The latest UNICEF Update on the Measels Immunization Campaign in Afghanistan I could find is from last January. Based on the numbers in the update, including the anticipated numbers mentioned for further efforts, it seems unlikely to me that 19 million people could have been vaccinated by now (even if the best estimates were right). I'd even question whether the goal of 9 million has been reached.

Glenn......

The point really is not how many have been vacinated......

The point is how many Afghans have bben SAVED with the US presence? From Taliban killers, from drought, from disease etc.

This should really be factored in when the AXIS of FEEBLE talk about civilian deaths.

Oh, and where were they when the Taliban killed so many? Just wondering.

Unless they are vaccinating by cropduster, or C130.

Well, yes, George, but news media accuracy is an issue, too.

Wonder if any of the media outlets claiming outrageous Afgan casualties due to US bombing will bother to report on this... I'm not holding my breath.

Ah, why don't we hear about the threat of starvation in Afghanistan anymore? How Afghan lives were saved by the war against the Islamo-fascists and their direct action pals?
How many Afghans have returned from exile in Pakistan and Iran? Voting with the feet is the ultimate form of polling. Just watch which direction people are going tells you what is really going on in a country. BTW, where's the condemnation of the attacks on Christian churches and hospitals in Pakistan not only by Muslims, but by the diversity-nazis and the those constantly knocking us for OUR lack of tolerance. It's hard to come up with something lower than attacking children and nuns.

Well George, even if the issue is one of how many Afgans have been saved due to the intervention of the U.S., the statistics reported still need to be accurate. To the extent they are used to present the idea that the U.S. power being used is a "power for the good," the examples of the "good" deeds and the data on the number of lives saved must be unassailable. Otherwise those that disagree will simply point out the inaccuracy in the data and will assert that the use of false information shows that the power must not be for good (despite any flaws in logic). So, I agree as to the point, but deem the accuracy of information used to support it to be essential.

Yeah, my post is hardly an attack on the war. But even though I think that the case for what we did in Afghanistan is irrefutable based on the actual facts, it's still important to distinguish what's true from what's not.

In a February 1, 2002 column entitled "A Merciful War," NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof argued that however many civilians had been inadvertently killed by US troops in Afghanistan (the column was written shortly after the Marc Herold brouhaha, which, if anyone noticed, the Guardian resurrected yesterday), the war was indeed a just one and had saved even more people. Here's the money paragraph as pertaining to the current discussion:

"But now aid is pouring in and lives are being saved on an enormous scale. Unicef, for example, has vaccinated 734,000 children against measles over the last two months, in a country where virtually no one had been vaccinated against the disease in the previous 10 years. Because measles often led to death in Afghanistan, the vaccination campaign will save at least 35,000 children's lives each year."

So someone's clearly wrong here. I couldn't find the NRO article to which Glenn links, but, a.) 19 million seems highly implausible given the population of the country and the current, still-shaky situation, b.) if the 19 million figure were true, it would have saved a lot more than 35,000 lives, if, going by Kristof's rate above, measles killed about 1 in 20 Afghan children. I'd like to see where the NRO article gets its figures, but my guess is that the 35,000 figure has taken on a life of its own after being quoted in the NYT and perhaps elsewhere, and is now showing up out of proper context.

Here's the full Kristof article, which, though slightly off topic, is worth a read.
---
One of the uncomfortable realities of the war on terrorism is that we Americans have killed many more people in Afghanistan than died in the attack on the World Trade Center.

Over the last couple of months I've tried to tabulate the Afghan death toll. My best guess is that we killed 8,000 to 12,000 Taliban fighters, along with about 1,000 Afghan civilians. So what is the lesson of this? Is it that while pretending to take the high road, we have actually slaughtered more people than Osama bin Laden has? Or that military responses are unjustifiable because huge numbers of innocents inevitably are killed?

No, it's just the opposite.

Our experience there demonstrates that troops can advance humanitarian goals just as much as doctors or aid workers can. By my calculations, our invasion of Afghanistan may end up saving one million lives over the next decade.

Ever since Vietnam, the West has been deeply squeamish about the use of force -- particularly European and American liberals, who are often so horrified by bloodshed involving innocents that they believe nothing can justify it. But Afghanistan shows that guns and bombs can save lives as much as scalpels and IV tubes do.

Look at the numbers. In each of the last few years, without anyone paying much attention, 225,000 children died in Afghanistan before the age of 5, along with 15,000 women who died during pregnancy or childbirth. There was no way to save those lives under the Taliban; indeed, international organizations were retreating from Afghanistan even before 9/11 because of the arrests of Christian aid workers.

But now aid is pouring in and lives are being saved on an enormous scale. Unicef, for example, has vaccinated 734,000 children against measles over the last two months, in a country where virtually no one had been vaccinated against the disease in the previous 10 years. Because measles often led to death in Afghanistan, the vaccination campaign will save at least 35,000 children's lives each year.

"You're going to see an immediate jump" in Afghanistan's health statistics and school attendance, says Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Program. But he adds that truly building the country up will be a hard slog over 10 or 20 years.

Of course, the gains depend on stability in Afghanistan, and that is not guaranteed. But if the West lives up to its obligations to help Afghanistan, and not abandon it as we all did a decade ago, then the potential savings in human lives are staggering.

Heidi J. Larson of Unicef says that if all goes well, child and maternal mortality rates will drop in half in Afghanistan over the next five years. That would mean 112,000 fewer children and 7,500 fewer pregnant women dying each year.

