Troika on rampage

Sikander Shaheen | US covert organisation Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) notorious reputation to eliminate its ‘enemies’ is known well to the world and its intensive efforts, which have been underway since long, to form a vicious alliance with Israel and India have finally begun to show.

For the last couple of years, the United States has been immensely pressurising Iran to curtail its nuclear programme. However, after Iran has refused to succumb to Western pressures regarding UN-brokered deal about uranium enrichment and has placed certain conditions on nuclear fuel swamp, US and its Western allies are desperate to tighten the noose around the country. A prosperous nuclear Iran is seen as a major threat to US and Israel. To curtail this threat, both the countries have intensified ties with India and are using Afghanistan as an outfit to ‘tame’ Pakistan, Iran and China as well. To mention the most, Iran has lately confronted assassinations and abductions of its nuclear scientists.

After the assassination of prominent Iranian nuclear scientist Dr Massoud Ali-Mohammadi on January 12 last in a motorbike explosion in Tehran, the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament Ali Larijani categorically accused Israel and CIA of the heinous killing. “We had received clear information a few days before the assassination that the intelligence service of the Zionist regime, with the cooperation of the CIA, were seeking to carry out a terrorist act in Tehran,” Larijani had told a news agency, a day after the killing took place.

Another nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri at Malek Ashtar University in Tehran was abducted while he was on his way to Saudi Arabia for pilgrimage in June 2009. Iran had accused US of involvement in the abduction.

Back in 2007, Times Online reported that Ardeshire Hassanpour, a nuclear physicist, had been assassinated by Mossad, the notorious Israeli intelligence agency.

Hassanpour reportedly worked at a plant in Isfahan that produced and processed Uranium Hexafluoride gas required for enrichment of uranium in another Iranian plant. Rheva Bhalla of Stratfor, the US intelligence company, claimed then that Hassanpour had been targeted by Mossad and that there was “very strong intelligence” to suggest that he had been assassinated by the Israelis, who have repeatedly threatened to refrain Iran from acquiring the nuclear bomb.

Apart from that, as reported by US Homeland Security Newswire and local Indian media, Israel and India, in December last year, had a series of meetings of joint defence working group focussing counterterrorism and intelligence sharing, delivery of weapons and enhancement of cooperation in research and development. Chinese news agency Xinhuanet’s report quoted a defence official privy to the meeting as saying that the main focus of the talks was on enhancing the counterterrorism cooperation based on intelligence sharing in the wake of Mumbai terror attacks.

More importantly, this meeting followed a low-profile visit of Israeli Chief of Defence Staff, Lt Gen Gabi Ashkenazi to India earlier in the same month, during which he had met the top brass of the Indian armed forces. According to the news service, these developments can be evaluated in the pretext of reports that India has bought military hardware and software from Israel worth $8bn since 1999, making India the biggest buyer of Israeli arms across the globe.

Given that the US barely sees any signs of success in its so-called war on terror in Afghanistan, US and Israel are encouraging Indian military and economic presence in Afghanistan to serve the purpose. While Pakistan is asked to ‘do more’ the US and India, with the help of pro-American Afghan government, are all set to engage ‘likeminded’ and moderate Taliban into talks, to use them for destabilising Pakistan and Iran.

Under the scenario, the situation deems fit into what is described by some analysts as FINISH plan, abbreviated from “financial ruin, infrastructure destruction, nuclear scientists elimination, Indian hegemony, seizing of physical nuclear weapons and harassing Pakistan’s leadership and its public.”