In a change of tactics, the Taliban has called off its attacks against health workers in Afghanistan, providing space for polio workers to finally eradicate the deadly disease.

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.

Several health workers administering vaccines were shot dead in Nigeria today, part of a spread in violence threatening the tantalizingly close eradication of polio.

While the exact number of those dead is unclear — estimates on the ground vary from as many as twelve to as few as nine — there is a consensus growing about the identity of the group behind the attack:

No one claimed responsibility but the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which has condemned the use of western medicine, has been blamed for a spate of assaults on security forces in the city in recent weeks.

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“Gunmen opened fire on a health centre in the Hotoro district, killing seven, while an attack on the Zaria Road area of the city claimed two lives,” said a police spokesman, Magaji Musa. “[The health workers] were working for the state government giving out polio vaccinations at the time of the attack.”

Boko Haram — which has referred to itself as the “Nigerian Taliban” — has been a thorn in the side of the Nigerian government for over a year now, launching attacks against government facilities and bombing multiple churches. Should they be behind today’s murders, it would be the first instance of their targeting health workers.

The attacks seem close in nature to a rash of killings that swept through Pakistan last month, killing over a dozen. Much as in that case, current reports indicate all of those killed in Nigeria on Friday were women. Unlike in Pakistan, however, there’s no CIA program to blame the workers for colluding with. Instead, the militants have blamed the vaccines for being a Western plot to sterilize young girls and causing AIDS, neither of which is remotely true.

Nigeria is one of the last remaining holdouts of polio on Earth, with only Pakistan and Afghanistan joining it in having regular significant outbreaks. In 2012, Nigeria had at least 121 cases of polio, by far the most in the world. Facilitating a drop in those numbers will require a near universal vaccination rate, one that is unlikely to occur with the threat of violence.

Twelve of the deans leading the nation’s top public health schools have written to President Barack Obama to condemn the use of public health programs as cover for covert activities.

In 2011, it was reported that the Central Intelligence Agency utilized a vaccination program as cover to confirm the whereabouts of Osama bin Ladin in Abottabad, Pakistan. Since then, health workers have been targeted for violence throughout the country, with over a dozen murdered in the past three weeks alone. The upswing in violence caused the United Nations to suspend their vaccine work in December, while the covert operation itself led the Pakistani government to kick out the NGO Save the Children in Sept. 2012.

In the course of the one-page letter, the deans or such schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA take the President and the administration to task for their role in the spreading mistrust of health workers, and close with an impassioned plea to prevent further uses of health programs for intelligence-gathering:

Independent of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, contaminating humanitarian and public health programs with covert activities threatens the present participants and future potential of much of what we undertake internationally to improve health and provide humanitarian assistance. As public health academic leaders, we hereby urge you to assure the public that this type of practice will not be repeated.

International public health work builds peace and is one of the most constructive means by which our past, present, and future public health students can pursue a life of fulfillment and service. Please do not allow that outlet of common good to be closed to them because of political and/or security interests that ignore the type of unintended negative public health impacts we are witnessing in Pakistan.

The letter specifically refers to a recent spike in treatable diseases run rampant in Pakistan, following the surge in suspicion towards vaccination programs and the workers who administer them. In particular, have measles have jumped from 4,000 in 2011 to 14,000 in 2012. Likewise, Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio remains endemic, a statistic that will be unlikely to change should attacks on health workers continue.

On Tuesday, a coordinated attack in Pakistan left four female health workers dead on the streets of Karachi, a major port city. In the city of Peshawar, another two aid workers were gunned down. And on Wednesday, another two people were killed and another was wounded in Peshawar — leaving many wondering if a program spearheaded by the Central Intelligence Agency to capture Osama bin Laden could be a contributing factor in all the violence.

The four workers killed in Karachi were all part of a program by the Pakistani government to vaccinate children against polio. Pakistan is one of the last countries where polio remains endemic, and a conference that opened on Wednesday was meant to highlight the country’s successes in combating the diseases over the past year. Cases dropped from a staggering 173 in 2011 to only 56 so far in 2012, in large part due to a huge public health effort from the government, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations.

That progress is now at risk, as the United Nations announced that World Health Organization and UNICEF employees on the ground in Pakistan were suspending their work due to the current violence. No group has officially taken credit for the attacks, but police have said that at least two of the incidents in Peshawar were carried out by members of the Pakistani Taliban. While officially having denied involvement, the Pakistani Taliban has been outspoken about their dislike of the Western-backed vaccination program.

Part of the Taliban’s opposition is due to the controversial way that the CIA sought intelligence on bin Laden’s presence in the Pakistani city of Abbotabad. In 2011, the Guardian revealed details about the CIA’s use of a fake vaccination program to collect “DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound [which] could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.” Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi was jailed by the government earlier this year on charges of treason for his part in the deception.

In 2011, shortly after details of the ruse became clear, global health blogger Chris Albon noted the potential backlash that could result from the CIA program:

Insecurity has a serious negative effect on health care in rural communities. The greater the personal risks, the greater the appeal for both national and international health workers to stay within the safety of major cities, venturing out only in large convoys. This so-called “bunkerization” diminishes the ability of health campaigns to target rural communities — often those most in need of primary health care. The best way to overcome bunkerization is through building relationships with communities and local elites, allowing for the free movement of health workers in a region — exactly the kind of thing undermined by the CIA’s apparent operation.

And that’s what appears to be playing out now in Pakistan. While the DNA obtained in the CIA’s covert operation did in fact help prove that bin Laden was present, the effects of the CIA’s actions may have hindered the legitimate polio vaccination program in the country.