On the evening of February 24, 2022, I was due to teach an internal medicine session to a group of junior colleagues, among them a young physician from Ukraine.
She could not speak through her tears, and could not attend. Russian tanks had crossed her country's border hours earlier. I remember the silence on that call more clearly than almost anything said in it.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, I woke early and watched, in something close to real time, young people being dragged away from a music festival in southern Israel, and the destruction, within hours, of the Israeli villages bordering Gaza. Within perhaps half a day, hundreds were dead.
In the months since October 7, 2023, I have watched, night after night, as Gaza was reduced to rubble, hospitals bombed to ashes, and aid workers killed while children ran toward soup kitchens holding out bent and broken utensils, while white-painted drones circled overhead and IDF mortars piercing the sky above the blue Mediterranean.
And this year, a third conflict opened before I had recovered from the second: Iran and the United States, missiles fired across the Gulf, Saudi Arabia itself struck by Iranian fire meant for someone else.
Three theatres. Three of the most technologically advanced militaries in human history, deploying precision munitions, autonomous drones, and missile-defense systems worth billions of dollars.
And the result, in every case, is not zero. It is sub-zero.
More dead than before the shooting started. No peace concluded. No side visibly deterred.
Gaza in ruins. Ukraine still waiting for an end no one can date. The Gulf still bracing for the war's next act.
I have carried this fear since I was young enough to watch the towers fall in New York in 2001 -- nearly live, on the BBC, in the hospital corridor where I was on duty.
A nurse burst through the door, breathless, calling out my name twice -- “Rajani! Rajani!” -- as though the news itself could not wait for a full sentence. Some planes, she said, had struck the roof of a tower in New York.
Even Swedish radio, usually so measured, could not yet decipher what was happening, and for a long moment neither could we, standing together in that corridor, disbelieving.
And the tragic aftermath of nearly two decades of war that followed -- in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan -- still haunts a generation of women denied their schooling, wrapped head to foot in black, in Kabul and elsewhere, in what was once a more modern country.
Weeks, months later, came a similar news alert: Netanyahu had ordered civilians in southern Lebanon to flee before a bombing spree. That same evening, sharing this over dinner with a friend, I found myself asking aloud what would happen if Putin attacked Sweden and told us to flee.
Flee where? For one unsettling moment, I did not want to know whether I was Lebanese, or Swedish, or a Bengali. I was simply a disposable object, waiting to be thrown into the trash of human folly.
And where does the Iran-US war fit into this -- a war still ongoing, its fragile ceasefires broken. I think here of a friend's son, married to an Iranian physician. On at least two occasions, she has flown to Sweden from elsewhere in the EU -- and each time, within days, as though summoned by some cruel and uncanny clock, a new round of bombing has broken out between the US and Iran.
I have joked with her, half-seriously by now: Whenever you are in Sweden, the US bombs Iran. But behind the joke sits something that is not funny at all -- her parents, still in Tehran, waiting out each night not knowing whether the next siren is the one that finally reaches them. Safe, so far. Only so far.
High technology has changed how efficiently human beings can kill one another. It has not changed why we do it, and it has not once, in any of these three wars, produced the thing weapons are supposedly for: Peace.
A new alliance, and an old fear
On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement in the city for which it is named -- a pact declaring that an armed attack on any one signatory will be treated as an attack on all three.
Commentators have already nicknamed it a “Sunni NATO,” though it has none of NATO's command structure, and its own foreign ministers insist it targets no one.
It was born, transparently, from the last 18 months: Saudi Arabia absorbing Iranian missile fire, Gulf states losing confidence that Washington will backstop their security in real time.
What concerns me is not the pact itself -- sovereign nations may organize their own defense as they judge wisest.
What concerns me is what comes next. Bangladeshi officials have confirmed that Saudi Arabia has invited Dhaka to consider joining. A junior foreign minister has called the idea something Bangladesh “views positively.” Nothing is decided. But the invitation is real, and so is the danger it opens.
Bangladesh has no quarrel with Iran. It has no stake in the Gulf. But under a mutual-defense clause, an attack on any member becomes everyone's war -- and Bangladesh's two nearest neighbours are nuclear-armed and have fought each other four times since 1947. The Radcliffe Line still runs raw through this region's memory.
Let me say plainly what I am not saying, because in this country, a byline is often read before an argument is. My surname will be filed by some readers, reflexively, as Hindu, and from there as pro-Indian -- a conflation as old and as unjust as the Radcliffe Line itself.
I write none of this out of sympathy for India over Pakistan, or Pakistan over India. I do not want Bangladesh dragged into a war against India, and I do not want it dragged into a war against Iran on Saudi Arabia's behalf, for exactly the same reason: I am against every war, everywhere, without exception, and I do not believe any Bangladeshi, of any faith, gains anything from a grave.
I say this as someone whose mother still lives in Dhaka, and who has, by his own choice, become something other than only Bangladeshi. Sweden is my home now.
I have watched Gaza's children, Tehran's children, and Ukraine's children -- and a Ukrainian doctor unable to speak through her tears -- with the same grief, because I claim no side except the side of those who did not choose any of it.
If Bangladesh is pulled into a war between India and Pakistan or over a Gulf dispute it never chose, the only outcome will be death -- Bangladeshi death, achieving nothing for Bangladesh.
