Foreign Policy In Focus

Since the global anti-polio campaign was launched in 1988, the number of polio cases has dropped by more than 99 percent. As of now, only Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan still suffer from the spread of polio. Supporters of the anti-polio campaign estimated that the elimination of polio would produce a net benefit of $40 billion -- $50 billion by 2035. However, the global anti-polio campaign has recently been complicated by the scandal that the CIA ran an operation to verify Osama bin Laden’s location by gathering DNA samples through a false-flag hepatitis B vaccination program. This incident also further complicates the already strained U.S.-Pakistan relationship after it was uncovered that a Washington nonprofit funnels money from Pakistan’s spy agency to lobby Congress on Kashmir.

Resistance to vaccination gained much momentum in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. In Nigeria and Pakistan, at least, Muslim clerics have taken on roles to spread rumors that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were part of a wider war on Islam. In 2003, religious leaders in Nigeria led the resistance to vaccination campaigns by spreading rumors that the shots were in fact sterilization drugs, part of a Western conspiracy to reduce African birthrates. In 2007, Taliban clerics in Pakistan also joined the anti-vaccination campaigns. Resistance also developed in extremely poor areas in Uttar Pradesh in India. It took a tremendous effort from the World Health Organization to reach out to religious authorities to dismiss these misconceptions.

And now these efforts are jeopardized by the CIA’s polio vaccine plot in Pakistan.

According to a Guardian report, the CIA worked with Shakil Afridi, a surgeon in Khyber Agency—a tribal agency that borders Afghanistan to the east—to lure families in for hepatitis B vaccinations. In addition to giving the shots, the medical team collected DNA from the blood of the patients. To make the vaccine drive seem less suspicious, Afridi even started in a poorer part of town before moving to Abbottabad.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaeda courier…to what turned out to be bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer.

The agency…wanted confirmation that bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country. DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

According to The Washington Post, American officials are defending this operation, not denying it. An unnamed senior U.S. official was quoted:

People need to put this into some perspective. The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else. If the United States hadn’t shown this kind of creativity, people would be scratching their heads asking why it hadn’t used all tools at its disposal to find bin Laden.

There have been mixed reactions to the CIA’s vaccine plot and Pakistan’s growing domestic resistance to polio vaccination that may prompt ripple effects in the Muslim world. Doctors Without Borders, for instance, condemned the “use of medical aid for military objectives.” As the organization’s president Unni Karunakara said on July 14, “Whether the story is true or not, the mere suggestion that the provision of medical care was carried out under false pretences damages public perception of the true purpose of medical action. With all populations in crisis, it is challenging enough for health agencies and humanitarian aid workers to gain access to, and the trust of, communities, especially populations already skeptical of the motives of any outside assistance.” He went on to criticize the CIA: “Deceptive use of medical care also endangers those who provide legitimate and essential health services. Furthermore, carrying out an act of no therapeutic or preventative benefit purely for military or intelligence purposes violates medical ethics, which require acting solely on the needs of patients and doing no harm.”

Walt Orenstein, polio director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is concerned that “if we fail, if we take the pressure off, we will see a major resurgence [in polio cases].”

The vaccine plot, despite the success of the bin Laden mission overall, may yield more losses than gains in the long run. Vaccination campaigns must reach virtually 100 percent of a population to prevent pockets of resistance from emerging. To achieve this, public trust is immensely important to make healthy people agree to preventative medicine treatment. What further complicates the matter is that Pakistan recently dissolved its Ministry of Health, leaving international health programs to negotiate directly with local leaders about disease prevention. The CIA injudiciously burned the bridges that took many years to build, and this time it may take a longer time to repair.

Shiran Shen, a senior honors political science student at Swarthmore College, works as a research intern at the Foreign Policy In Focus program.

With knowledge that elements of its army and ISI obviously provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden, Pakistan's Q ratings, already low, are tanking. They're about to bottom out, now thanks to this, courtesy of Andrew Bast at the Daily Beast-Newsweek (unclear where one ends and the other begins):

According to new commercial-satellite imagery obtained exclusively by Newsweek, Pakistan is aggressively accelerating construction at the Khushab nuclear site, about 140 miles south of Islamabad. The images, analysts say, prove Pakistan will soon have a fourth operational reactor, greatly expanding plutonium production for its nuclear-weapons program. . . . Although the White House declined to comment, a senior U.S. congressional official who works on nuclear issues told Newsweek that intelligence estimates suggest Pakistan has already developed enough fissile material to produce more than 100 warheads and manufacture between eight and 20 weapons a year. "There's no question," the official says, "it's the fastest-growing program in the world."

