At the New York Times, Declan Walsh and Donald G. McNeil write about Islamist extremists targeting Pakistani women who work for the UN administering polio vaccines.
After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday. … Militant commanders have been criticizing polio vaccination campaigns … since 2007 when Maulvi Fazlullah, a radical preacher on a white horse. … claimed that polio vaccines were part of a plot to sterilize Muslim children, but in recent years Taliban commanders in the militant hub of North Waziristan have come up with a more political complaint: they say that immunization can resume only when American drones stop killing their comrades.
Compounding matters
Suspicion of vaccination has also intensified since the C.I.A. used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to run a hepatitis B vaccination scheme in order to spy on Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad in 2011.
In fact
Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who analyzes local support for vaccines in different countries, believes the C.I.A.’s use of Dr. Afridi has hurt the polio drive more than the Pakistan government or the eradication campaign itself will admit.
As with Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old education activist that members of the Taliban shot in the head and neck, they’re demonstrating that “they consider women to be legitimate targets.” On a side note, this amounts to a declaration that, in fact, the Taliban are less concerned with theological credibility — 50 Islamic clerics subsequently issued a fatwa against the attackers — than in enforcing their whims.
Another victim of Pakistans’ use of Dr. Afridi is the doctor himself. Matthieu Akins reports at GQ. Pakistan’s ISI, its main intelligence agency
… arrested him as he was driving home in Peshawar on May 23, and as they say in Pakistan, “he was disappeared.” Afridi was taken to a secret prison, leaving unanswered the question of what exactly happened that day in Abbottabad.
The $25,000,000 reward for bin Laden was left unclaimed.