The War on Pakistan’s Aid Workers

The murders of charity and aid workers in Pakistan has dealt a devastating blow to a national campaign to wipe out polio and other deadly diseases. On Tuesday, assassins ambushed and killed seven Pakistani teachers and health workers, six of them women, as they returned home from work at a children’s community center in the Swabi district of the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. They were affiliated with a private Pakistani aid group, Support With Working Solution, that runs health and education projects in Pakistan’s poor and lawless tribal region. On Wednesday, there were reports that local police had promised extra protection for aid workers who are planning to conduct a polio vaccination campaign on Saturday in Peshawar and other cities in northwest Pakistan. That move is clearly necessary, though far from sufficient. The federal authorities need to make sure that the killers are brought to justice and make clear that murdering health workers is a terrorist act against the nation itself. This week’s slaughter followed a series of attacks across the country last month that killed nine Pakistani health workers involved in a polio vaccination drive. Most of those victims also were women, earning about $2 a day and critical in campaigns to persuade families to participate in immunization programs. No one has claimed responsibility for the most recent attack, but suspicions point to the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups that have opposed the vaccination drives, calling them a cover for government or international spies, or part of a plot to sterilize Muslim children. Those conspiracy theories intensified when the Central Intelligence Agency used a vaccination team, led by a Pakistani doctor, to visit Osama bin Laden’s house in 2011. The vaccination programs are essential to the protection of Pakistan’s citizens. After a two-decades-long global vaccination campaign, the world is on the verge of eradicating polio. Only in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria is the disease still endemic. In 2011, Pakistan counted 198 new infections, the highest in the world. Without safety for health workers, this scourge will never be eradicated.