Murder in Pakistan

BOOKMARK

Here are two books on the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in early 2002 "" Marianne Pearl's, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband (Virago/Penguin, Special Indian Price, £ 6.99) and Bernard Henri-Levy's: Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (translated from the French, Melville House, $ 29.95) that you would probably gloss over in bookshops or libraries.

All the same, if you happen to start browsing through them, you would continue to read, not for their who-done-itry, but to get a better insight on the spread of violent jihadi groups on Pakistani soil and their complicity with the Pakistan state and the ISI, in particular.

Neither of the two authors have been able to pinpoint the assassins but it is clear from their descriptions of the Karachi underworld, circumstantial evidence and the loose ends of their investigations that were never tied up that the Pakistani establishment knew what was going on and chose not to look too closely at what was happening in their backyard.

The two books are really quite different from each other though the conclusions they arrive at seem to mesh together. Marianne Pearl, who was five months pregnant when her husband was kidnapped, has essentially written a book of love "" a tribute to a murdered husband by a bereaved and loving wife. Levy's book (he is known as BHL in journalistic circles) is a kind of settling of accounts with the city of Karachi and Pakistan as a whole, which he regards as the head of the evil jihadi empire.

Levy makes no attempt to conceal his deep animosity against the Pakistani State and society. Pakistan is "devil's own home "" drugged on fanaticism, doped on violence "" a silent hell, full of the living damned "" and their nightmare mullahs." Karachi where all the action took place is "a black hole" with "fanatic, long-haired dervishes with wild blood-shot eyes howl(ing) outside the house of the Devil."

BHL spares no one "" men and women, a charge he repeated in the Hardtalk BBC interview some time back. (He had added that Karachi had become the world capital for jihadi terrorists and most al-Qaeda operatives were holed up there or in Pakistan's north west.) Because Levy's descriptions are so full of contempt and so full of ethnic stereotyping, it is difficult not to dismiss his story as the ravings of a journalist who discovers 'facts' to suit his prejudices and hare-brained theories.

Despite the many factual errors, especially on the geography of the subcontinent, we must carry on if only to get an answer to who killed Daniel Pearl and the lessons we can learn from it. Here, the two accounts of Marianne and BHL merge to quite an extent. Based on conjecture for the most part, the hard facts that emerge are these.

First, ISI was hand in glove with the jihadi groups, probably because the top echelons of ISI operatives themselves believe in Islamic fundamentalism. What is important are the religo-ideological ties that bind the Muslims worldwide, not territorial states. Islamic fundamentalists imbued with this philosophy have penetrated deep into the state apparatus and it is not easy to weed them out.

Second, Omar Sheikh (one of the terrorists exchanged in the IC 814 swap) was the key figure in the kidnapping of Pearl. He has confessed to the kidnapping, using various militant jihadi groups to do so.

Sheikh was to use the kidnapping in order to negotiate a prisoner exchange but apparently at the crucial stage the al-Qaeda extremists took over. The execution of Pearl was the work of a different cell, not Sheikh's doing.

As far as we are concerned what is important is that the ISI knew all along what was happening but dragged its feet to allow al-Qaeda to finish the job. According to both Marianne and Levy, three Arabs were involved, two Saudis and one Yemini.

Some conclusions can be drawn. Islamic fundamentalists are deeply entrenched in Pakistan and it will not be easy to flush them out. They could become 'a state within a state.' Because of this, Pakistan will always have a selective deployment of violent Islamists when it suits it. This could rebound on them but it isn't easy to get off the tiger they have nurtured over the years.