Author: Tunku Varadarajan
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: September 18, 2003
Bernard-Henri Lévy's "Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?"
The jacket of "Who Killed Daniel
Pearl?" describes the author, Bernard-Henri Lévy, as "France's leading
philosopher." This may well be true, but such a claim could have the effect,
among non-French readers, of prompting more doubt than trust. And yet I
commend this book. Although written by a philosophe who is given--irrepressibly--to
bouts of navel-gazing, it is not a philosophy book. If it were, then he
could be said to have invented a genre: "forensic philosophy."
Mr. Lévy is better described
here as a forensic fabulist, who weaves his tale by extrapolating vigorously
from hard information gathered from the Pakistani police, Indian intelligence
and his own painstaking research. Sometimes his flights are so undisciplined
as to be flights of fancy, in which he leaves the zone that might properly
be called extrapolation and enters the sphere of pure imagination. This
imparts to his book a lurid, haut-tabloid quality.
An example is his description, as
if through Daniel Pearl's own eyes, of Pearl's decapitation. Another is
his conviction that Pearl--The Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered
in Karachi, Pakistan, in January 2002--was killed not because, as an American
and a Jew, he was a perfect symbolic target for terrorists wishing to intimidate
the West but because he'd stumbled upon details of Pakistan's involvement
in a terrorist "dirty" bomb. (It should be said that his editors, in constant
contact with him, knew nothing of such a discovery--and, given Journal
practice, he'd certainly have told them if he had such news.) The problem
is not whether Pearl did so stumble--who can know what he found? And who
can now know? It is, rather, that Mr. Lévy's conclusions can sometimes
seem greater than the sum of their parts.
But at least he attempts the math.
He's one of the few to ask hard questions about Pearl's death, harder than
the questions the Pakistani investigators appear to have asked of the suspects--harder,
even, than the questions the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad was willing to ask
of the investigators. He is one of the few to explore the links between
the man convicted of Pearl's murder--Omar Sheikh--and Pakistan's Inter
Services Intelligence (ISI); and to raise questions about the links between
the ISI and al Qaeda, not just before Sept. 11, 2001, but after. These
aren't airy questions that can be dismissed--as some will try to do--as
the imaginings of a French fop. It is a fact that Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, then
head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta before 9/11 through an
intermediary. (This was reported in the Journal on Oct. 10, 2001.) So what
have we done about it? Mr. Lévy asks. What indeed?
It is a fact that Omar Sheikh, the
man behind Pearl's murder, turned himself in to an ISI brigadier on Feb.
5, 2002, a full week before his "arrest" was announced to the world by
Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president. So what have we done to make the
Pakistani authorities account for that missing week? Mr. Lévy asks.
What indeed?
It is a fact that, in December 1999,
Omar Sheikh was freed from an Indian jail--where he was serving time for
kidnapping American (and British) citizens in Delhi--in exchange for the
release of 150 Indians whose flight had been hijacked to Kandahar by Islamist
terrorists. (According to an eyewitness, Mr. Lévy reports, Sheikh
was received in Kandahar by an ISI operative.) He returned to Pakistan,
lived openly, married and had a child. Why was no attempt made to apprehend
him, and why did the U.S. never seek his extradition? Mr. Lévy asks.
Why indeed?
But the book is about more than
awkward questions, questions for which there will be few takers--as the
author freely admits--for such time as Gen. Musharraf is regarded as an
ally in the war against terror. The book also bares Mr. Lévy's own
identification--to the point of obsession--with Pearl. He sees in Pearl
someone exactly like himself: On an obvious level, they're both Jews and
share a vocation. (Refreshingly for a philosopher, Mr. Lévy is always
prepared to describe himself as a "journalist.")
But at another level, which occasionally
borders on the creepy, he appears to want to be Pearl. He visits all the
places Pearl had been to in Karachi and goes so far as to sleep in the
same sordid hotel that Pearl once went to. (He has to content himself with
the same floor, since the exact room in which Pearl slept was occupied.)
For sure, this retracing of steps is a respectable device to ascertain
what happened to Pearl and to capture the mood of Karachi's Islamist demimonde;
but some of it borders on posthumous stalking.
Yet the most disconcerting parts
of the book deal with Mr. Lévy's pursuit of Sheikh, his other idée
fixe. He travels everywhere that Sheikh had been--Bosnia, his Delhi jail,
the London School of Economics, Kandahar and an infamous Karachi madrasa
(which Mr. Lévy calls "a terrorist Vatican"). "Everywhere I go I
feel he has been," writes Mr. Lévy, "and yet I find no trace of
him." He seems almost relieved.
Mr. Lévy has a good heart
and a noble sense of outrage. He is also fiercely proud of our civilization
without being contemptuous of the Muslim world. Ignore his flashes of pretension
and his gaudy history as a public intellectual. You cannot but admire a
man who has so much compassion for Pearl. And you can't help wishing that
at least some of his questions will be answered one day.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features
editor of The Wall Street Journal.
