43,000 Afgan Babies Live

But the rights of Taliban "prisoners" takes precedence thanks to layton, dion, doucette........

Jonathan Kay: Meet 43,000 Afghan babies who will live instead of die this year

Sometimes, the media makes bizarre collective choices about what is newsworthy and what is not.
Case in point: Here in Canada, we are obsessed with the brutal treatment of a handful of detainees who our troops have turned over to Afghan authorities. Yet at the same time, all but a few Canadian media organization have ignored a far more important piece of news from Afghanistan: Since the Taliban were in power in 2001, there has been an 18% reduction in the number of children who die before their first birthday.
The good news, reported this week, comes from a countrywide survey by John Hopkins University. According to the new data, 13.5% of Afghan children die before their first birthday. That is an appallingly high number. (By comparison, the Canadian figure is about 0.5%.) But it represents an 18% reduction from the 16.5% of children who died when the Taliban was in power in 2001.
Afghanistan has a population of about 31,000,000, and a birth-rate of about 46.6/1,000 pop. Using those numbers, I calculated that the total number of Afghan babies saved every year (compared to 2001) thanks to the improved infant-mortality numbers is 43,338.
Of course, all of those children — along with countless other humanitarian improvements in the lives of ordinary Afghans — would be put at risk if Canada and other NATO countries withdrew and surrendered the country to the Taliban. Life would then crumble into the brutal. stone-age theocracy it was in the pre-9/11 days.
In fact, some Canadian politicians are seizing on the current detainee scandal to argue for just such a cut-and-run strategy. How perverse would it be if the welfare of a few dozen terror suspects compromised the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Aghan babies?