Office of the Historian

318. Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (Sisco) to Secretary of State Rogers1

Washington, December 16, 1971.

WSAG MEETING THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1971

The short WSAG meeting today discussed “Where do we go from here.”

Security Council: At the outset of the meeting it was agreed that we would support the British-French draft resolution, which, in turn, had been endorsed by Bhutto. However, when it was learned during the meeting that the UK-French resolution had been dropped it was agreed that we would stay loose in New York and be prepared to support a simple ceasefire resolution, assuming it also had Pakistani support.

Reply to Mrs. Gandhi: State was asked to prepare a reply to Mrs. Gandhiʼs December 15 letter2 to the President, setting forth our case strongly and explicitly.

[Page 843]

Contingency Papers: The following five papers3 were requested for next Monday:

1.
U.S. policy regarding humanitarian assistance for South Asia.
2.
U.S. policy regarding economic assistance for South Asia. (In this connection, Maury Williams was asked on an urgent basis to do a paper on economic assistance for Pakistan.)
3.
U.S. policy toward the Bangla Desh regime—assuming that we would not be prepared promptly to recognize Bangla Desh.
4.
Arrangements for restoring the territorial status quo in the West, including the Kashmir region, as of December 3.
5.
U.S. military supply policy for South Asia.

  1. Source: National Archives, RG 59, NEA Files: Lot 73 D 69, Memoranda to the Secretary, Nov–Dec 1971. Secret; Exdis. Drafted by Van Hollen. No other record of this meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group has been found.↩
  2. See Document 314.↩
  3. Following the WSAG meeting on December 16 Kissinger sent a memorandum to the Departments of State and Defense, JCS, CIA, and AID in which he assigned responsibility for the preparation of the papers listed as follows: the first 2 papers were assigned to State and AID jointly, papers 3 and 4 were assigned to State, and the final paper was assigned to State and Defense jointly. (National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, NSC Institutional Files (H-Files), Box H–083, WSAG Meeting, 12/16/71)↩