A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  ‘It’s terrible when innocent people are killed,’ US Senator John McCain explained two days later. ‘We apologize, but I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again.’

  Tens of thousands of Pakistanis protested across the country. USAID-funded offices of the NGO Associated Development Construction were burned to the ground; in Karachi, protestors chanted, ‘Stop bombing civilians!’ and ‘Death to America!’

  Nine months later, it happened again. This time the target was a madrasa in the village of Chenagai, just outside Bajaur’s largest city, Khar. At 5 a.m. on 30 October 2006, several aircraft fired missiles into the building, killing around seventy people. Again, apparently, the target was Zawahiri. Again, he wasn’t there. The college’s leader, Liaqat Ali, was.

  Fury at US actions led to an immediate backlash. Thousands marched in Khar, chanting, ‘Death to Musharraf!’ and ‘Death to Bush!’ One of the protest’s organizers was a young religious leader from the Swat Valley, Maulana Fazlullah. The son-in-law of the jailed founder of the extremist group Tehreek Nifaz Shariat Mohammed (TNSM), Fazlullah had been a close friend of Liaqat Ali, killed by the United States.

  Fazlullah set up an illegal radio station transmitting throughout the region. A barrage of anti-Western, pro-Sharia broadcasts followed, leading to his moniker ‘Mullah FM’. The Mullah’s broadcasts became required listening for Swat’s inhabitants as he castigated both Pakistani and US governments, instructed school administrators not to admit girls, barbers not to shave men, banned music, dancing, television and CDs, advised his audience to burn their evil computers and requested donations. He also handed out lists of provincial and government leaders to be beheaded for their anti-Islamic actions.

  Perhaps predictably, after the US airstrike, Mullah FM added another ingredient, exhorting listeners not to allow their children to be vaccinated against polio. The Nigerian rumours were repeated. The ‘infidel vaccine’ contained female hormones. It spread AIDS. It was unsafe and ineffective. The GPEI was ‘a conspiracy of the Jews and Christians’, Fazlullah told listeners in January 2007, ‘to stunt the population growth of the Muslims’. A new allegation was added: the vaccine was manufactured using pig fat. According to Mullah FM’s logic, there was no room in the Koran for the treatment of diseases before they struck, anyway: children who died from polio were martyrs.

  Not long afterwards, Fazlullah would strike a bargain with the leader of another Islamist group, Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the two joined forces, making him one of the Taliban’s main leaders in the country. He amassed a 15,000-strong army, burned down electrical-goods shops, blew up schools, beheaded village elders, declared war on the country’s President Pervez Musharraf and eventually played a key role in the assassination of Musharraf’s rival, Benazir Bhutto.

  All the while, the anti-polio rhetoric spewed out across the airwaves. According to TTP spokesman Muslim Khan, Pakistan’s inhabitants should not trust the United States, which was busy bombing its villagers, with the health of their children.

  ‘There are other diseases,’ Khan told listeners, ‘hepatitis, typhoid, and so on. Why is everyone concentrating on polio? It’s an American conspiracy’

  The organization found an imam willing to declare a fatwah on the UN and WHO workers, and ordered all NGO staff out of the area on the basis that they employed women – promoting vulgarity and obscenity.

  ‘They hire women who work with men, in the field and in offices,’ thundered Khan. ‘It’s totally un-Islamic and unacceptable.’

  Ghani was worried. Things had clearly taken a turn for the worse. He stopped inviting his friends to come and stay and started looking for a way out himself.

  ‘He was concerned about the deteriorating security situation,’ recalls Azmatullah Jan Faiq. ‘On a number of occasions he told us he wasn’t happy’

  A month after the US bombing of the Chenagai madrasa, Ghani was supervising a polio-eradication project not far away when his car was surrounded by thirty masked men. They signalled for him to stop.

