“Dr. Shakeel Afridi is the unsung hero of the war on terror.”  So sings U.S. Congressional Representative Dana Rohrabacher in nominating Afridi for the Congressional Gold Medal.  (You can read his full speech here).   Humanitarians are well familiar with Dr. Afridi’s exploits, though perhaps somewhat less likely to heap praise:  Afridi is and will continue to be the unsung cause of a lot of deaths.

 Who is Afridi?  He’s the medical doctor who engineered a fake vaccination campaign in a certain part of Pakistan, allowing him to enter the house of Planet Earth’s #1 most wanted bearded man.  It was the good doctor’s intelligence that supported the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  In essence, Afridi did for the widely held (and wildly exaggerated) belief that we humanitarians are spies or soldiers what Monica Lewinsky did for rumors of Bill Clinton’s philandering.  So when the al-Shabaab militia group in Somalia accuses UN agencies and NGOs of being the enemy, using that as an excuse to expel vital aid organizations from famine-stricken areas of Somalia, it is easy to label the Shabaab callous or insensitive or even murderous, but you can’t label them nutters.

 Afridi’s exploits create a shot heard round the world, the well-hyped example which transforms an obscure event into common knowledge.  I have a feeling it will live on.  For anybody with a sense of skepticism or suspicion, for people who need to trust their doctor, it’s a simple confirmation  that humanitarians aren’t what they appear to be.  Confirmation that the conspiracy theorists, gossipers, rumor mongers, and anybody else with a interest in stopping aid work aren’t just people with a loose screw. 

 About the only upside is this:  if people only suspect that we are secretly working for the CIA, maybe they won’t notice all the other ways in which we humanitarians do the bidding of others, be it a specific government, institutional donor, or that amorphous bogeyman, Global Power.  Thanks, Dr. Afridi, for improving our street cred as spies.