The New Year broke to murder once again in Pakistan, where more teachers and heath workers were murdered yesterday for the capital crimes of educating girls and immunising children against fatal diseases. As someone who has been immunising children for more than thirty years, the latter outrage shocks me all the more deeply. A lot of what I do in general practice could be seen as pandering to an over-privileged, neurotic middle class, but looking back over my career, I am convinced that preventing serious and fatal disease by immunisation is undoubtedly the most valuable thing I have offered to the community.
On the face of it there is no possible justification for these disgraceful crimes against humanity, but we need to remember something: during the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the CIA infiltrated local health workers and intimidated them into obtaining DNA specimens of their child patients so that the Americans could work out if they were the offspring of OBL I am not saying this appalling act of subverting a legitimate aid effort justified the response of the Taliban, but at the very least I shouldn't think it helped much. You can certainly understand how the Taliban would view any kind of medical aid programme with the deepest suspicion.
Foreign aid workers always work under the severest difficulties from every side, and the interference from a foreign intelligence service has now rendered any aid effort in central Asia virtually unworkable. You reap what you sew...
The Taliban in central Asia, and Al Shabbab in sub-Saharan Africa believe that everything the West offers is tainted and should be de-constructed immediately. Again, it's easy to sit on our comfortable sofas and say "How terrible!" when this sort of thing happens, but remember: things are rarely as simple as they appear.
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