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After the invasion of Afghanistan by American-led forces in 2001, many Taliban fighters relocated to the FATA, from where they launched cross-border attacks. The Pakistani army tried to bring the region under government control but the incursion aggrieved local communities, who joined forces with the militants. The CIA used drone strikes to support Pakistani military action from 2004 onwards. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NAfjFonM-Tn7fziqiv33HlGt09wgLZDSCP-BQaux51w/edit#gid=1000652376>, there have been 428 drone strikes, leading to between 2511 and 4020 fatalities. Vaccination campaigns were suspected of being a smokescreen for collecting intelligence ahead of drone strikes. Organisations involved in the Pakistan Polio Eradication Initiative <http://www.endpolio.com.pk/polioin-pakistan/partners-and-donors> include the Pakistani state and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio vaccinators visit the FATA every few months, walking from door-to-door, offering to vaccinate children, and recording who has been vaccinated. The data is collected for public health purposes, but you can see how it might be misconstrued as intelligence gathering. There have also been complaints <https://tribune.com.pk/story/394962/cover-for-us-spies-n-waziristan-warlord-bans-polio-vaccination/> that ‘billions of dollars’ are spent on vaccination campaigns when ‘polio infects one child in a million’, while malnutrition and diarrhoea receive far less attention from the international community despite causing much more suffering. Polio workers have been attacked and vaccination campaigns interrupted, reducing the number of children being immunised and leading to an increase in polio cases. Before the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the CIA organised a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna> in Abbottabad in a failed attempt to obtain his relatives’ DNA. When the story broke a few months later, it seemed to vindicate people’s suspicions of the polio programmes in the FATA. ‘As long as drone strikes are not stopped in Waziristan,’ one militant leader declared <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-militants-polio/pakistan-militants-ban-polio-jabs-threaten-action-idUSBRE85F0E220120616>, ‘there will be a ban on administering polio jabs’ because immunisation campaigns are ‘used to spy for America against the Mujahideen’. More than 3.5 million <http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)60002-1/fulltext?rss=yes> children went unvaccinated as a result of the boycott and associated disruption, in which several health workers were killed. Polio increased in Pakistan and further afield, as the virus spread to Afghanistan and the Middle East <https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/heapol/czw148>. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/09/08/jonathan-kennedy/pakistan-polio-and-the-cia/?utm_source=LRB+blog+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20170919+blog&utm_content=usca_nonsubs _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
