BACK in 2000 I shared a train cabin from Amsterdam to Munich with an Afghan man who, when he learned I was a journalist, pleaded with me to communicate to the American public that the CIA had to stop destroying his country and rebuild it instead. "They have so much power," I recall him saying. I reacted with the tolerant and condescending attitude of the Western liberal. The real sources of Afghan misery, obviously, were tribal, political and religious rivalry, and while it was tempting for people with lower levels of political understanding to blame a foreign mastermind for their troubles, such conspiratorial thinking was actually part of the problem in the Mideast, as in Eastern Europe. Right?

Afghanistan and Pakistan are where liberalism goes to die. In the years since, it's become increasingly clear that my traveling companion was at least partially right: when trying to explain a social or political event in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it's entirely rational to assume that it stems from a plot by an intelligence agency, quite likely the CIA. The sickest confirmation of this point was the recent revelation that the CIA ran an operation to verify Osama bin Laden's location by gathering DNA samples through a false-flag hepatitis B vaccination programme. As James Fallows notes, American officials are defending this operation, not denying it.

This is despicable and stupid.

All over the world, poor people resist vaccination campaigns in the belief that they are part of a plot by powerful authorities to take advantage of them. The CIA operation in Pakistan turns these fears from crazy conspiracy theories into accurate and rational beliefs. But what's really tragic is that Pakistan happens to be at the epicenter of a crucial ongoing vaccination programme: the worldwide campaign to eliminate polio, which has been hampered by opposition from Muslim clerics. As it happens, the only countries in the world where polio is still endemic are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and "persistent pockets of polio transmission in northern India, northern Nigeria and the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are the current focus of the polio eradication initiative." In Nigeria, beginning in 2003, Muslim religious leaders hamstrung polio vaccination campaigns by spreading rumours that the shots are actually sterilisation drugs, part of a conspiracy by Westerners to reduce African birth-rates. At a minimum, several hundred Nigerian children per year contracted polio in subsequent years because of the resulting failure of vaccination campaigns. By 2007, Taliban clerics in Pakistan joined the anti-vaccine campaigns. Resistance also developed in extremely poor regions of Uttar Pradesh in India. To counter both religious resistance and high levels of "misconceptions" among the extremely poor, hard-to-reach populations where polio is concentrated, World Health Organisation-backed health campaigns engaged in outreach to local religious authorities, according to a WHO report.

In 2004, Muslim religious (2697) and community (1892) leaders were asked to participate in the polio campaign, resulting in 77% and 79%, respectively, of these leaders supporting the programme's efforts to convince resistant caregivers. They succeeded in 87% of cases in their coverage area, reaching 100% in some districts. This was a critical contribution to the reduction of the immunity gap among Muslim and Hindu children in Uttar Pradesh's western region. The number of Muslim children who had not received at least two polio drops was reduced from 5% in 2002 to nearly 0% in 2004. Engagement of religious leaders to counter refusals due to religious reasons or misperceptions has yielded similar results in Pakistan's north-west frontier province. Data from 2007 show that, after involving religious leaders in polio eradication activities, coverage of children in families refusing due to religious reasons increased from 13% in August to 17% in October, and coverage of families refusing due to misconceptions increased from 37% to 50% in the same period. When properly engaged, religious and community leaders become strong community allies to eradicate polio.

Terrific. How many of those Muslim religious leaders in Pakistan will continue to support vaccination programmes, now that it's clear that such programmes may in fact be CIA operations designed to smoke out Taliban or al-Qaeda operatives so they can be taken out in drone missile strikes?

If the fake vaccination campaign was a necessary part of the operation to "take out" Osama bin Laden, it would have been better to leave Mr bin Laden in. One more ailing ex-terrorist holed up in a ratty house in remote Pakistan, watching old videos of himself; this was not worth jeopardising global vaccination campaigns. In fact, though, nobody will be able to say whether the vaccination DNA intelligence was critical to the assassination effort. Like any other programme, it was one more effort among many, launched by officials who decided the probability of producing some information useful for their organisation's priority goal outweighed the nebulous possibility of doing some damage to public goals that were not their specific responsibility and had no constituency within their organisation. In that sense it's similar to what happened at another large organisation concerned with intelligence-gathering. And it's equally inexcusable.

(Photo credit: AFP)