Polio Eradication Program Suspended In Pakistan After Aid Workers Shot 223
Hugh Pickens writes "Jamal Khan reports that the United Nations has suspended its polio vaccination drive in Pakistan after eight people involved in the effort were shot dead in the past few days. The killings dealt a grave blow to the drive to bring an end to the scourge of polio in Pakistan, one of only three countries where the crippling disease still survives. Militants accuse health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and claim the vaccine makes children sterile. Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in the country. Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake polio vaccination program to help the CIA track down and kill Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest. The Pakistani government has condemned the attacks against aid workers, saying they deprive Pakistan's most vulnerable populations — specifically children — of basic life-saving health interventions. A total of 56 polio cases have been reported in Pakistan during 2012, down from 190 the previous year, according to the U.N. Most of the new cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. Clerics and tribal elders were recruited to support polio vaccinations in an attempt to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers. 'This is undoubtedly a tragic setback,' says UNICEF spokeswoman Sarah Crowe, 'but the campaign to eradicate polio will and must continue.'"
Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like every backward region I've ever been too has been awash in conspiracy theories, urban legends, and superstitious horseshit. Worked down in South America, where every illiterate countryside hick seems to think Americans are trying to steal their organs (resulting in shit like this [nwsource.com]). Worked in India, where half the hicks think that clean water is just a ruse to poison them. Even worked in a ghetto, where the rumor was that whitey was putting chemicals in menthol cigarettes to make black men sterile.
So it doesn't surprise me that backwater Pakistanis believe that Christians are out to give their kids drugs to make them hate Mohammad (or whatever other crazy crap runs through those heads), disguised as these things called "vaccines." Combine that with a CIA sleight-of-hand and a Taliban which is happy to use any excuse to show it's still relevant, and you get a lot of kids who are now going to die from a disease the rest of the world eradicated long ago.
Fuck, just look at this idiot [salon.com] as the perfect example of what happens when you mix base stupidity with just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
It's all well and good until said hillbillies start killing people or getting them killed.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:4, Insightful)
Your sentiment is not lost on me, but that is why we must remember we cannot force our ways or our means of producing a safe and poductive society on others. This is a bit of case for the prime directive.
There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
Thats not to say we shouldnt freely provide information, or allow people to ask us for help, that contradicts there beliefs, but we should be careful how we do it.
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In almost all cases national governments are in favor of these programs. What Pakistan should be doing is giving the workers armed escorts.
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What Pakistan should be doing is giving the workers armed escorts.
That would be like sending in the army to end racism in the south so that you can hand out bottled water.
The civilized areas of pakistan don't particularly need the UN to go in an help people, they have hospitals and roads and all that stuff already. Yes, there are poor people who need help being vaccinated, but they in karachi for example this a detail management problem, and they in a broad sense need money.
In the tribal areas the pakistani central government is not welcome. At all. They've been basica
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be like sending in the army to end racism in the south so that you can hand out bottled water.
Well, sometimes you do need to send in the 101 Airborne.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine#Armed_escort [wikipedia.org]
Not saying that this is the case here – but it’s not something you want to dismiss outright.
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I actually made comparison for that reason specifically.
Is it worth starting a war over, or can you get what you want some other way? If the south had revolted against the army being used as an escort it would have been a big fight. The tribal areas in pakistan *are* fighting a war with the government already, this would just make it worse.
As I say, it will have to come to it eventually when the central government in pakistan wants control over their whole country (just like the US civil war!). Until th
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get the danger. Most children in the west aren't vaccinated against Polio (makes no sense here and there's a small risk involved to the child), in Africa very few children are vaccinated at all in large areas. I don't know about South America or China, but I doubt the situation is much better. If even one of those tribal children gets out* with the disease, it will kill thousands and maim tens of thousands of children, maybe hundreds of thousands. This has happened before, and it is an absolute certainty it can happen again. This is what happens to ~30% of infected children take a look [un.org].
Those are the stakes. To be extremely frank, I'm ambivalent on whether it would be moral to nuke this disease out of existence. Nuking this disease would easily help more people than it would hurt, even if it does hurt millions.
