Terrorism, like smoking, is injurious to health. Not just to the one who indulges in it, but to the people at large. Pakistan and Afghanistan are learning this now.
Both had bred more badmashes than their factories could make Kalashnikovs, and both are now facing a scourge that the rest of the world has got rid of—the scourge of polio. All the 64 cases reported this year are from the two countries—41 from Pakistan and 23 from Afghanistan. The numbers may look small, but scary considering there are thousands of unvaccinated kids in their neighbourhood. Both have one man to blame: that evil genius Osama bin Laden, whom they hosted—Afghanistan before 9/11, and Pakistan after 9/11. He wasn’t into germ warfare, was he? Tauba, tauba! That’s one sin that the ‘virtuous’ western world hasn’t been able to damn him with. The link lies elsewhere.
Ever since Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin invented two vaccines to stop the spread of polio virus, governments across the world had been administering either of them to kids. India launched a pulse polio drive in the 1990s and the land was declared polio-free by 2012. No different has been the story in most countries.
Imaging: Deni Lal
Not in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Vast tracts of both were then ruled by gun-toting guys who allowed neither the writ of the state nor the vans carrying polio vaccines to run. Yet Pakistan, ruled by better-schooled leaders and generals than the Taliban of Afghanistan, did seek to vaccinate its babies, at times daring terrorists guns’ and mullahs’ writs. Thus the country had partly successful vaccination drives across the lawless northwest.
Then came bin Laden in the winter of 2001-02 or later, fleeing the angry Americans who were seeking revenge for his plane-bombing of their trade towers. Their bombs flattened most of the Tora Bora mountain caves where he and his men had sought to hide, but the guy crawled his way into Pakistan where the generals housed him in a secret villa near their academy in Abbottabad.
The guy lived there a retired life with wives, kids, grandkids, servants and video games, but no internet, cellphone or any wireless device—in effect never being in the sun or going on the air, either of which would have given him away. The blighter would have died of lack of vitamin D, had not Barack Obama found him out and got him shot.
How did Obama find him there? Therein lies the vaccine link. Obama’s spies, not trusting the generals in khakhi, disguised themselves as NGOs, and hired a local doc to fake a door-to-door vaccine drive in and around Abbottabad. The guy collected DNA samples from all the homes there; the CIA found one of them matching with the samples they had of the bin Laden clan, and zeroed in on the villa. The rest is history—hush-hush and bang-bang.
A thrilling spy story, but one with a tragic fallout! Once it came out that a vaccinator had spied for the big bad Americans, vaccinators came to be viewed as satan’s agents and were stoned away from the mountain villages. Shehbaz Sharif’s mandarins—well-meaning guys—are sending vans with vials of vaccines, but most are barred into villages. Early December they launched a house-to-house drive to inoculate about 44 million kids, but it hit a stonewall after militants in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa shot dead a vaccinator and his two police guards.
The government is seeking the help of radical leaders in the province to talk sense to the guys with the Kalashnikovs. A few are said to have obliged—no house visits, they say, but kids could be brought to mosques, where they could be given the drops. God bless!
prasannan@theweek.in