Scripps Howard News Service

At the start of the new millennium, the United Nations’ health organizations, WHO and UNICEF, were reasonably confident that polio could be eradicated by the end of 2004.

Then came radical Islam, with its suspicions about — if not downright hatred of — the United States. Muslim leaders in northern Nigeria announced that they were blocking U.N. immunizations of children because, they believed, the vaccines were laced with HIV and sterilization chemicals: It was all part of a sinister U.S. plot to reduce the Muslim population.

Whether the villagers believed this nonsense was immaterial because the Islamic radicals were prepared to stop the immunizations by force.

The disease spread to southern Nigeria and seven neighboring West African nations, and it has been a slow process to recoup the lost ground.

Now a Pakistani Taliban commander in North Waziristan has banned a polio-inoculation program just days before 161,000 children under age 5 were to be vaccinated. If this ban stands, it is a heartbreaking setback in the drive to eliminate the disease.

The commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, said he would allow the program to go forward if the U.S. stops all drone strikes. In a way, holding the children hostage to this crippling disease is a backhanded compliment: It suggests that the U.S. is too humane to allow this to happen and that we care more about Pakistan’s children than Taliban leaders do.

According to The New York Times, Pakistan accounted for 198 new cases of polio last year, the highest rate in the world. The disease is now endemic in just three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

The sad thing about this mujahedeen meddling is that health workers were beginning to make real progress, 22 new cases reported in Pakistan so far this year compared with 52 this time last year.

It would speak very poorly of Pakistan if its government stood by while this crippling but easily preventable disease spread through the children of its northern tribes.