Polio and the CIA

Polio is back.  It almost was gone — almost extinct — but it's back.

The epicenter is Pakistan, where health workers vaccinating children are victims of Islamist attacks.  The problem, it seems, is that health workers vaccinating children against polio probably were working as CIA informants in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Neither the Obama Administration nor the CIA has refuted those accusations.  Most likely, the accusations are accurate.  Most likely, the USofA has sacrificed the health and the lives of who knows how many children for the sake of killing one man in hiding.

The informants could have been selling leather-bound Korans, or doing market research for some mass producer of chapatis, or anything else.  Why polio?  Who gave the okay?  It's dreadful.  It's horrible.

Me, I'd call it a war crime.

We won! Right?

Whoopie doo! Bin Laden is dead! We finally got him!

Now, as I see it, is a perfect time to declare victory and get the hell out of Afghanistan — and, while we're at it, the rest of the way out of Iraq as well. Yes, the death of Osama bin Laden is more of a symbolic victory than a military victory, but what the hell... as long as we won.

Our president has to be feeling pretty chipper today, as he should. If you're president, symbolic victories go a long way. How it all happened remains more than a little vague, so I don't mind indulging myself in a little pure conjecture, just for fun, mind you. I have no direct evidence for anything that follows, but it sounds good.

From what we've been told to date, there was only one mansion with eighteen foot walls in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Abbottabad where bin Laden was staying — and given what we know about the pervasive penetration of Pakistan by its security agency, we should assume that ISI knew who was living there. CIA operatives, on the other hand, may have been in the dark — since ISI doesn't make them especially welcome in Pakistan. It follows that the US got the tip about bin Laden from ISI.

It also follows that ISI wanted something in return for giving such politically valuable information to the Obama administration. One hopes that what ISI wanted was an expedited withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan, so that Pakistan can reassert what it considers its "natural" influence over its neighbor. Add that to the US foreign policy/military shuffle discussed in my two previous posts, and it seems that the troops just might be home well before the announced date of 2014.

Rejoice, ye progressives! Perhaps you weren't totally screwed. ("Hope" springs eternal, especially in the run-up to an election.)

In the meanwhile, expect to hear demands for Osama bin Laden's long-form death certificate from the usual quarters.