Borderless Web of Killers

The barbaric murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl did more than devastate his family, friends and co-workers. It also illumined the borderless web spun by international terrorists and the difficulty of steering Pakistan away from Islamic fundamentalism.

The main suspect in Pearl’s kidnapping and killing in Pakistan is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a Briton born to Pakistani parents. He traveled to Bosnia, Afghanistan and, in 1994, into India, where he kidnapped a group of Westerners and demanded the release of a fellow militant in an Indian prison. He was instead caught and jailed. Unfortunately, five years later, India freed Sheikh, his mentor, Maulana Masood Azhar, and a third prisoner in exchange for the release of more than 150 people aboard an Indian Airlines plane hijacked by Islamic militants to Afghanistan.

As the Reagan administration showed when it sold arms to Iran in a futile attempt to win the release of U.S. hostages held in Lebanon, it is difficult for nations to resist the pleas of families to ransom their loved ones. But the danger is clear from the Sheikh case: Terrorists keep committing terror.

Azhar is currently under house arrest in Pakistan. While imprisoned in India, he told police of meetings with groups linked to Al Qaeda that attacked U.S. forces in Somalia in 1993 and U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has rightly said that the target of the kidnappers was his government as much as it was Pearl. Islamic fundamentalism has been a problem in Pakistan for a quarter-century. The religious political parties have not gotten much support in elections, but a previous military ruler, Zia ul-Haq, wooed them to give himself political legitimacy. The CIA strengthened the fundamentalists when it used them against the Russians who invaded next-door Afghanistan in 1979.

A special concern is the involvement of Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence agency with fundamentalists and possibly with the kidnapping of Pearl. The agency was godfather to the fanatical Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. Musharraf has installed new agency leaders, but many mid-level functionaries remain sympathetic to the extremists.

Pearl’s kidnappers demanded the release of Pakistanis captured in Afghanistan and held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba and the return of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. But some intelligence officials believe that the terrorists intended to kill Pearl from the start. They also say other Muslim extremists involved in the Pearl murder may have slipped back to their bases in the Persian Gulf region.

Finding them will be difficult even if intelligence agencies in the region cooperate. But beyond the need to bring Pearl’s murderers to justice, a vigorous manhunt would show support for Musharraf in his efforts to cut the ties between government security agents and terrorists. And whether successful in this specific hunt or not, the effort would turn up information and informers, increasing the heat on the entire network.