Pakistan, Oct. 16 -- 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 th...