The conspiracy theories of these tribes, killing and sterilizing anyone perceived as different, are simply what they would do themselves if they could. They probably perceive doing that as part of their religion. They may even be right about that, I don't know. Fortunately those aid workers don't share their religion.
* very sorry to put it that way
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
The conspiracy theories of these tribes, killing and sterilizing anyone perceived as different, are simply what they would do themselves if they could.
The US performed covert military operations disguised as medical aid with the goal of assassinating people in Pakistan. It's not an irrational conspiracy theory, it's their daily life.
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Those are the stakes.
Indeed, and so perhaps we should go with what works, rather than charging in guns blazing. Clearly the UN did not bribe the right people, and clearly the US should avoid trying to use vaccinations as intelligence gathering tools.
I'm ambivalent on whether it would be moral to nuke this disease out of existence. Nuking this disease would easily help more people than it would hurt, even if it does hurt millions.
Considering there are 200 million people in pakistan, and they have nukes, and there are only a few thousand cases of polio a year... your solution seems... cowboyish.
Most children in the west aren't vaccinated against Polio
It's still part of routine vaccinations in the US, canada, china, japan etc. AFAIK. I know for sure you can't go t
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>That would be like sending in the army to end racism in the south so that you can hand out bottled water.
That's exactly what we did, so people could drink from the public drinking fountains (and also vote and go to college and such.) It worked.
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Well, the second time. The first time you fought a civil war over it, and then 100 years later *still* had to send in the army to get to the drinking fountains. So it didn't work very well.
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I never said helpless. I said not interested.
The chaos kills a lot of pakistani's, don't be under any illusion, they are in the midst of a war they don't really want to fight. And for the moment they're trying to not make it worse.
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I'd really like to know how you can make it worse than by letting psychotic religious fanatics take over large swaths of the country.
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Because they have always been there and in charge, and those swathes of the country are mostly worthless.
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Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
There have been cases in history where cultural lobotomy has been a good thing. So, 100k cases of polio win hands down.
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There have been cases in history where cultural lobotomy has been a good thing. So, 100k cases of polio win hands down.
The problem is that most "cultural lobotomies" have been performed by ethnic discrimination, terror, or simply mass killing.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that most "cultural lobotomies" have been performed by ethnic discrimination, terror, or simply mass killing.
Aye, that is a problem. I guess that it all boils down to the fact that until recently, for a very long period (approximately from the end of the Neolithic), there has been very little value put on a human life. And in many parts of the world, it still is.
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The problem is that most "cultural lobotomies" have been performed by ethnic discrimination, terror, or simply mass killing.
Aye, that is a problem. I guess that it all boils down to the fact that until recently, for a very long period (approximately from the end of the Neolithic), there has been very little value put on a human life. And in many parts of the world, it still is.
And, just as counterexample, some "cultural lobotomies" have been relatively bloodless [wikipedia.org]. Some of the changes were subtle, such as adopting a new alphabet so as to separate people from their history. Ninety years later, Turkey's doing better than most of its Islamist cousins. Was it ethical? Probably not, but it turned out better than most ideologically driven changes.
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Turkey's "cultural lobotomy" wasn't entirely bloodless was it?
Check your dates: the Armenian Genocide was conducted by the Ottoman government prior to their being overthrown and replaced by the Republic of Turkey that Ataturk morphed into a secular state. Now it did take a war with 200,000 deaths to create the Republic, and I'm sure that, not being a historian, there are some complications [wikipedia.org] I don't appreciate. But the secularization--the forced cultural shift that freed Turkish politics from the grip of religious posturing--seems to have been largely bloodless.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Funny)
Aw come on......have a heart.
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Aw come on......have a heart.
I bet that's exactly what the victims were telling to the priests even as they were lying on the altar.
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Aw come on......have a heart.
I bet that's exactly what the victims were telling to the priests even as they were lying on the altar.
And then they took the offer... literally!
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Informative)
Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
What good is cultural diversity if people are dying left and right and thus unable to enjoy or even preserve it because of ill-informed radicals?
100k cases of polio, definitely worse.
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Put another way, the longer we take to eradicate the disease, the greater the risk of the virus mutating into a form that the vaccine no longer protects against, at which point we're back to square one worldwide.
