THOSE in Pakistan who feel some sympathy for the Taliban and their campaign against what the terrorists see as corrosive Western values will have been given serious cause for thought as a result of the murders of eight UN officials involved in a campaign to vaccinate 33 million Pakistani children. These callous and outrageous slayings have forced UNICEF and the World Health Organization, which are running the nationwide anti-polio drive, to halt their work in the provinces of Sindh, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Peshawar, in the last of which the latest two murders took place. Poliomyelitis is a terrible disease which has been very largely eliminated over the last 60 years thanks to a worldwide campaign of inoculation. Polio remains endemic in three final countries: Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The two UN agencies, acting with the full approval of the Pakistani government, had mounted the inoculation program because of rising concerns that the disease could return with a vengeance, since there have been large outbreaks in Africa, as well as China and Tajikistan. One major danger is that, as with other diseases that have been all but eradicated, a different strain could be developing, which cannot be combatted by the current inoculation. Such a new scenario could have disastrous global consequences, condemning hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, the majority of them children, to severe incapacity and a life of misery and missed opportunity. The disruption to family life, whole communities and entires societies could be extensive. All this of course matters not at all to Taliban bigots, who see no problem gunning down innocent UN officials, who are actually working to help the children and the communities in which the terrorists live. There is however one sinister reason the killers may be using to justify their savagery. This is that the CIA used a fake cholera inoculation program to track down Osama Bin Laden in his Abbottabad hideout, by, it is believed, obtaining the DNA of one of his children. It is fairly certain that CIA chiefs never calculated the knock-on effect of their ruse. The law of unintended consequences was ignored in their eagerness to nail the world's public enemy number one. And there can be no doubt that this piece of trickery outraged the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies. However, to then vent their wrath on another, entirely innocent and extremely necessary genuine disease eradication program, is bovine in its stupidity. Indeed, these disgusting killings display the ignorance and prejudice that drive these people, who claim to act in the name of Islam, but whose every merciless action disproves this. They establish, beyond any doubt, the emptiness and wickedness of their cause. But then why should anyone really be surprised at their latest savagery? They have had no problem setting off bombs in crowded market places, blasting apart the bodies of women and children. They have seen nothing wrong threatening the life of a young girl, who had the temerity to condemn them for their malignant ignorance. Such blindness to common decency and civilized behavior is quite terrifying. Where is their humanity? Do they not look at their own families and feel the love that their hapless victims also felt for their own folk and the wider community? What is to be the terrorists next depravity? Having frustrated the polio inoculation campaign, will they be putting guns to the heads of babies deformed by the disease, as a result of their own cruel murders of UN staff who came to help?
