For a change ... I bring you good news!

A polio-free world is in sight.  Yes, a world without polio!

Since the initiative was launched by the assembly in 1988, the number of polio cases have reduced by 99%. The remaining 1% of cases can be found in the two countries with endemic polio – Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This is one of those rare moments when we humans deserve to stand up and congratulate ourselves.  Go ahead, pat yourself on your back.

Note that AfPak is the problem, in more ways than one!  The other notorious home for polio, Nigeria, is off the list; what an achievement, right?

It has been one full year since polio was detected anywhere in Africa, a significant milestone in global health that has left health experts around the world quietly celebrating.

A quiet celebration because of the recognition that the virus can always stage a comeback.  After three continuous years of no cases, the real celebration will begin.

“This is a big success, but it’s still fragile,” said Dr. Hamid Jafari, the initiative’s World Health Organization director. “There’s always a worry that there could be an undetected case in a population you’re not reaching.”

If you are like me, you then wonder how public health experts go around seeking confirmation.  (Maybe it is a good thing you are not like me, eh!)

How does one go about finding the polio virus across the expanse of an entire country or continent? There are now far fewer polio virus needles in the global haystack, which is fantastic news. But the remaining ones become even more difficult to find. We can’t stamp out a disease if we don’t know where it is. But with polio we do know where it is—and we know thanks to poop.

And now, if you are like me, you are puzzled.  What has poop got to do with polio.  That's how ignorant I am; turns out that all these years I hadn't bothered to find out how polio spreads!

When children get polio, the virus grows in their intestines and is excreted in the stool, and from there it spreads to other children. That’s why it has been so tough to beat polio in areas with poor sanitation. 

No kidding; now I understand why India eliminating polio within the country is such a cause for astonishment.  A country with extremely poor sanitation facilities managed to wipe out polio.  That's phenomenal!

The last case of polio in India was reported in 2011, an achievement once thought impossible. The country once suffered from more polio cases than anywhere else in the world, and the combination of dense populations, poor sanitation, and weak routine immunization programs led experts to suggest it would be the last place on Earth to drive out polio. Today, India’s polio story is one of historic success.

What more evidence does one need that we humans can achieve remarkable success, despite all the hurdles!

Since 1988, more than US$9 billion has been invested into the global polio eradication initiative.

What a wonderful use of nine billion dollars!  Let me put this in perspective:

The Marine Corps, the ascetic tribe of “Devil Dogs” that prides itself on being “the first to fight,” is getting a new weapon, announcing Friday that its version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is, at long last, ready to be unleashed in combat.
The announcement comes after years of testing and development, marking a significant milestone for the sometimes-beleaguered, often-criticized and always controversial $400 billion program, which is years behind its original schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget.

Got that?  400 billion dollars. For fucking fighter planes!  Ok, I shouldn't rant about the military expenditure because I want to bring you only the good news in this post ;)

So, brother, can you spare me a dime. Er, make that a billion dollars. To launch something similar to the war against polio.  Against the Ebola virus:

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a bold proposal by three doctors for an international vaccine fund with an initial capitalization of $2 billion. That is far less than the $8 billion that Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, which had the most Ebola cases, say they need for recovery. Bringing a single new vaccine to market costs between $500 million and $1 billion.
The fund would be a boon to the biotechnology companies and university research centers that are already working on vaccines but don’t have the resources to get drugs approved and manufactured. And it would save lives.

Don't try telling me that we don't have the money for it.  You can never, ever convince me about lack of money.  Will stop here before I take off on a rant on our misplaced priorities! ;)

The slowly fracturing Indo-US relationship

One of the best things that happened since the Clinton years, and into the Bush presidency as well, was India and the US coming closer than ever before.  Of course, this was a dividend thanks to the end of the Cold War--during the decades of US/USSR rivalry, the US always leaned in favor of Pakistan and against India, despite the fact that India was the democracy and Pakistan was, well, to put it mildly, not a democracy :)

But, yet again we are finding the US getting trapped in crazy geopolitical realpolitik and, therefore, beginning to sideline India.  It is all in the AfPak policy we are pursuing.  The result: even though India is the most popular country in Afrghanistan,

India, the only stable secular democracy in the region, is being actively prevented from helping in Afghanistan in order to appease the Pakistani regime, lest it re-enact the carnage that was visited upon Mumbai in 2008 and the Indian Embassy in Kabul in 2008 and 2009. Which raises the question: Is the U.S. objective in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, or is it to secure the country for Pakistan? To New Delhi, the answer looks increasingly like the latter.

Washington's critics trace the origins of today's crisis to the United States' abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan in the late 1980s. The trouble with this version of history is that it skips over the 1990s. But contrary to what is now conventional wisdom in the West, the Taliban in its current incarnation is not a remnant of the Cold War. It is a creation of Pakistan. It was during the 1990s that the Taliban -- actively backed by Pakistan -- seized control of Kabul. Since then, New Delhi has witnessed Afghanistan become a launching pad for anti-India terrorism.

