(Photo: Afghan child receives polio vaccine, Credit: UNICEF)
The former leaders of Afghanistan have gone back and forth on allowing aid workers to administer the polio vaccine to Afghan children over the years. Last year, the group decided to allow the program to go forward so long as workers “not use government resources, including vehicles and soldiers, and they should use their own resources so that they impartially execute their program.” At the time, their spokesperson also claimed that the Taliban has always supported vaccinations.
That commitment was questioned yet again this year, when in March the Taliban halted the program in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province. “For the past three years Waygal district has been under the Taliban, they are very strong there. For the last two years the vaccine process went on in the district, but this year they stopped it,” Nuristan governor Tamim Nuristani told the Guardian at the time.
It seems, however, that the Talibs have had a change of heart once more. In a statement issued from “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — the country’s full name when under Taliban rule — the vaccination push has been given the all-clear:
“According to the latest international medicine science, the polio disease can only be cured by preventive measures ie the anti-polio drops and the vaccination of children against this disease.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan supports and lends a hand to all those programs which works for the health care of the helpless people of our country,” said a statement issued by the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’.
But it warned the World Health Organisation and Unicef to employ only “unbiased people” in a campaign “harmonised with the regional conditions, Islamic values and local cultural traditions.”
It also ordered its fighters to give polio workers “all necessary support”.
Afghanistan is one of only three countries — alongside Nigeria and Pakistan — where polio is still endemic. Last year, the country had thirty-six new cases of polio, with an estimated 160,000 to 180,000 children missing their scheduled vaccinations. In April, the Afghan government pledged to administer anti-polio and anti-measles vaccines to eight million Afghan children under the age of five this year.
And while the Taliban’s pledge to allow aid workers to complete their work is promising, it leaves questions remaining for the other two countries seeking to eradicate polio, both of which have also experienced numerous attacks on aid workers. In Nigeria, home of the most polio outbreaks in the world, the extremist group Boko Haram killed at least nine aid workers in February. Likewise, in Pakistan at least a dozen aid workers have been killed since the start of the year.
As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approaches, many of my colleagues who write about policy have been looking back on their past prognostications to see who was right, who was wrong, and who believed what information on what basis. It’s an interesting exercise, considering how many reputations were made and broken on those assessments, but I’m interested in looking backwards for something different. During the decade of America’s involvement in Iraq, Hollywood’s responded with a huge array of movies, television shows, and miniseries that offer a fascinating, and in many ways disturbing window into our desire to support and honor the people who have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite the profusion of these movies, and of soldiers as heroes even in movies that aren’t specifically about these wars, pop culture tells us as much about our attitudes to Iraq in what movies and television largely leave out: the reasons we sent soldiers to Iraq in the first place and kept them there for so long; the rising number of female veterans who are homeless, even as the Obama administration welcomed servicewomen officially into combat; and what medical recovery from combat injury really looks like. Too often, Hollywood products reflect a public desire to support the troops without recognizing what kind of support would actually be useful. And too often, sympathy for veterans substitutes for grappling with the reasons that we asked them to do things that have left them physically or psychologically injured.
And soldiers have become stock figures in all sorts of genre movies, even those that don’t purport to deal directly with war or the soldiering experience as their primary subject—and soldiering roles have become a key way for actors to attempt to rebrand themselves as serious mainstream players. Zac Efron, as part of his attempts to present himself as something other than a teen idol, played a Marine who served three tours of duty in Iraq in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks weepie The Lucky One. Professional wrestler John Cena played a Marine who was discharged for overzealousness in the fight against terrorism in Iraq, and who has trouble adapting to civilian life until his skills become necessary in tracking down a violent band of criminals who have kidnapped his girlfriend in The Marine. The remake of The A-Team, which put a jokey spin on the Iraqi insurgency, was part of Bradley Cooper’s move up from goofy supporting player to star, and an attempt to make South African actor Sharlto Copley a mainstream American movie actor after the success of District 9. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was a silly stop for both Channing Tatum, who between this and Stop-Loss has benefitted perhaps more than any other single actor from the fad for soldier characters, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it did demonstrate that they were both credible participants in action franchises.
