“Attacks on polio workers have become dangerously frequent, and so security measures are being ratcheted up,” an editorial in Pakistan’s The Nation states. “But even in cases where apparently ample security is provided, attacks happen. Instances where police patrols accompanying the health workers, have themselves come under fatal attack, are not unheard of,” the editorial writes. “Religious extremism is not going to go away by just glossing over it with a false sense of security or with half-baked measures such as providing police mobiles to polio workers,” the editorial states, concluding, “These measures only demonstrate how the state is incapable of doing what it should be doing: providing the bare essentials of safety and security to its citizens. … So long as the terrorists and the creed that gives birth to them in the first place are thought of as something to fall back on during hard times, there is neither any hope for polio workers nor the ordinary Pakistani” (12/2).