Worse, within a given region, eradication of polio has to be completed within a fairly short period of time, or you risk the vaccine form of the virus mutating and causing some immune-compromised people to actually get a form of polio from people who received the vaccine [pbs.org]. So stopping the immuniza
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
Even if one is happy to stand back and let the colorful natives be colorful(either because you'd rather not pick on their culture, or because it's just too much of a pain in the ass), the trouble in this case is that anywhere polio is allowed to remain endemic is a reservoir just waiting for a stroke of bad luck to make it back into the wider population.
Were the threat to local children some sort of non-contagious local superstition, we'd have the luxury of deciding whether or not to play cultural relativism. With polio, though, the question is whether we hunt it down wherever it hides, incidentally pissing off some locals and saving some babies, or whether we put up with the risk of having a serious outbreak at any time, almost anywhere...
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You must be joking. They're putting everyone at risk by not getting vaccinations. If we actually had a large outbreak of polio there would be a good chance for a dangerous mutation.
No, he is not joking. He is rationalizing (Score:3)
Rationalizing is a sad disease that affects those that have a tiny tiny tiny voice telling them things ain't right in the world but they don't want to do anything about it because it would involve effort and risks their cosy little lives.
It is seen as such stuff as people saying child labor ain't so bad because at least it means kids have an income, that slave labor conditions are better then having no job etc etc. And that horrible nasty practices should be preserved because else you are not respecting pe
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. 100,000 cases of polio is much much worse. The kids didn't ask to be born to parents who have strange ideas and there are many aspects of the local culture (honor killings? Systematic and systemic discrimination against women?) that should disappear. Cultural eradication is a good thing if it means that mistaken beliefs about the world get rooted out, and especially if it causes active harm to others. I won't be shedding any tears if a "culture" that rejects something as innocuous as vaccination disappears.
That being said, I agree that imperialism is a bad idea, and much of the backlash against "the West" is due to real grievances. For instance, bombing weddings and killing children is not a good way to show how great Western civilization is. Neither can you shove your values down people's throats and expect them to embrace them. But if some cultural practices (genital mutilation for instance) were to be abandoned, I'd be very happy. And, when it involves children whose only mistake was to be born in the wrong part of the world, cultural relativism doesn't seem very appropriate to me.
Not to forget that appealing to "culture" is often a way for the powerful to cement their privileges and continue to exploit marginalized groups. Thus the various dictators who explain that human rights are a Western construct and that authoritarianism is part of the local culture. Or people who want to keep girls ignorant and submissive because their culture/religion says women are inferior to men.
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Your sentiment is not lost on me, but that is why we must remember we cannot force our ways or our means of producing a safe and poductive society on others. This is a bit of case for the prime directive.
There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
Thats not to say we shouldnt freely provide information, or allow people to ask us for help, that contradicts there beliefs, but we should be careful how we do it.
"Prime Directive?" This is Pakistan, not some fledgling civilization in danger of being contaminated by knowledge of alien life with far superior technology, who might be mistaken for deities upon sighting. It's just Pakistan. Many of their doctors and engineers studied in the West, for fuck's sake...even if there was a question of cultural contamination, that line is waaaaaaaay behind us all.
Vaccinating people against polio and "cultural eradication," to use your terms, aren't even on the same plane of
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:4, Insightful)
Reincarnate.
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Not reincarnate. Isn't that the whole point?
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Unquestionably, the polio.
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Fuck cultural relativism.
100 000 cases of polio is worse than backwards cultures being wiped out.
I do think that many so called backwards cultures are actually not. However, fuck Islam. In fact, fuck Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism as well. Religion is backwards.
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How dare you insult my Jesus crackers like that.
Mmmmmm ... Jesus!
that's complete bullshit (Score:2)
a guy ready to shoot health workers is not a representative of any culture or set of beliefs. plenty of intelligent and well-adjusted pakistanis are valid representatives of their culture, and they want polio eradicated
oh my god, shut up you moron. giving people polio vaccine does not destroy anyone's culture.
why do you think this atrocity represents some sort of valid defense of a culture? what other insane lies do you sw
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Can't tell if you are a hard working troll or one of the dumbest fucking morons I've come across in awhile.
