People disagree about how many people died. According to the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center, it could have been as few as 500,000 or as many as 3 million. This was during the Cold War, so different groups said more or fewer people died depending on what their own political ideas and goals were. The Soviets said it was 3 million. The United States CIA said it was 200,000. Pakistan was an ally of the United States at the time, and the West Pakistani soldiers used weapons that the United States had given them. India and Bangladesh also say that nearly 3 million were killed.