The other casualties
There is a class of victims in these wars that rarely makes the front page, and I have not been able to stop thinking about them.
When the fighting between Iran and the United States widened into the Gulf this year, I watched footage of a drone strike setting fire to fuel tanks near Dubai International Airport -- an airport I have passed through so many times on my way to Dhaka or elsewhere that I could not, at first, quite believe what I was seeing.
What frightened me most, though, was not the airport. It was the millions of people from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India who live and work across the Gulf states -- the drivers, nurses, construction workers, and domestic staff whose labour keeps those economies running, and whose remittances keep millions of families afloat back home.
Human rights organizations have already confirmed that Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Nepali workers were killed in strikes on Gulf cities during this war -- a driver, a security guard, a water-tanker operator, ordinary people who chose this war no more than the residents of Gaza or Kharkiv did. In fact, two Bangladeshis were killed in the recent attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on October 10.
Had the fighting widened rather than paused, the danger to those workers would not have been only physical. It would also have been the danger of unemployment overnight -- a war turning millions of already vulnerable labourers into returnees with no income and no plan, in economies that cannot easily absorb them.
That fear sat in me with exactly the same weight as watching Gaza's children run toward a soup kitchen. A migrant worker killed in Dubai and a starving child in Gaza are not different categories of grief. They are the same failure, wearing different clothes.
A balance sheet that never balances
Even the world's richest and most powerful nation cannot make the arithmetic of modern weaponry work.
A single Patriot interceptor takes years to build. The United States, still the strongest military and economic power on Earth, is nonetheless carrying a national debt now near forty trillion dollars, growing by billions of dollars every single day.
If a country of that wealth and scale cannot spend its way to peace through weapons, what should a country like Bangladesh conclude?
And this is not a hypothetical question for Bangladesh. Dhaka has recently advanced a deal to buy up to two dozen Chinese J-10CE fighter jets, at a cost reported near $2bn -- one of the largest defense procurements in the country's history.
Reasonable people can debate whether Bangladesh needs to modernize its air force. Probably it does. But before any such sum is committed, its politicians owe the public more than a single moment's reflection. They owe it a dozen.
What could two billion dollars buy in hospitals, schools, flood defenses, for a country that still struggles to fund all three?
Every taka spent on a fighter jet is a taka that cannot feed a child, treat a patient, or build a seawall against the rising water that will, with rising certainty, arrive before any invading army does.
This is the part of the ledger the war planners never show. Every high-tech weapon is a bet that violence, or the credible threat of it, will purchase something -- territory, deterrence, security, victory.
Three live wars, watched in real time by the whole world, have now tested that bet at unprecedented scale and technological sophistication. In every case, the bet has lost. Not broken even. Lost. No child's death has ever repaired a balance sheet. No missile fired has ever paid down a debt.
What true strength looks like
I write none of this from resentment toward the United States. I say this as a physician whose own career would not exist in its present form without America -- its conferences, its training programs, its medical journals and universities, the sheer excellence of its scientific culture.
I admire it, unreservedly, and I want it strong. That is exactly why watching its finances stretched thin by war, and its own missile stockpiles too depleted to properly defend an ally, causes me grief rather than any satisfaction.
A country I admire should not have to choose between its own future and one more interceptor.
I once spent six months working in Riyadh, and I still remember flying in and out of that city, looking down at a skyline that had not existed within living memory, and wondering, honestly, how it had been built.
Decades earlier, as a PhD student, I had discussed something similar with younger Swedish colleagues -- what people then called the postwar Western miracle: How ruined economies had rebuilt themselves not through conquest but through trade, institutions, and the free movement of people, capital, and ideas.
What I saw from the air over Riyadh, and later over Doha and Dubai, struck me as a second version of the same miracle: Glass towers and universities and airports risen from the desert within two generations, built by planning and investment rather than war.
Whatever one thinks of how that wealth arrived, its existence is a genuine human achievement -- proof that peace, prosperity, human mobility, and the free flow of capital and information are what progress actually looks like, in the Gulf as much as in the West.
None of it was built by weapons. All of it is now, in different ways, being asked to live under weapons' shadow.
That is the deeper waste: Not merely the money spent on armaments, but the fact that it is being subtracted from precisely the kinds of projects -- scientific, medical, economic, civic -- that have actually made nations great.
As a physician, I cannot stop thinking of it in those terms: Every fighter jet and every interceptor is money that did not go toward cancer research, or the next Ebola outbreak, or the next pandemic we have not yet named.
We know, because we have watched it happen twice in this decade already, that we are not owed advance warning.
The one model that has worked
If there is a lesson buried in seventy years of failed deterrence, it is not military. It is political.
The only durable peace project of the modern era is the European Union -- a continent that fought itself to exhaustion twice in 30 years, and has not fought itself once since 1945.
As a result, a Dane can breakfast in Copenhagen, lunch in Vienna, and dine in Paris, crossing what used to be the most contested borders on Earth without a checkpoint in sight today.
No missile shield built that. Shared institutions did -- habits of coexistence, patiently assembled, chosen over and over rather than imposed once.
South Asia has never had its Schuman moment -- the 1950 declaration that first bound France’s and Germany’s coal and steel industries together and became the seed from which the European Union grew.
It should not need a war to go looking for one. But it could still choose, deliberately, to become the region that tried.
Rajani K Saha writes from Sweden and is a practising physician.