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your problem is you seem to think these people represent something about pakistan. pakistanis want polio vaccine, and the people who don't want it are a deranged murderous fringe. they don't represent any culture, certainly not pakistan. they represent a psychological pathology
your argument is so fucking stupid because it's like looking at theodore kaczynski, charles manson, or jim jones as some sort of authentic representatives of a culture. that 's how pakistanis view these polio vaccinator murderers
if yo
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you've made it your business to comment on a topic. i judged you harshly for that. i'm just one voice on the internet, you need not take my solitary judgment so seriously. but i stand behind my judgment, i find your "reasoning" such as it is deplorable, and i hold it against you. you are free to speak on any topic you want, but you aren't free from the consequences of the quality of your speech or lack thereof
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There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
You over state the case.
You need not eradicate culture to protect against polio. That is simplistic nonsense.
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"Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?"
In the case of Islam, cultural eradication would be desirable in terms of human progress, but is impractical, because Superstition is perfectly evolved to resist outside attack.
Superstition must be seen to fail then fall from within. "Dead" Gods failed to deliver and were abandoned, because even superstitious beast-man can generally "get" it when his religious construct fails.
I wouldn't lift a finger to provide medical care to such a culture. Let
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100, 000 cases of polio. There, I said it. Cultural eradication in this case would be tragic but inevitable. Especially considering they breed a threat to the world over.
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100,000 cases of polio. "Cultural eradication" doesn't actually harm anyone, but polio does.
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There's no way to win this issue without completely destroying these peoples autonomy. Whats worse 100,000 cases of polio or cultural eradication?
This problem exists only because the Taliban, known cultural eradicators [wikipedia.org] are willing to inflict a great deal of harm on their victims in the process.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
They are a viral cesspool that threatens to infect everyone.
Ok, that was a bit dramatic, but the point is, you can't leave a viable infectious reservoir if you want to eradicate a disease.
Look at smallpox. There was a massive campaign to inoculate everyone on the planet. The got pretty close to that goal, and no area was left untouched. Now, the only smallpox you are going to see are the samples still held by certain organizations. Most of the doctors and scientists want even those samples eradicated, but a few fools have been preventing that for over a decade. (I could list why their excuses are invalid, but this isn't the place.)
They are just trying to do the same thing with polio. This can only be effectively done with diseases that reside exclusively in humans.
Ok, some people are going with the Star Trek Prime Directive excuse. In Next Gen and later, the wimps writing for them interpreted it as a total hands off let them suffer version. In the original series, it was a don't mess with their development kind of thing. Curing a plague was ok, so was evacuating a doomed planet. On the other hand, you don't set yourself up as gods, provide them with advanced tech or science, or force a non-space faring planet into the federation.
In the New stuff, they'd totally let everyone suffer and die, and then wring their hands metaphorically and congratulate themselves on not interfering in the development of another culture.
In the Old stuff, they'd have provided a vaccine and aided in it's distribution and then congratulate themselves on saving vast numbers of peoples lives among the primitive culture, and making it possible for them to continue to develop on their own.
Yes, I watched a lot of Star Trek when I was younger.
One of the problems some people are overlooking is that vaccinations need to go to the people, the people can't really go to the vaccines, or at least not the distances and locations that would be required if they had to go to the major cities. Few people have the kind of transportation necessary, and leaving your own area, ESPECIALLY if you are a tribal, it is an immediate and large risk to your survival and well being. It would be great if the government would provide security escorts for the aid workers, but again, it's not going to work in the boonies out there. Some tribal territories would consider that a hostile act, and either not cooperate, or actually try to kill everyone involved.
As to the CIA thing, I hadn't heard of it, and am somewhat doubtful without further documentation. On the other hand, that's the kind of bullshit the CIA is know for doing, even though I'm pretty sure it's against international law. Even if it isn't against international law, it is a horribly stupid thing to do as it will put all humanitarian aid personnel and projects in jeopardy for years if not decades. It's something no intelligent, rational, or ethical person would do. In other words, right up spy alley.
As to the Taliban, they've already proven they'll say and do anything to force people to follow and obey their power. They have proven themselves to the world to be irrational unreasoning scum of the worst sort. They don't want outsiders in their territories and will happily lie, steal, cheat, and kill to get their way.
