of this meeting, would be key factors in determining which way our relations went.
8. Having heard Aziz Ahmed out, I decided this was not the occasion for a confrontational response. So far as charges of U.S. interference in Pakistani internal affairs are concerned, I made clear there was no basis for such charges and suggested that whatever evidence the Pakistanis had might be the result of a disinformation campaign against us. Beyond that, I emphasized how highly we have valued our relations with Pakistan, our respect for Prime Minister Bhutto in the past, and our desire to follow the path of restoring mutual confidence in our relations. With respect to the reprocessing project, I outlined our own decisions to forego reprocessing and look for less dangerous alternatives. I stressed our hope that others would do the same, while acknowledging that in the end every country must make its own sovereign [Page 611] decision in such matters. Aziz Ahmed did not raise either arms supply questions or economic assistance, and I decided to leave these matters for later exchanges between us.
9. In summary, I made clear that our preferences were to pursue cooperative relations if Pakistan will do the same, but left unanswered the question of what the content of those relations will be and did not hold out any promise that we can fulfill Pakistan’s objectives in the nuclear reprocessing and arms supply fields. Having signaled our desire to forget the recent past and restore our relations on a basis of mutual respect, I believe we must now wait a bit to see whether Bhutto reciprocates before undertaking more concrete discussions of the issues which still have to be resolved in our relationship.
[Omitted here is material unrelated to Pakistan.]
- Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Brzezinski Material, Subject File, Box 18, Evening Reports (State): 5/77. Secret; Sensitive; Nodis. The message was transmitted via the White House Situation Room in message WH70336 to Carter at his vacation residence on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Vance was in Paris May 28–June 2 in order to attend the CIEC Ministerial conference. Carter initialed in the right-hand margin of the message. The message was repeated to the Department of State as telegram Secto 5020 from Paris, May 31. (National Archives, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, P840077–2172, N770003–0596)↩
- According to the memorandum of conversation, Atheron, Ambassador-designate Hummel, and Department of State Spokesman Hodding Carter also attended the meeting, as did Haider and Dhlari representing Pakistan. (Department of State, Office of the Secretariat Staff, Cyrus R. Vance, Secretary of State—1977–1980, Lot 84D241, Box 10, Vance EXDIS MemCons, 1977)↩