Between harboring bin Laden, allegedly responsible for thousands of deaths (if he'd been captured and tried we might know for sure) and now this, Pakistan had better be careful. Otherwise that most racist of all libels -- "They value human life less than us" -- will stick.

A couple of nights ago I heard a TV commentator (can't recall who) note that al Qaeda officials often clashed with Osama bin Laden over tactics. Bin Laden remained in thrall to his dream of another attack on a grand scale against the United States like 9/11, which he professed to believe was required to convince the United States to leave the Middle East. Others in the organization, more active on a day-to-day basis in its logistics, advocated a more realistic approach, which entailed smaller attacks that were more manageable, as well as local. In fact, their conflict echoed a long-time division in Islamic extremists: whether to attack the "far" enemy, as they call the United States,  or the "near," as they refer to autocratic regimes under which they live.

In his May 7 column for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Bin Laden died in Sidi Bouzid before he died in Abbottabad, Doug Saunders, the chief of its European bureau, wrote:

It was never difficult to find fans of Osama bin Laden. You ran across them almost daily if you spent time in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf or Pakistan. . . . He was a rock star. . . . If you talk to the kids wearing him on their T-shirts, you find they admire him as an Arab who took on the United States, who ran his own show, and who wouldn't bow to anyone else's agenda. It’s the way many blacks admire Malcolm X, as an icon of self-sufficient resistance, without any interest in the Marxist-tinged racial separatism he sought. . . . But it's been almost impossible, in recent years, to find anyone who subscribes to his ascetic and medieval view of the role of religion in politics, who has any interest in installing his endlessly touted Islamic caliphate in their country. The ideas died long before the man.

"The demand for freedom and democracy in a national context has displaced the imaginary umma, the world community of Muslims, in its struggle with the West," [writes French scholar] Olivier Roy. . . . "Charismatic authoritarian personalities such as bin Laden no longer exert any fascination on an individualistic and rather pragmatic younger generation."

With his severity and grandiosity, bin Laden had outlived not only his tactical and strategic usefulness, but his philosophic as well, with his idle dreams of a global caliphate and shariah rule. Saunders again:

Osama bin Laden, in his efforts to fit the world into a single identity, was a man of a previous era.

If it's any consolation to his spirit, where 'ere it roams, he at least retains some symbolic value to Islamic extremists.

Osama bin Laden's demise raises many moral, legal, political, and historical questions. As I've edited and posted a steady stream of commentary about this post-9/11 milestone, one persistent editorial question has touched on all these issues.

Specifically, which verbs are appropriate for conveying what U.S. Special Forces did to carry out their mission after they burst into the al-Qaeda leader's Pakistani compound? Did they simply kill bin Laden? Murder him? Assassinate him? Execute him?

Most Americans consider Osama bin Laden a dangerous and evil man. With so many of us feeling that the world is better off without him, few are questioning the legality of the operation that ended his life. As a former New Yorker who lives in Arlington, VA, it's easy for me to relate. I was already at work in a downtown DC newsroom on September 11, 2001 when those planes flew into the twin towers and the Pentagon, and several years earlier my daily commute required me to change trains underneath the World Trade Center. I still wince whenever I glance at the Manhattan skyline. Yet, as an editor committed both to accuracy and to speaking truth to power, I need to probe this issue carefully.

One of the dictionary definitions of assassination is "to murder (a usually prominent person) by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons." The Saudi-born terrorist certainly was killed at home, and he was killed for reasons that could easily be described as "political." However, Merriam-Webster defines "murder" as "the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought." That's more problematic because it raises another question: did the U.S. government commit a crime by killing bin Laden?

To read the rest of the story, visit Other Words.

"In revenge for bin Laden's killing, as during his life, most of the victims of al Qaeda are Muslim," Tweeted Doug Saunders, the chief of the Toronto Globe and Mail's European bureau. He was promoting an Associated Press piece that appeared in the Globe and Mail by Riaz Khan, who reported

A pair of suicide bombers attacked recruits leaving a paramilitary training centre in Pakistan on Friday, killing 80 people in the first retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden by American commandos last week. . . . The bombers blew themselves up at the main gate of the facility for the Frontier Constabulary . . . close to the Afghan border.

A Pakistani Taliban spokesman told the AP: "We have done this to avenge the Abbottabad incident."

On May 10 the AP reported:

In a statement posted on the Internet, al-Qaeda's official online media organization, al-Fajr, says the American people "will pay the price" for the May 2 raid that killed bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan.

Yeah, that Constabulary attack really hit America where it hurts, didn't it?