Maybe it is too easy, but The Taliban show once again their pit-worthiness.
These f—ed up excuses for human beings decided that trying to wipe the scourge of polio off the map once and for all is just not something they can stand.
Yup. They want to stop vaccination programs because those NGOs must be spying on them!?!?! :smack: Assholes!
If only there was a way to only infect the morons responsible for these killings. I’d say give them polio and let them see what it is all about.
I work in public health, and we were expecting this as soon as the details of the Bin Laden raid were known. Vaccination programs, especially when the disease is very rare like polio, require a lot of public trust in the field workers. Engaging the workers in a CIA mission destroyed that trust. Even if the program continued, we expected the vaccination rate to fall due to refusals. Whether the CIA knew they were jeopardizing public health is up for debate, but they had to have known that they were risking the lives of those field workers.
This loss of trust will extend to other public health operations as well. It’s an obstacle we really couldn’t afford and we will be working to overcome it for decades.
Eh I cannot get angry at the Taliban. A dog barks at you because he is a dog, the Taliban do such things because the are the Taliban. What I will pit is the provincial and city authorities who let such teams into towns with overwhelming majoities of Afghan, Arab and C Asian without even the smallest security detail.
Come on. The blame falls squarely on the people who spread misinformation about the polio vaccine (that it is a secret plot to sterilise muslims), and the killers of people who attempt vaccination. The conspiracy theory about polio has been particularly insidious and existed long before the CIA used Shakil Afridi to find Bin Laden. It was the only reason why polio was interrupted in India last year, instead of years ago. Most of India has been polio free for years. The only holdouts? Two muslim majority areas in two states where muslim families refused to allow vaccination. All the Shakil Afridi case did is provide fodder for lunatics, but lunatics will manufacture fodder if you don’t give them any.
No pitting of the authorities that bred these dogs to turn loose at India?
Over here Muslim insurgents in the South have recently taken upon themselves to murder school teachers.
Heavens forbid kids may get an education, before you know it they may start thinking for themselves.
What do you expect from an organization that tries to kill a 14 year old girl for her views on women and education? It’s a mighty strange god they worship.
I tend to agree that blame lies with the fucked-up fuckers who killed the health workers, but one must consider the wisdom of using a health service as a front for CIA activity. There’s a reason you don’t do that sort of stuff as it delegitimizes the real thing. In this case, however, I think the Taliban have shown themselves to be able to make up any excuse for doing anything in the name of “fighting the infidels”.
At least our school shooters usually kill themselves, too.
[QUOTE=Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now]
It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
[/QUOTE]
Let’s not forge that the Taliban was the creation of our good friends, the Pakistanis. Ms Bhutto, in particular.
God, I can’t wait until we get the ever-loving fuck out of that place. I’m sure many Afghanis are wonderful people, but too many of them don’t want us there. Can’t really blame them, to a certain extent.
There are two massive problems with that. One is that India has just (idiotically, in my view) signed off on a more liberal visa regime with Pakistan, so there are going to be more people visiting from Pakistan. We’ve only just interrupted polio transmission last year (thanks fundie islam), and I really, really don’t want it to be imported again.
The second is that Afghanistan collapsed to a 15th century society in the and we let it. See where that got us?
Even if they did, it likely sprang from Pakistani experience in working with militants/terrorists, and was routed through them in any case. From an article Understanding militancy in Pakistan by Shapiro and Fair.
Pakistan can also take the credit for the creation of the likes of Lashkar-e-toiba apart from the Taliban. The only Islamic Nuclear Power, the savior of Muslims around the world, Dil Dil Pakistan Jive Jive Pakistan…
