IN 2006, retired United States Army officer Ralph Peter wrote an article ‘Blood borders’ published in the Armed Forces Journal, asserting that the borders drawn after World War I were arbitrary and distorted. He particularly referred to Iraq, Syria, Turkiye and Iran. The world has seen his prediction about division of Iraq on sectarian lines coming true. In fact, oil reserves defined the new landscape of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The next in line may well be Iran and, finally, Pakistan.

Nato forces landed in Afghanistan for two purposes; one, for the oil and gas reserves around the Caspian Sea, which the US would like to deny to Russia and China; and, two, to destabilise Pakistan and weaken it on behalf of Israel, which actually controls the US foreign policy. That the Israel lobby in the US works in the interest of the Jewish state is a secret to no one anymore.

India would also like Pakistan to be weakened. India’s participation in a close covert alliance with Israel would be just an added bonus.

It is Israel’s long-standing desire and aim to destabilise any Muslim country that poses a threat to its dominance in the region. So, it was Israel’s desire to weaken Pakistan to the point that it ceases to operate militarily. With this objective in mind, the Israelis have been training teams in places like Badakhshan, and sending them into Pakistan’s border areas. As a result, we witnessed the tragic Army Public School (APS) massacre in Peshawar, and repeated carnage in Swat and Waziristan.

Keeping in mind the aforementioned assertions, one can very well identify ‘glaring similarities’ in the Nato (read, US) bombings in Afghanistan and Israel’s rather callous and brutal killing of innocent children and women in Gaza. In both cases, the US and Israel are massacring indiscriminately.

The US, too, drops bombs on school playgrounds, and on weddings, only to later callously describe it nothing else but ‘collateral damage’.

It is certainly not wild thinking if one concludes that Israel is carrying out the ‘reshaping’ of the Middle East in total sync with the US, as was outlined by the said article back in 2006.

The Israeli prime minister is on record having said in his speeches before Israeli media that the ‘world is going to see a new map of the Middle East after total annihilation of Hamas’. Today, what we see unfolding in Gaza is just what Israel has been planning for the last so many years. We need to wake up.

Abid Mahmud Ansari
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, January 21st, 2024