Word: pakistani
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...Henri Lévy, France's most irrepressibly public philosopher, says he's always been fighting the same adversary: "the will to purity," whether political or racial. In a long career of public causes, he has seen that ill will on the faces of Nazi sympathizers, the Soviet nomenklatura, Pakistani generals fighting against Bangladesh's independence, and Serb paramilitaries bent on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Now he sees it in militant Islam - which he believes is perilously close to acquiring nuclear arms. Lévy's latest book was not prompted by political theory, but brute fact: the murder...
...murder of Daniel Pearl, above, Lévy traveled widely to expose the role of Islamic militants in Pearl's death. Lévy claims that Pearl - "a refutation of his killers' view of a clash of civilizations" - was murdered before he could reveal links between al-Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence chiefs...
...from London to Dubai and Bosnia, and from fact to a kind of fiction. In retracing Pearl's last steps - the story that got him killed - Lévy concludes that the reporter's kidnapping, decapitation and dismemberment was essentially a "crime of state" that implicates parts of the Pakistani government. And it is in Pakistan, he believes, where al-Qaeda's "madmen of God" mesh with nuclear scientists and intelligence chiefs, that a battle must be joined that will dwarf the controversy over Iraq. "The tyranny of Saddam Hussein belongs to another century," Lévy says. "The debate...
...fictionalized scenes help the book read like a novel, but Lévy doesn't need them to reach his conclusion: that Pearl's murder was ordered - precisely by whom he admits he doesn't know - because "he knew too much" that linked top Pakistani bombmakers and intelligence chiefs to al-Qaeda. That claim grows out of an accretion of detail that seems plausible but is hardly airtight: he cites an unnamed policeman who contends that Sheikh secretly surrendered to Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Agency (ISI) on May 5, 2002, then spent a week in a safe house before allowing...
...Either way, FBI and CIA officials have thousands of questions to put to Attash, who is in Pakistani custody at the moment but is likely to be handed over to U.S. or joint custody soon. The most vital questions concern schemes currently on the drawing board. He was caught with a massive pile of explosives and weapons, probably for use against Western interests in Pakistan, but, says a U.S. official, "We think he's involved in operations around the world...