  ‘Three of them were armed with Kalashnikovs,’ the doctor later told his friend Nazirullah Muhammadzai. ‘They started threatening me with dire consequences if I didn’t stop the anti-polio campaign.’ Ghani tried to reason with them. ‘I explained that I was both a Muslim and a doctor. I knew how important anti-polio drops were for the life of a child.’ When the militants were not persuaded, he shrugged. ‘Well,’ he told the masked men. ‘If you don’t believe me, shoot me.’ The doctor would later laugh about the incident with friends (‘Thank God they let me go!’) but it left a scar. Before he was allowed to drive away, the men warned him that, if he ever entered the region again, they would kill him.

  Shaken by this confrontation, Ghani told his friends that he was coming home. One more polio-vaccination campaign in Bajaur, and he was finished. He contacted Abdullatif Bacha, the politician who had arranged the posting in the first place.

  ‘He came to me again,’ Bacha acknowledges. ‘He said he couldn’t continue his work in the current hostile situation in Bajaur. He asked me to get him transferred out.’

  Bacha agreed, and after the meeting Ghani called Muhammadzai to tell him the news: it was over: ‘He was coming back to Nowshera.’

  Bacha made some calls to the federal government and wheels were set in motion: the doctor was to be transferred. But first there was one more task he had to complete.

  Inside the mosque in Shehano Bandar, when Friday prayers were complete, Ghani and his vaccination team faced their opponents. The numbers were hardly even. There were about twenty health workers and their supporters. Those against OPV numbered more than eighty. A furious debate ensued over the putative merits of polio vaccination. The Kalashnikov-toting cleric took the lead immediately.

  ‘He said that the vaccine was provided by the West, by George Bush and that Western people wanted us all dead,’ recalls Hazrat Jamal, the technician recruited by Ghani because of his Islamic-looking beard. ‘He said that the vaccine contained pig fat.’

  Ghani countered that the vaccine was necessary for the health of the village, that he was himself a Muslim and a doctor and that the allegations were not true. Shouldn’t children be left out of this argument, anyway? Surely the War on Terror had nothing to do with kids?

  The argument raged back and forth for around two hours. Finally, Jamal lost his temper. ‘If you’re arguing against this vaccine because it’s made in the West,’ he told the cleric, ‘well, look at your own Kalashnikov. That’s made in the West. If you drive a car, that’s made in the West, too.’ Jamal turned to the assembled crowd. ‘And if you go on the Haj, you will fly there on an aeroplane. Where do you think that was made?’

  At this point, the unimaginable happened. The cleric admitted defeat.

  ‘OK,’ he told the vaccinators reluctantly. ‘I don’t have a family or children myself – but you can come into our village and try to convince the parents here to take the vaccine. I won’t stop you.’

  The team thanked him, left the mosque, dispersed throughout the village of Shehano Bandar and started vaccinating children immediately.

  Two hours later, they met at the white pickup truck.

  ‘Come on,’ Ghani told the driver, Abdul Rahim. ‘Time to go home.’

  Rahim climbed in behind the wheel and Siraj, one of the EPI technicians, sat up next to him. Ghani climbed into the front left-hand seat; the others got into the back. The truck pulled away from Shehano Bandar and began the descent south towards Khar.

  Ghani asked how the vaccination had gone and was informed that around 60 per cent of the parents had allowed their children to be inoculated.

  ‘That’s good,’ the doctor told his staff. ‘You’ve done well.’

  There was, however, a problem: 60 per cent was not enough. They needed 100 per cent. They would all have to come back tomorrow. In the back seat, Hazrat Jamal was incredulous.

  ‘I have to be honest,’ he told his boss, ‘I don’t like this place very much. There�
��s something wrong. The people don’t seem friendly at all.’

  For the next fifteen minutes, the vaccinators argued good-naturedly with Ghani: they didn’t want to return; he knew they would all have to.

  Then, just as the pickup reached the bottom of the mountain track, it came to a right-hand turn so steep it was forced to slow to a crawl. The driver hauled the wheel over, the vehicle turned sharply and Ghani leant over the seat to speak to Jamal.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘We have to come back tomorrow and get the rest.’

  There was no flash. What there was, was a roar so deep and guttural it seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the car, as well as from the lungs of its occupants. So sudden was the detonation that, in the back seat, Jamal thought a rocket must have passed overhead.

