Another Levies constable was killed in Swat this week while guarding a polio team. It made the headlines for a day, then slipped into the familiar silence that follows such deaths.
Yet his killing tells more about Pakistan than any speech or summit could. It tells of a state that must now send rifles with vaccinators, as though medicine were a military campaign.
More than two hundred polio workers and security escorts have been murdered in this country since the 1990s. Each death is an indictment written in blood – not of the foot soldiers of public health, but of those who lead them from behind desks and slogans. The campaign against polio has become a measure of how little faith remains between the governed and those who govern.
Pakistan is one of only two countries left on earth where the wild poliovirus still survives. The science is sound, the funding abundant. What has failed is trust. Communities that once welcomed vaccinators now fear them. Militants feed on suspicion, turning ignorance into ideology.
The numbers sting. Six cases in 2023 rose to seventy in 2024. One in three environmental samples nationwide still tests positive. The virus endures not because it is strong, but because our institutions are weak. And yet, in this exhaustion, there is courage. Quiet, persistent and almost defiant. In Lakki Marwat, women ride motorbikes across hostile terrain to reach children no one else will reach. They are the state’s last credible face: women who build trust where the government has lost it.
The constable’s blood in Swat was shed for more than a vaccination drive. His death, and the many before it, mark the price of our confusion – a nation that must militarise compassion because it cannot inspire belief. Polio’s last mile was meant to be a triumph of science. In Pakistan, it has become a test of conscience. The world waits for us to finish what it began decades ago; we wait, still, for a state that knows how. *