318. Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (Sisco) to Secretary of State Rogers 1
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.
- 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.↩
- See Document 314.↩
- 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)↩