  ‘My first reaction was that I was OK, that the rocket had hit somewhere nearby.’ At that very instant Jamal realized the pickup truck was ten metres up in the air. ‘I realized that it wasn’t nearby. That we were the target.’ The bearded EPI technician lost consciousness before the truck hit the ground.

  When he came round, Jamal found himself lying beside the pickup, unable to move. Looking up, he saw the driver Abdul Rahim trapped behind the wheel of the mangled vehicle. Beside him, in shock, was Abdullah, one of the vaccinators, apparently unharmed. Siraj looked like he was sitting on the ground beside him, but that was impossible: one of his legs was severed. Behind them both was Abdul Ghani, lying on the road, drenched in blood. He had been ripped apart from the waist down.

  Unable to move his legs and bleeding profusely, Jamal shouted at the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers for help. Not one stepped forward. He shouted again. Eventually, a voice piped up from the crowd: ‘Who are you? Are you foreigners or are you local?’

  The full extent of the damage caused by parents in Pakistan’s tribal belt not having their children inoculated has yet to be determined. Perhaps it never will be. GPEI officials are keen to clarify that the problem is more complex than just a question of religious refusal. War, security, paranoia, poor sanitation: all play a role. Vaccinating children in war zones is difficult, dangerous and sometimes impossible. The most common reason why children are missed is not religion but instability.

  Privately, officials speculate about what might happen if the programme fails to achieve its goals. In the worst-case scenario, according to Ellyn Ogden of USAID, ‘at some point the initiative will run out of money or the spread of virus will simply get too broad to contain’. International commitment and funding will disappear. GPEI will die. The consequences of such a failure would be catastrophic: more than 10 million children will be paralysed in the next forty years.

  Even Ciro de Quadros, perhaps more than anyone else the person most responsible for instigating the programme back in the late 1980s, is downbeat.

  ‘We may never eradicate polio,’ he admitted to the author Tim Brookes in 2006. ‘It was a great adventure that could have been very successful. I feel very sad.’

  Perhaps de Quadros should consider what he has achieved. Since 1988, more than 2 billion children in 200 countries have been vaccinated. As a direct result, 5 million of them are not paralysed today. A million more are alive, when they would have been dead. Globally, cases of polio today are as low as they have ever been: just 1,595 in 2009. In 2006, polio from Nigeria was finally cleared from Niger, Egypt, Yemen and Indonesia. The Uttar Pradesh outbreak peaked and has since begun to die down. Pakistan is aiming for eradication of the disease from its borders by the end of 2012. Surely the battle is almost over? Not yet. Now there’s polio in Chad, Congo, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda again. The final cut may yet prove to be the hardest.

  * * *

  GPEI staff in FATA are less than optimistic. The programme is in trouble in all seven of the region’s agencies.

  ‘We’re not moving ahead,’ admits one. ‘The major issue is inaccessibility. We can’t access 53 per cent of the areas in Bajaur.’

  The dislocation of millions of people makes the project even harder: refugees want food, shelter and security more than polio drops. ‘How can we convince them of the importance of the drops for the children when they are struggling for their very survival?’ he asks. The programme is ‘at a standstill’.

  In neighbouring Mohmand things are little better. ‘Three out of seven subdivisions are inaccessible,’ says another vaccination official. ‘We cannot move there.’

  For the Khyber agency, the situation is the same: ‘Bara and Terah make up a huge area of the agency, but due to fighting our teams can’t go there at all.’ Other agencies – Orakzai and Lower Kurrum – are largely inaccessible and ridden with factional fighting. Upper Kurrum can only be accessed via Afghanistan. Vaccine is making it through, but, since there are no monitoring facilities, it’s hard to determine how effective the programme is.

  ‘No one knows whether the vaccine was given to children or not,’ admits the official.

  North Waziristan has been under a military curfew for eighteen months, so no polio vaccination is taking place at all. The whole situation is a lottery.

  ‘Most of the people have migrated to nearby settled districts and frontier regions anyway,’ he explains. ‘There are no anti-polio campaigns and no valid data on the current status of the disease.’

  In South Waziristan, regions under the control of the TTP are no-go areas for anyone, let alone health workers. No vaccination is taking place.

