A free Tibet

What if the west committed to ensuring Tibet maintained its independence by deploying troops to protect them? Would the scale of the have been escalated? Could they move fast enough to protect it? How would have effected the rest of the cold war?
 

trurle

Banned
Possible to keep Tibet independent from China, but Western support benefifits are likely not worth the efforts. The Tibet was an economical and political backwater in all 20th century. The positions of the USSR and China would be slightly weakened though.
 
CIA's Secret War In Tibet

Some interesting history there.

Spring of 1961 brought the Americans a new president and an apparent change of heart. John F. Kennedy’s administration, at least initially, continued to support Tibetan resistance. The CIA dropped more arms and a seven-man team to the camps in Nepal. It turned out to be one of the most auspicious decisions in CIA history. The Mustang guerrillas proceeded to make a series of smashing raids along the nearby Sinkiang-Tibet Highway running through southwestern Tibet toward Lhasa. Eventually, the Chinese gave up completely on using that important route and built another road farther from the Mustang border.

The real reward for the CIA, however, was an intelligence coup that occurred when 40 Tibetan horsemen overran a small Chinese convoy in what came to be called the ‘blue satchel raid.’ A veteran of the raid named Acho described what transpired: ‘The driver was shot in the eye, his brains splattered behind him and the truck came to a stop. The engine was still running. Then all of us fired at it. There was one woman, a very high-ranking officer, with a blue sack full of documents.’ When the CIA men in Washington opened it, they were stunned. The bloodstained, bullet-riddled cache of 1,500 documents contained the first hard evidence of the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, famine, and discontent within the PLA. John Kenneth Knaus said: ‘The Tibetan Document Raid was one of the greatest intelligence hauls in the history of the agency….So that was of great help as far as getting or maintaining support for these kinds of operations was concerned.’ There were at least three important courier satchels captured, which provided insight into policy decisions, order-of-battle information, and proposals being made by China to India. The Tibetans were happy to know that the Americans were so pleased with the blue satchel’s contents, although Acho, in a 2001 interview said, ‘We still don’t know what was in that bag.’

Judging by the comments of Galbraith and others, the US probably wouldn't have wanted to commit itself much more to the cause of the Tibetan people(as per trurle's comment).
 
Top