THE landmark talks hosted last week by Pakistan between Iran and the US came at the head of a meandering colonial trail straddling two World Wars, game-changing assassinations, and countless coups, coupled with botched military campaigns to occupy foreign lands.
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Rudyard Kipling, and Lawrence of Arabia, in that order, plied Britain’s colonial time zones over a varied geographical stretch. But all three were on the same page with a singular mission of plunder, occasionally masked as Christian piety. At present, that fabled embrace of conquest is being reinstalled by Donald Trump and his followers. Elphinstone was the governor of Bombay when he expressed support for the Roman imperial mantra of divide et impera. Divide and rule would be the countermeasure to thwart future close calls revealed in the astounding Hindu-Muslim unity that underpinned the great Indian revolt of 1857.
Kipling, on his part, advanced a commitment to civilise “the half devil, half child” native of faraway lands. His poem romancing this Western mission was, in fact, a direct appeal to US president William McKinley against his dithering on the question of absorbing the Philippines into the US.
When The White Man’s Burden was first published in a New York magazine in early 1899, it appeared with the subtitle The United States and the Philippine Islands. It became Kipling’s clarion call to action for the US to take control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. He instructed Americans to “send forth the best ye breed” to undertake the task. Kipling was, in essence, telling the Americans: ‘This is what we do in places like India, and now you must do the same.’
Dividing was not a strategy used by Col T.E. Lawrence. His imperial task was to loosen Ottoman hold over Arab territories east of Suez. Uniting the frequently quarrelling Bedouin tribes became Lawrence’s misleading endeavour of faux sovereignty and freedom. After his spectacular success against the Turks, which inspired David Lean’s magnum opus, even if it did not fetch Peter O’Toole a deserved Academy Award, it was left to France and Britain to divide the spoils.
Officially called the Asia Minor Agreement, their pact was named after its chief negotiators — Britain’s Mark Sykes and French François Georges-Picot. The plan posited that the Triple Entente, involving Britain, France, and Russia, would defeat the Ottoman Empire during the war. The agreement carved up Ottoman Arab territories into zones of future control. France was awarded control over coastal Syria, Lebanon, Cilicia, and the Mosul region, which was later amended. Britain was awarded control over Palestine, Transjordan (Jordan), Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the strategic ports of Haifa and Acre.
At present, that fabled embrace of conquest is being reinstalled by Donald Trump and his followers.
The colonial scheme included Russia, which was to receive Istanbul and the Turkish straits, though this never materialised due to the Russian Revolution. In fact, the agreement’s publication by the Bolsheviks in late 1917 caused a major scandal. It directly contradicted wartime promises of Arab self-determination made by Lawrence to Sharif Hussein of Makkah, leading to an acute sense of Western betrayal in the region. The discovery of oil by the mid-20th century, much of it in the Persian Gulf, imperiously described by Lord Curzon as “a British lake”, added perfidious coups, assassinations and brutal wars to the colonial mix.
Three of these assassinations continue to cast a shadow on the ongoing turbulence in the region, set off with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran in June last year. The first game-changing assassination was of Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal in 1975 by his nephew who in turn was beheaded by the new incumbent, King Khalid. The Arab oil embargo against the West’s support for Israel in the 1973 war was Faisal’s brainchild. The story of Western control over Arab oil resources didn’t begin with the murder, nor did it end there. Faisal’s departure cleared the way, however, for a stronger Western hold on the Gulf’s oil resources until the Iranian revolution shattered the reverie.
The second important assassination shadowing the US-Israel war on Iran was that of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad killed him at a military parade in Cairo over Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which many saw as a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle.
A distinction must be made here between the EIJ and the Muslim Brotherhood, which criticised Sadat but disowned support for his murder. The Brotherhood is anti-monarchical, a quest the pan-Arab Sunni group shares with predominantly Shia Iran. The Brotherhood also supports militant Palestinian groups like Hamas, another reason why Saudi Arabia bankrolls the military regime that toppled Muslim Brotherhood’s popularly elected president Mohamed Morsi.
Riyadh continues to underwrite Gen Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s major expenses. It’s interesting that Turkiye, though it supports the Brotherhood, for its own strategic needs has developed close relations with Riyadh. Pakistan’s security pact with Saudi Arabia last year further cemented their ties as de facto allies.
A third assassination in the Middle East spawned the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu as a Palestine-hating prime minister of Israel. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a fanatical Jewish opponent of the Oslo Accords was cheered by right-wing parties, including Netanyahu’s backers.
Let’s complicate the story further. Who all did we see in the room where Pakistan hosted the potentially pivotal meeting last week?
Egypt and Turkiye together with Pakistan prepared the grounds. All three have close links with Riyadh. All of them are close to the US and all of them have evinced a deep interest in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Two of them have flourishing defence ties with Russia.
And none of them spoke up for India when it launched Operation Sindoor against Pakistan in May last year. Or when Pakistan responded with its own Bunyanum Marsoos. All in the room except the US were either members of BRICS or aspiring to become one. It seemed even odder that this year’s BRICS president was nowhere to be seen.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2026