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From what I can tell, the CIA were practically bragging about how clever they were for disguising their operatives as health workers doing polio vaccinations to anyone in the media that would listen. The only way you could've missed it is if you were living in a cave somewhere when Osama was assassinated.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging from your subject heading, I thought you were talking about the USA and as I read your post, I was thinking that everything you say could be applied to the good old USA so I'm not sure what your point is...?
TFA seems to have the theory that it was the US operation of a fake polio campaign as part of the effort to get Bin Laden that led to the current Taliban violence against polio workers. Probably a reasonable assumption.
Also... ignorance is never "all well and good"... and simply any group of oppressed (by their govt., the US govt., their feudal landlords, etc.) people "hillbillies" is ignorant.
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The Taliban has been against vaccination long before the bin Laden operation. Let's all be multi-culti and let the hicks overrun the civilized people. Any history of Pakistan would show you the only oppressor in the Pakistan tribal regions has been Islam and its upside down view of women, child marriage, education, etc. Let's also not forget that the wonderful cultural heritage of those regions is also the one that cultivates poppies for heroin production.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is also true of the hillbilly parts of the US by the way.
Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's all well and good until said hillbillies start killing people or getting them killed.
I saw this movie once where the hillbillies did a lot worse than kill some guy. Lesson I learned from it? Anytime you hear banjos, PADDLE FASTER.
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Eheh... yeah... backward regions (Score:2)
The US must be one giant hillbilly country there. Where is Donald "Batshit Insane" Trump from? For that matter, right here on this site you can find plenty of conspiracy theorists.
Just yesterday the Nazi Pope released another message of hate unto the world, a message most Americans seem to believe. That homosexuals are the end of humanity or some such bull crap. And plenty here believe it.
Plenty people in the west also are against vaccinations, including Polio and these fucktards are bringing long dead di
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Seems like every backward region I've ever been too has been awash in conspiracy theories, urban legends, and superstitious horseshit.
That's not at all surprising. What would be surprising is if you had actually been to a place that wasn't backward and hillbilly. I don't know of any on Earth, for example.
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1) While people believe that the vaccination programs are part of a crazy conspiracy, then children will die.
2) On at least one occasion, (Osama Bin Laden), the USA has used a vaccination program as part of a conspiracy to find the guy they wanted to kill (and some of his family)
3) Now we need to convince people that all the _other_ conspiracy theories are crazy and would never happen.
4) Meanwhile in the same region, the USA (and others?) kill men women and children with rockets from their robot drones
Why d
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the only true evil in the world today is the Taliban
the closest to true evil in the world today is the Taliban. There, FTFY.
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The CIA vaccination thing actually reads like some kind of fan service to conspiracy theorists...
The actual CIA, actually using a vaccine plot to gather DNA in an effort to direct an officially nonexistent model of stealth black helicopter carrying a kill team composed of officially nonexistent commandos to the correct target. Seriously, most conspiracy theories don't pack that much conspiracy theory...
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The sad aspect is the cover was not used for a full set of meds.
The CIA got their DNA and left before the second dose was given.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/07/12/137792912/reports-cia-tried-to-confirm-bin-laden-dna-using-fake-vaccination-drive [npr.org]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14117438 [bbc.co.uk]
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Using the words hillbilly an
Biological warfare (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess the Taliban have obtained biological weapons of mass destruction after all. They didn't need any fancy technology, just a whole lot of stupidity.
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Are you a moron, Pakistan has been a nuclear nation for decades and are not run by the Taliban.
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The problem is that Pakistan isn't run by anyone, or rather there are two parallel governments and much of the country's chaos stems from the friction and competition between the official civil government and the army on one side and the vast labrythine security services on the other.
Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan (Score:2)
Find the similarities.
Pakistan (Score:2, Insightful)
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I once read it being referred to as "the country that should never have been."
The partition of the Subcontinent is a tragedy that is still happening.
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More info (Score:5, Informative)
Then there's this: Afghan Taliban support polio vaccination campaign [cnn.com]
So it's not really fair to blame this on the CIA's operation...
Re:More info (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually I will blame the CIA.
They went and took an urban legend and made it true.