Today, the tragic irony of President Barack Obama, who invokes the virtues of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi while simultaneously making overtures to the Taliban in an oxymoronic pursuit for "moderate extremists," has not been lost on India. A tiny but vocal band of skeptics in India is already questioning the wisdom of New Delhi's alignment with the United States over the last ten years. Of course, it is unlikely that New Delhi would directly oppose U.S. policy in the region. But in the first year of the Obama administration, much of the progress achieved over a decade of aggressive diplomacy to bring India closer to the United States has been undone.

Hmmmm .....

AfPak high on opium

"The Afghanistan/Pakistan border region has turned into the world's largest free-trade zone in anything and everything that is illicit - drugs of course, but also weapons, bomb-making equipment, chemical precursors, drug money, even people and migrants," 

That is from the head of UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) who is concerned about opium from Afghanistan and how it generates a whole bunch of problems for the rest of the world too.

UN findings say an opium market worth $65bn (£39bn) funds global terrorism, caters to 15 million addicts, and kills 100,000 people every year.
The UN says corruption, lawlessness and uncontrolled borders result in only 2% of Afghan opiates being seized locally.
The UN says more Russians die annually from Afghan drugs than Soviet soldiers were killed during its Afghan conflict.
Afghanistan produces 92% of the world's opium, with the equivalent of 3,500 tonnes leaving the country each year.

The US fights wars over one of three: oil, drugs, terrorism. Here in AfPak, we have two out of three.

BHO meet LBJ, continued

Back in January--yes, seems like eons ago now--I linked to Juan Cole's observation, which was eerily titled "BHO meet LBJ."

That theme is gaining a lot more momentum recently.  While not that specific phrase, the theme is clear.  First, here is John Kerry--yes, the same Kerry who was one of the early supporters of candidate Obama:

Before we send more of our young men and women to this war, we need a fuller debate about what constitutes success in Afghanistan. We need a clearer understanding of what constitutes the right strategy to get us there. Ultimately, we need to understand, as Gen. Colin Powell was fond of asking, "What's the exit strategy?" Or as Gen. David Petraeus asked of Iraq, "How does it end?"
Why? Because one of the lessons from Vietnam—applied in the first Gulf War and sadly forgotten for too long in Iraq—is that we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people. Otherwise, we risk bringing our troops home from a mission unachieved or poorly conceived.

It was interesting that Kerry's op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal.  I wonder what the deal is with that.
Well, it is not that the "liberal" media is quiet about the ghost of Vietnam.  In the NY Times, Frank Rich presents the following comments in the context of Woodward "leaking" McChrystal's report, and then an unnamed White House official countering it:

it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.
Within Kennedy’s administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs’ repeated call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara) and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s special military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball’s dissenting role.
Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”
Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now.

And Ross Douthat--the conservative columnist at the NY Times who replaced William Kristol--piles on:

However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected “good war.” But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous.

Meanwhile, Germany's newly (re)elected Chancellor Merkel's deputy, Guido Westerwelle, will lead the cheers for continued Afghan military engagement:

While Germany's deployment to Afghanistan has become increasingly unpopular, Mr Westerwelle has emerged as the most powerful and articulate proponent of sustained involvement in the war.

So, instead of the Anglo-US lead into the Iraq debacle, we will now have a German-American push in AfPak?

Climate change, not healthcare is Obama's Waterloo?

[As] the health care debate has shown, public support matters little, and facts matter even less. And even if health care reform does pass, it's unclear that Blue Dogs will be eager to lie down for the administration a second time. In which case, perhaps climate change—not health care—could be Obama's Waterloo.

I agree with Christopher Beam's analysis that it will be one tricky challenge when climate change-related legislation comes up after healthcare reform is sorted out--wait, that is if healthcare reform is sorted out! It is going to be one hell of a fall session for the Congress and the President.

Beam points out that:

[Already] some senators—Democratic senators, no less—have been hedging. This month, four Democrats said they think the energy provisions, like mandating renewable sources, should be separated from the climate provisions, like cap and trade. Combined, the bill is "too big a lift," said Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.
...
Sen. Mary Landrieu, who represents oil and gas hub Louisiana, has declined to rule out the filibuster on climate-change legislation. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska is likely to speak for farm interests as a member of the agriculture committee—as in, less wind energy, more ethanol. Nelson and the two Democratic senators from North Dakota, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, joined Lincoln in calling for Reid to strip the legislation of its climate-change provisions. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio recently said, "I want to support this bill, but it's got to protect manufacturing." And in May, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana was the only Democrat to vote against a renewable-electricity standard during a committee markup. Add in Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin (both of Michigan), Mark Pryor (Arkansas), John Rockefeller (West Virginia), Jim Webb (Virginia), and Claire McCaskill (Missouri), all of whom did not vote for the Climate Security Act of 2008, and you've got a good dozen Democrats likely to be skittish about climate legislation as envisioned by the House.

Meanwhile, imagine what the chaos will be if the recession that seems to have bottomed-out suddenly takes a dive because of acute geopolitical crises in the AfPak-Iran-Iraq corridor! Wake me up in 2010!!!

