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Cold War in the High Himalayas: The USA, China and South Asia in the 1950s . By S. Mahmud Ali New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xl, 286 pp. $59.95 (cloth).

This is a well-written study of the Cold War as played out across the high Himalayan plateau between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. The author, a retired Bangladeshi officer and Ph.D. of War Studies from Kings College, London, draws heavily upon American documents and, where possible, on British, Pakistani, and Indian sources. He focuses on the period from the early 1950s to the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and its aftermath. He provides his readers with a coherent and provocative account of the complex interconnections among and between the external and regional states, with particular attention to the Indian and American attempts to impede Chinese efforts to control Tibet. A convenient chronology, a detailed Dramatis Personae, an epilogue of developments following the 1962 SinoIndian war, and texts of relevant international agreements help us find our way through an historically complicated but lucidly written account. To provide the necessary specifics for understanding the effects on the region of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the volume focuses in detail on three "subplots." First, concerning India's looming problem of coping with the rise of China, the author assembles the most detailed account this reviewer has seen of clandestine cooperation between Indian and American intelligence services in supporting Tibetan resistance. While the detail in the less documented parts of the account suggests he may have been privy to some of the operations, this reviewer concludes that on certain specific points tenuous inference carried the author beyond firm knowledge. He sketches with understanding the numerous dilemmas facing Nehru, as he sought to set limits to Chinese ambitions from a position of relative weakness. Ali respects the pragmatism of Nehru's apparently contradictory dual policy of talking nonalignment and publicly committing China to the principles of Pancha Sila and the Spirit of Bandung while clandestinely supporting, with the help of the CIA, the already existing resistance in Tibet. Yet to characterize the resulting relations between the two states as an "Indo-American military alliance," as he does in a number of places, severely misrepresents the reality of their difficult relations during these decades. Second, on better-known terrain, he shows how American and British worries about a hypothetical Soviet thrust toward the oil fields led them to involve an eager Pakistan in a defense alliance. By thus strengthening Pakistan's capability, supposedly on behalf of policy toward the Gulf, Washington and London intensified Nehru's