Pip: Rokan’s Journal this week covers the kind of stories that make you wish they were hypothetical — children dying from a vaccine that’s been available for decades, a border that’s been a wound since 1893, and a country where a conviction for rape is rarer than a lightning strike.
Mara: Rokan Uddin is the author across all of it. He is a Retired Major General from Bangladesh Army. The posts move through a public health collapse in Bangladesh, the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict and what reconciliation would actually require, and the structural roots of sexual violence and impunity.
Pip: Let’s start with the measles outbreak — and the decisions that made it happen.
When Prevention Becomes Policy Failure
Mara: Bangladesh’s 2026 measles outbreak is not a story about a dangerous new pathogen. It’s a story about what happens when a functioning immunization system is dismantled by administrative decisions, and children pay the price.
Pip: The post doesn’t soften the indictment. UNICEF’s Bangladesh representative Rana Flowers, warning the interim health minister against changing vaccine procurement away from UNICEF, is quoted saying: “For God’s sake… don’t do this.”
Mara: That warning was not acted on. The government switched to an open tender system in September 2025, the process stalled in bureaucratic delays, and vaccine supplies dried up nationwide. By late March 2026, only 59 percent of eligible children had received measles vaccinations — well below outbreak-prevention thresholds. That data was later quietly removed from the government’s website.
Pip: A health ministry erasing its own coverage numbers is the kind of detail that belongs in a satire — except 475 people are dead.
Mara: The post is direct on the structural cause: a supplementary measles-rubella campaign postponed due to political unrest was cancelled entirely, and the Health, Population and Nutrition Sector Programme was scrapped without an adequate exit plan. Among confirmed measles patients, 74 percent had received neither vaccine dose.
Pip: The lesson the post draws is stark — public health infrastructure is not a political instrument, and every incoming government must treat functioning health programs as sovereign assets, not things to restructure for administrative reasons.
Mara: That framing carries weight given where the outbreak hit hardest — the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, where around three-quarters of confirmed measles patients were unvaccinated. The most vulnerable population absorbed the worst of a failure that started at the policy level. The conflict driving that vulnerability is its own story.
A Border Drawn in 1893 Still Bleeding
Mara: The Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship is one of the most consequential unresolved conflicts in the Muslim world — and the post on the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict traces exactly how it got this bad, and what honest reconciliation would require.
Pip: The colonial origin matters here. The Durand Line, drawn by the British Empire in 1893, divided the Pashtun people and was never accepted by Afghanistan as a permanent border. Pakistan’s founding in 1947 inherited that rejection immediately — Afghanistan was the only country to vote against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations.
Mara: The post describes the current paradox precisely: “Pakistan helped bring the Taliban to power, and the Taliban’s return has dramatically worsened Pakistan’s own security situation.” The Afghan Taliban has not only refused to act against the TTP — the Pakistani Taliban — but has in some cases integrated TTP figures into its own structures.
Pip: So Pakistan’s decades-long strategic investment in the Taliban produced a neighbor that is actively sheltering the group killing Pakistani soldiers and civilians. That is a return on investment that would make any strategist pause.
Mara: The post also names India’s role directly — the title flags it — framing India’s influence as a complicating factor in Pakistan’s strategic calculations, specifically the doctrine of strategic depth that drove Pakistan to seek a friendly Afghanistan as a buffer. The humanitarian cost running underneath all of this is severe: more than 28 million Afghans facing acute food insecurity, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees forcibly expelled from Pakistan in 2023.
Pip: The post’s argument for reconciliation is grounded in Islamic obligation as much as strategic logic — it quotes the Quran directly on the brotherhood of believers, and calls on religious scholars to carry that message where diplomatic communiqués cannot reach.
Mara: Economic interdependence is also named as a foundation — Afghanistan needs Pakistan’s ports, Pakistan needs Afghan territory for Central Asian connectivity. The post frames these not as idealistic hopes but as material incentives that give both sides a stake in the other’s stability. Which brings us to a different kind of structural failure — one that’s closer to home and harder to talk about.
Impunity as Infrastructure
Pip: The post on rape in Bangladesh opens with a claim worth sitting with: this is not a crisis of reporting — the violence is actually rising, and the country can no longer manage it with candlelight vigils that fade as quickly as they are lit.
Mara: The numbers are specific. Ain o Salish Kendra documented at least 1,413 women and children raped in Bangladesh in 2020 alone — 208 gang-raped, 47 killed after rape. And the post is clear that these are only reported cases, in a society where shame, fear, and distrust of police prevent most victims from ever coming forward.
Pip: Then comes the number that reframes everything else.
Mara: A 2019 report by the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust found that between 2011 and 2019, conviction rates in rape cases were below two percent. The post’s framing is exact: “This is not merely a failure of justice — it is an active invitation to repeat offending.”
Pip: A greater than 98 percent chance of no legal consequence. That is not a gap in the system — that is the system working as it has been allowed to work.
Mara: The post methodically dismantles the arguments that place responsibility on women — dress, movement, mixed spaces. It points out that most rapes in Bangladesh are committed by people known to the victim: neighbors, relatives, employers, teachers, religious figures. The stranger-rapist narrative, it argues, is a distraction from the far more common reality of trusted proximity abused.
Pip: And the structural causes the post names go deeper than any single policy failure — patriarchy reinforced across homes, schools, religious institutions, and a legal system that for decades treated rape as a matter of family honor rather than individual criminal violation.
Mara: The post calls for simultaneous interventions: legal reform focused on conviction certainty rather than just harsher sentences, mandatory consent education embedded in the national curriculum from primary school, police retraining, one-stop crisis centers, and regulation of online content that normalizes sexual violence. The Women and Children Repression Prevention Act exists. What has consistently been absent, the post argues, is institutional will.
Pip: Three posts, three different arenas — and the same underlying problem running through all of them: the gap between what a state is capable of doing and what it chooses to do.
Mara: And who absorbs the cost of that gap. Always the same people.
Mara: These are for Today’s Podcast. More from Rokan’s Journal next time.
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