Have Pakistani Nuclear Facilities Already Been Attacked?

In a little-noticed article published last month in a West Point counterterrorism journal, a British academic pointed out that while the world waits for the kind of global public announcement of doomsday that would come from a Bond villain, Islamist militants in Pakistan have quietly launched at least three attacks in the past two years on military bases that may contain nuclear weapons.

That very comforting (yes, sarcasm here) paragraph is from The Lede at NY Times.
Now, this is a day after I read quite a few way too uncomfortable discussions in the new "AfPak Channel" in Foreign Policy.

Thanks! Now I can worry that much more about Pakistan.

The AfPak quagmire

A month ago the Register Guard published my opinion piece where I discussed political instability in the Baluch territory of Pakistan and Iran. In that, I referred to the Balochs who are yet another ethnic group whose lands got divided--in this case, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And the Baluchs have been treated as less-than-equals in these countries, which has therefore resulted in militancy in Iran and Pakistan. My concern then, and even now, is that by expanding our operations in AfPak, we might be drawn into these situations also, which is not what we want ....

A month after my piece, ahem, the NY Times has a report on "another insurgency" gaining in Pakistan. These are the kinds of instances that end up as positive feedback on my approach to understanding the world and writing about them. Anyway, the NY Times says:

Although not on the same scale as the Taliban insurgency in the northwest, the conflict in Baluchistan is steadily gaining ground. Politicians and analysts warn that it presents a distracting second front for the authorities, drawing off resources, like helicopters, that the United States provided Pakistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Baluch nationalists and some Pakistani politicians say the Baluch conflict holds the potential to break the country apart — Baluchistan makes up a third of Pakistan’s territory — unless the government urgently deals with years of pent up grievances and stays the hand of the military and security services.

U.S. recognizing links between Afghanistan and Pakistan

Slowly and steadily we are beginning to recognize the geopolitical importance of a stable Pakistan. President Obama’s administration now operates with a more nuanced “AfPak” approach, fully recognizing that Afghanistan and Pakistan need to be tackled together.

Iran shares a long border with Afghanistan. Iran and Pakistan are also neighbors, with a border that simmers with its own set of ethnic disputes, religious tensions and drug trafficking.

The best way to understand the Iran-Pakistan border issues is to start with one of the most under-reported stories from two weeks ago. At least 20 people were killed, and more than 50 were injured, when a bomb exploded in a mosque in the city of Zahedan in Iran. Zahedan is the capital of Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Balochistan, and the city is practically at the junction of the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At least three aspects of this bombing deserve our attention.

First, this part of Iran has a predominant Sunni population in a country that is otherwise majority Shiite. Keep in mind that Iran and Iraq are home to Shiite Muslims, while surrounded by Sunni majority countries.

Second, the explosion came only a few days before the presidential elections, which are scheduled for Friday. Further, the explosion occurred only three days after a historic trilateral meeting in Tehran of the presidents of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Third, and most important, a group called Jundallah claimed responsibility for this blast. Jundallah, which means “soldiers of Allah,” has gained strength in the post-Sept. 11 years. Jundallah claims to be fighting the Iranian government to secure equal rights for the Sunni and the Baloch people.

The Balochs are spread across the modern boundaries of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the largest province — in terms of land area — is Balochistan, where about half of the 10 million population is ethnically Baloch.

During the days of the empire on which the sun never set, the British were more interested in protecting the “jewel in the crown” — the Indian subcontinent — and, therefore, treated the unconquerable Afghanistan and the territory of the Balochs as a buffer against the threat of an expanding Russia.

When the British created Pakistan in 1947, Balochistan remained quasi-independent until 1948, when it was annexed into Pakistan. A feeling of second-class treatment has slowly led to the emergence of a significant Baloch militant movement. The Pakistani government has no control over 10 percent or more of Balochistan, land that is now under the control of separatists.

The Balochs are yet another aspect of intricate relationships among Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The bombing in Zahedan was not the first time that Jundallah struck in Iran. The significant difference when compared to its violence the last few years is that Jundallah almost always targeted Iran’s security forces and other officers of the government.

Until the recent mosque bombing, never have such a large number of civilians fallen victim to Jundallah.

To add another layer of complexity: Iran has consistently viewed this militant organization as one that has support from Pakistan and the United States.

Iran alleges that the U.S. aids Jundallah — directly or through Pakistan. Of course, Iran has no evidence to support these allegations.

So, what do all these mean? It took us almost eight years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to understand that stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan is of utmost importance, and that Pakistan is linked to this in many ways. Over the same period, Pakistan has come apart to such an extent that we are now worried about it becoming a failed state with nuclear arms.

I hope that our leaders have a clear understanding of the limits of our involvement in AfPak so that we do not end up staying there even one day longer than we absolutely have to. And, I certainly hope that we will not enlarge our engagement into the Iranian issues.

For The Register-Guard

Posted to Web: Wednesday, Jun 10, 2009 05:44PM
Appeared in print: Thursday, Jun 11, 2009, page A7