Now when the Taliban says "We killed aid workers because they were spying on us." we can't say they are full of shit anymore.
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Ya, blame the CIA the same way you'd blame the police when a bank crook shoots a hostage.
I was wondering how many posts it would take for someone to twist this to blame the US for not dancing in a way sensitive to dictatorial murderers.
The only thing I blame the US for is letting the doctor go to jail instead of rescuing him. This is the US fleeing Vietnam and letting all the South Vietnamese who helped us fall into the hands of the North, writ small.
Re:More info (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
Very stupid bad people used a very paranoid conspiracy theory for the justification of killing people.
The CIA went and made that conspiracy theory true.
You can't see how that is a very wrong thing to do?
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I am not fuckiing a goddamn moron.
I am a goddamn fucking moron.
Get it straight will ya?
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GP's point is that it's not a "hillbilly conspiracy theory" if the CIA was actually putting agents in among aid workers. If they did that, they are endangering the aid workers by making them a legitimate target of (admittedly informal) counterintelligence.
I'd bet $20 that you didn't blame the U.S. military for the deaths of Iraqi civilians back when Saddam had placed his military bases in among them,* but blamed Saddam instead. You'd have been justified, but you can't have it both ways.
* (Actually,
Re:More info (Score:5, Insightful)
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They went and took an urban legend and made it true.
It's never been an urban legend. The CIA and other intelligence organizations have been doing this for centuries. The bread and butter of their trade is building legitimate covers for their agents, and recruiting folks who are legitimate, and have access to sensitive data or areas.
A diplomatic mission will always have a few: just look for the ones who are way more intelligent and clever for their official jobs. Journalists? Hell, their real job is to snoop around in places where they have no business.
Fake program was for hepatitis, not polio (Score:3, Informative)
The summary is screwed up - the fake program used in searching for bin Laden was for hepatitis B, not polio.
Taliban: scum of the Earth (Score:2)
By killing the UN workers, they are potentially killing thousands of children.
How did they drift so far apart? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pakistan allied itself to NATO and America, allowed its land to be used freely for US spy planes, Voice of America broadcast stations, bought every bit of military hardware US was allowed to export, from Patton Tanks, to F-16s to E-3 Hawk-eyes to stinger missiles to.... India claimed to be a leader of Non-Aligned movement, but in fact it was leaning towards USSR with MIG-21, MIG-23, Sukai, Hind helicopters and T-72 tanks etc.
But though both countries were mired in poverty, somehow India's democracy thrived. No one would mistake India for a developed country, with its slums and open sewers and congested roads and perennial power cuts and corrupt politicians and periodical flare up of communal violence. But somehow it is emerging out of it, in fits and starts, cornered the cheap back office white collar market, some good IT companies, decent medical systems, eradicated polio, making good progress on other diseases...
I don't think the difference is religion. I think the difference is government dominated by the military in Pakistan, and civilians in firm control of the military in India. That I think set a completely different social processes, incentives in the economy etc. I think economists should study how this process happened instead of wasting their time out doing one another in forecasting gloom and doom following the fiscal cliff. More and more the economists are looking like Mayans predicting the end of the world at the end of their long count calender.
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India and Pakistan both inherited British bureaucracy. That got them off on the wrong foot. The Muslims, as they seem to do everywhere else, cannot stand living in close proximity to non-Muslims so they up and left to East and West Pakistan. East became Bangladesh when they found they didn't care for the crazy West. Given the wars between India and Pakistan, India (under Indira Gandhi) just had to make it worse by letting off a nuke thus showing the Paks they had big dicks. So Pakistan just had to have thei
Re:How did they drift so far apart? (Score:5, Interesting)
When they studied the immigrants from that particular region they discovered that while all of them practiced arranged marriages with cousins, the Muslims from that region practiced patrilineal arranged marriages and the non-Muslims practiced Matrilineal arranged marriages. In addition, the clan structure was patrilineal. The effect was that among the non-Muslims, a young woman left her father's clan and married into the clan her mother came from. This tended to encourage relationships across clan boundaries. On the other hand, among the Muslims a young woman stayed within the clan she grew up in when she got married. This tended to encourage clans to remain divided. As far as I know, the practice of patrilineal arranged marriages is not a doctrine of Islam. However, it appears that most Muslim areas practice it. I wish I could remember the reference for the study because the authors made a compelling case that this practice explained the intractability of many of the cultural pathologies of Muslim countries. In addition, the authors brought in how other cultures with a similar patrilineal marriage pattern had similar pathologies, even when the cultures had few other common elements.
