Sarah Paine

And the United States doesn't want it either.

So the United States is very happy that the Soviets broker the Tashkent declaration that ends this war.

But Pakistan is worse off after this thing.

India has restored its reputation for knowing what it's doing on the battlefield.

For Pakistan, the United States is really problematic because we're interested in being nice to them when we want something out of them, and then we're not so interested when we don't want something out of them because we don't share a primary enemy.

So what we really wanted were listening bases.

The technology of the day was such that if you want to surveil the Soviet Union, you want to send these big U-2 planes over, and given their ranges, and you're not supposed to be doing it, and so...

We had U-2 bases, I think Norway, West Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, and then Japan.

And in addition, we had a listening base at Badabur.

And these were really important things for us during this period.

So we're paying the Pakistanis a lot of money to get it.

Except there was one of these U-2 planes gets shot down over the Soviet Union.

They finally get so they can, because they fly at really high altitudes, they shoot it down.

And Khrushchev is furious.

He hauls in the Pakistani ambassador in Moscow and he goes, where is this place Peshawar?

We've circled it on the map.

And we're going to blow it off the map if you all don't wise up.

And the Pakistanis are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And so, between these sort of threats in 1960 about the U2, and then the United States freezing arms in the 1965 war, which the Pakistanis believe that they lost it over that.

Oh yeah, and by the way, in that 1965 war, the United States had, when we provided arms to everybody, we said, oh, we will guarantee that no one uses it, that Pakistanis and Indians don't use it against each other.