Likewise, a desperate rush to train 20,000 new teachers and open new schools means that some 1.5 million Afghan children will be able to enroll in elementary school when the term begins next month -- more than double the number of children who were in school a year ago.

Denunciations of the American bombing in Afghanistan pop up regularly in the United States and even more boldly in Europe and the Muslim world. A Pakistani columnist, Humayun Gauhar, described the war in his country's typically subdued prose: "The stench of Afghan flesh, the sweet smell of their children's blood (garnished lightly with one dead American) has overpowered the quest for prime target Osama bin Laden."

Yet these critics seemed less exercised by the much larger number of preventable deaths in Afghanistan from routine ailments. I've sat in mud huts with parents sobbing as their children died of diarrhea, and trust me: Their grief is every bit as crushing as that of parents who lose children to bombs.

Working from United Nations figures, if Afghanistan eventually improves just to the wretched levels of neighboring Pakistan, that would mean 115,000 fewer deaths a year of children under the age of 5, along with 9,600 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year.

All this underscores a simple truth, and enough time has passed since Vietnam that we should be able to acknowledge it: Military intervention, even if it means lost innocent lives on both sides, can serve the most humanitarian of goals.

I have no info but I wonder whether someone skipped a decimal place. 1.9 million, while large, is more believable in terms of the initial goal, the total population, and the number Kristof gives for February.

Sorry for the many postings, but I think I have the answer here. Kristof writes:

the vaccination campaign will save at least 35,000 children's lives each year.

My guess therefore is that UNICEF is saying that *the entire campiagn,* if it goes as they think it will, will save 35,000 children's lives. When Kristof spoke to them they had already vaccinated 734,000 people and were extrapolating the 35,000 based on the entire number of people they hoped to vaccinate in the year ahead. Perhaps the 19 million in the NRO article is the "magic number" they need to reach to hit the goal of 35,000 children's lives saved.

Thought I would take a look at the well-formed, meticulous, and fact-based arguments you keep talking about Glenn. Interesting results in this little comment thread.

Gives me an idea of what you expect in the way of 'good' debating practices, as well as well-formed arguments you would expect from the anti-war side of things.

Interesting lesson. Thanks professor.

This press release from the state department about the measles campaign says that 35,000 children die each year in Afghanistan from measles. The goal was to immunize 9 million children. I suspect that's the estimated childhood population of the country, not 19 million. If they succesfully immunized 9 million, then they would theoretically save 35,000 lives a year by eliminating the disease.

Unicef has the following claims on their website,
http://www.unicef.org/noteworthy/afghanistan/immunization/index.html

The 9 million figure apparently comes from their goal of immunizing 90 percent of the population aged 6 to 12 (10 million children out of a population of 26.8 million). Perhaps the figure of 19 million people could refer to adults as well, although their page doesn't claim this. They state that more than either 6 million or 5 million children (they're not clear) have been immunized in the country as a whole as of this summer (June 2002). The 750 k figure apparently refers to Kabul alone as opposed to countrywide. The figure of 35000 children saved is clearly stated as a goal/projection, and not the number already saved.

Hope this helps.

so 35,000 lives saved is a projection; as is 9 million intended to be immunized. If one assumes that *all* non-immunized children would have gotten measles, then the death rate from measles was about 0.3% of measles cases. However, in the absence of immunization, it's not that likely that all 9 million children in Afghanistan would get measles while children (or at all), and therefore, the death rate is proportionately higher. UNICEF may also be counting on greater access to the basic medical care which can make measles much less likely to be fatal, and only counting those who would die even if they caught measles and received basic care.

I wonder if 19 million came from adding the polio goals to the measles goals, not realising that it's mostly the same children?

Burningbird: As you can see, we do try to get the numbers right, even when the wrong numbers support our positions. That's in contrast to those who, for example, continue to cite the multiply-discredited Marc Herold figures on Afghan civilian casualties during the war.

People reflexively opposed to war forget that far more people in the 20th century died at the whim of uncontested governments than died as the result of international or civil war. Programmed famines, ‘resettlement’ and low-tech mass murder racked up the greatest body counts.

By contrast, modern tactics seek less to kill individuals that to destroy systems of command, communication and logistics. Destroying systems means destroying objects first and people only incidentally. A soldier without ammunition or ability to coordinate with his comrades, posses little threat.

More people in sub-Sahara Africa will die in the coming year at the hands of their own governments than will die in a full tilt U.S. invasion of Iraq. Worse still their deaths will bring nothing to the world but more power and privilege to the elites who murder them. At least those innocents who died in Afghanistan bought with their lives hope for their loved ones and peoples. The great “crime” of the Gulf War lay not in the incidental killing of civilians but in throwing away the chance to give the survivors hope for a better future.

Wars save lives and make the world a better place when they destroy regimes and institutions that murder on a vast scale. The refusal of so many to even contemplate this idea constitutes a moral willful negligence.

Well said, Shannon. But for some people, being "anti-war" is a matter of personal identity, not logic. So it doesn't matter that going to war can save lives -- at least, it doesn't matter as much as being the "right kind of person" and making sure that everyone knows it.

And some pro-war webloggers won't have a true, detailed, fair and open discussion on the war; preferring to fall back on canned rhetoric, half-truths, innuendo, character assassination, and the deliberate and unwarranted discredit of opponents.

What was it that the Libertarian Party's press release said?

"The bottom line is that Bush’s wide-ranging indictment against Saddam Hussein is missing one key element: proof that Iraq poses a direct threat to the United States, Dasbach said."