  Ongoing fighting along the border creates suspicion, which further fuels the problem. Even in safer areas, polio eradicators are often assumed to be working for the Government or the CIA, collecting information about inhabitants either for new fertility-reduction vaccines or military targeting.

  ‘The military, the militants and the [US] drone attacks have made life miserable for the local communities,’ says the official. ‘They’re caught in a vicious circle and fighting for their survival. Thousands of children are left unvaccinated.’ Rumours about vaccinators, and the vaccine itself, abound. ‘When Bush was the President of the United States,’ he recalls, ‘some people even said that his urine was used in the vaccine.’

  Such are the levels of suspicion that, although they are willing to talk about the polio-eradication programme, none of the vaccination officials will divulge their real names, even off the record.

  To this day, Dr Ghani’s friends are unsure about the exact mechanism of the bomb that killed him. Authorities have stated that the explosives were placed under his car seat; Ghani’s driver says that he guarded the vehicle the entire time, so it would have been impossible for anyone to place a charge on it. Local villagers, who may know more, maintain that a roadside device was triggered by remote control as Ghani’s vehicle passed by. Certainly the location of the detonation, on a sharp turn where the car was forced to decelerate almost to a standstill, would have made this a good place for a bomb; that Ghani was sitting in the left-hand seat might explain why his injuries were so much more severe than the other occupants: if the charge was placed on the outer edge of the turn, he took the brunt of the blast. Next to receive the shockwave would have been Siraj, who lost a leg – then died in hospital a few days later. What seems in little doubt is that it was not a random attack.

  ‘One fact is clear,’ says Namair Muhammad. ‘He was the target.’

  Fazli Raziq was at home when the phone rang at 6 p.m. on 16 February 2007. A colleague informed him that Ghani had been killed near Salarzai.

  ‘It was like a thunderstorm,’ he says of the call. ‘I couldn’t believe it.’

  Asked how he knew, the colleague explained there had been a newsflash on local TV. Since Raziq had no television, he called Namair Muhammad, who confirmed the news: Ghani’s official car had been travelling away from Shehano Bandar when the bomb went off. His body was on its way home.

  Ghani’s friends congregated at his family home in Manki Sharif that night. At 11 p.m., the corpse was finally delivered. Medical staff were unable to inspect it because it was in a sealed coffin.


  ‘The lower half of his body had been vaporized by the explosion,’ says Raziq. ‘But his face and chest were safe.’

  Those who inspected the scene of the bomb told his friends that the doctor had been killed instantly. His killers were never identified.

  ‘Nobody ever tried to pressure the Government to bring the perpetrators to justice,’ says Nazirullah Muhammadzai. ‘It was very discouraging.’

  The family was offered a 500,000 rupee award, and a pension of 8,000 rupees per month: about $100. Together they were not sufficient to cover the cost of three children in full-time education, so Ghani’s oldest son Ameer Hamza was forced to drop out of college to support the family.

  Not long after Ghani’s death, a plaque arrived from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Signed by the Center’s president C. Charles Stokes, it announced that – in the light of his ‘extraordinary contributions and sacrifices’ – Abdul Ghani had been named a ‘Polio Eradication Hero’.

  He wasn’t the only hero, of course. Hazrat Jamal, still unable to use one leg as a result of the explosion, is back on the vaccination trail, still going after twenty-three years. So are the others. Abdul Rahim, the driver, was unconscious for three days. When he woke up, he was told there had been an accident, but everyone had survived. All would be fine. His next recollection, a week later, is of being told this information was incorrect. Actually, the car had been bombed. Dr Ghani was dead.

  ‘I sat and cried for hours. I was just so immensely sad.’

  Jamal felt the same. ‘A good man,’ he says of Dr Ghani. ‘We miss him.’

  Pakistan’s religious leaders are under no illusion as to the scale of the problems in their country. Maulana Rahat Hussain, a religious authority and former parliamentary senator from Swat, first heard rumours about vaccines when he was studying at a seminary in 1988, but immediately dismissed them as scare stories. An educated man, Hussain knows that the OPV rumours are false, though he finds many of the other stories circulating in their wake persuasive.