Re:How did they drift so far apart? (Score:5, Interesting)
Deleterious (harmful) mutations are lot more common than beneficial mutations. So when the marriage happens between very closely related individuals, the deleterious mutations reduce the fitness of the off spring. But if marriage always happens between very distantly related individuals, the beneficial mutations do not get a chance to take hold. So what is the optimal genetic distance? Jared Diamond mentions that a genetic distance of 1/8 to 1/64 was found to be the optimum. Genetic distance between siblings, parent-child is 0.5. Between first cousins it is 0.125. (0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5). Between second cousins it is 1/64. This was found by genetic analysis of bird populations that are free to choose their mates. The assumption is whatever genetic distance is the most favored or most common would have been the optimum arrived at by millennia of evolution.
Coming back to the patrilineal endogamy, it explains very well the allegiance of most Iraqis to their sheiks (clan leaders) rather than religion, sect, country. Some people attribute the lack of women's rights in a divorce also sets a completely different social dynamic. But whatever is the root cause, Pakistan is a failed state with nuclear weapons. It can not be left to sort its future out the way we let Angola or Sierra Leon. They got nukes. Either they give up nukes like Ukraine, and other *stans. Or they shape up.
[*] Patrilineal endogamy: Marriage between children of brothers is allowed. Sometimes encouraged.
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actually India has more Muslims than Pakistan!
[citation needed]
CIA Factbook and Wikipedia disagree with you (160m in India(CIA&wikipedia) VS 180m in pakistan (CIA) or 171m (wikipedia)).
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To simplistic (Score:2)
India is indeed not a simple country and the lack of a Taliban style movement in India amongs it many Muslims is explained by some by the fact that a Muslim in India, despite being among the lowest of the low, STILL has it better then a Muslim in Pakistan. This idea is also present in the Middle East were Muslims in Israel are better off then Muslims in say Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Even for the Palestines, you see an unreal connection to Israel, they rely on it for jobs, education, medicine, law and even
Eradicate the Pollos! (Score:2)
The font (on OS X Chrome) on this article really makes the headline look like "Pollo Eradication", which I suppose is what they do at "Pollo Campero"!
Sterile Children (Score:2)
Of COURSE the children are sterile, they havent even reached puberty yet!
Idiots!
no surprises (Score:2)
look, these people support, and allow their children to succumb to, a toxic disease that criples their prospects and permeates their society. a disease that's been around for a long time, that we've only recently been aware that it's possible to eradicate, and they actively resist attempts to help them rid themselves of it - even killing those that attempt to help.
and there's also polio.
Every crippled child is the taliban's fault (Score:2)
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MURDERD.
Killed could mean anything - from an accidental car death to dying from bullets falling from the sky after a round of celebratory gunfire.
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Explain This to Me Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope the families of the slain sue and are successful in getting bazzzilions of dollars out of the idiot Americans.
So the Sikhs that were killed in the wake of 9/11 [time.com] as "blowback" should sue the Taliban and Al-Queda?
Man, "justice" sure is fucked up where you're from.
Oh yeah, and Americans are idiots.
Ah yes, it is the entire American populace that are idiots. Yep, we were all part of everything you just said. Not one of us opposes it. All of us act together uniformly. No one protests. Man, for people who like to criticize Americans as racist bigots, they sure could look in the mirror from time to time.
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At some point though, "Americans" becomes shorthand for "the majority of Americans", "the American government" or "a loud and significant minority of Americans". And that it stays that way is partially the fault of the others. I dislike this situation as much as the next rational American, but.... that's the reality. We can either deal with it, or just blame the messenger.
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It seems to me that population reduction will occur regardless of whether or not the UN has a hand in it.
Your link is to a crackpot site, I hope you realize.
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You do realize I was pointing to a video of Bill Gates speaking at a TED event....