Daniel in the den of lions

As French-American relations lie deep in the doldrums, Bernard-Henri Levy, France’s omnipresent philosopher-celebrity, is once more at the center of the most fashionable French issue of the day: anti-Americanism. Levy cannot say it too often: He is passionately “anti-anti-Americanism,” or, as he has said, he opposes those who are anti-America “for what it is rather than for what it does.”

Anti-Americanism, he suggests, is an insidious disease spread across the globe by Islamist extremists, and he associates it closely with anti-Semitism. Levy says he opposes U.S. policy in Iraq but values America, and he tries to make both points by pouring his passion into the story of a terrible crime committed in Pakistan in early 2002 against Daniel Pearl, a journalist whom Levy considers a perfect American: generous, open, liberal, tolerant, justice-seeking and a democrat. “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” is at once a personal book about the psychology of an individual crime -- about “a dead man that I must bring to life” -- and about the larger meanings and implications of that crime. It is meant to be an activist’s alarm call: Its atmospherics alone will leave readers fearing Pakistan.

The paraphernalia of Levy’s wealth, looks, lifestyle and persona preoccupy most of his book’s reviewers. He has written 30 books, many of them controversial; and he has taken up various causes, including those of Bangladesh (where, in 1971, he learned to despise the Pakistani military’s policies, and rightly so), Bosnia-Herzegovina and other war-ravaged places. “Who Killed Daniel Pearl,” filled with Levy’s research, ruminations and interminable self references, is a bestseller in France. The English version makes difficult reading: so long is it, so loosely edited, replete with botched names of people and places. Still, this highly flawed book makes a useful point: If it is left unresolved, real danger could emanate from radical Islamists in Pakistan, a country of 145 million people and a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.

Levy says he became obsessed with Daniel Pearl after hearing the news and seeing the gruesome video of his execution. He spent a year tramping the world, including Los Angeles and Karachi, the city “I detested, where I was afraid,” in search of “the truth.” At one level, Levy’s book reads like a thriller -- in which he eerily inhabits both Pearl and his killer -- at another like a religious passion play in which an innocent victim is destroyed by the forces of evil, bearing the greatest sacrifice of all in the search for truth. Levy describes Karachi’s Village Garden restaurant as “the first station of Daniel Pearl’s cross.” Levy uses local fixers and intelligence agency contacts to build, on the edifice of this single and singular crime, a series of global theses. He pores over secret dossiers and visits unwelcoming places, including the vividly realized Hotel Akbar, where he says Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, housed Islamist militant contacts and where Pearl met his nemesis and kidnapper, British-born Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Pearl, says Levy, was killed because he was a journalist who was discovering too much in a place where such knowledge can kill; he was a Jew with family links to Israel in a place where, Levy correctly points out, an abhorrent anti-Semitism is popular; and he was an American in a place where few Americans feel secure.

Though the Pakistani government insists that Sheikh was responsible for the crime -- he has been sentenced to death in a secret trial -- Levy the sleuth attaches varying degrees of culpability and connection to a global jihadi conspiracy of Western-educated Islamists, Yemeni assassins, Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies, a shady U.S.-based Muslim sect and Al Qaeda. Ultimately, Levy suggests that Al Qaeda, helped by some of Pakistan’s nuclear scientists, might even capture the country’s nuclear weapons.

Some of Levy’s theses are known facts; some have been widely rumored (that Sheikh had ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, for example); others are simply bizarre. Despite Levy’s tone of revelation, intrepid reporters like Pearl, and scholars too, have been piecing together the stories since Sept. 11, 2001. They have written about Pakistani intelligence agents and soldiers who, while hunting down Al Qaeda leaders, also collude with Taliban supporters, local sectarian militants and the religious parties gaining power in Pakistan. Levy’s method is frustrating: Though he insists that most of the book is fact and little is fiction, the lines can be hard to discern. He calls his book a romanquete: part novel, part investigation: “When reality eludes you and circumstances are such that you are compelled to speculation,” he explains, he uses imagination to break impasses in research.

How disappointing. And how distracting from Levy’s serious point: The larger threats to the West, he says, come not from Iraq -- which he calls a “false target, a red herring” -- but from Pakistan. Levy is persuasive: Fighting a discretionary war, U.S. troops in Iraq are drawing in terrorists like bees to honey, and the war’s cost in opportunities lost to tackle threats in places like Pakistan could be enormous. In Pakistan, an Islamist terrorism network persists, killing routinely; an active nuclear program is in place (Pakistan is estimated to own the capacity for about 30 to 50 weapons); and government agencies that hunt down terrorists are sometimes in bed with them. The bloody and disturbing narrative of Pearl’s murder illustrates this point.

Dealing with Islamist extremism in Pakistan, however, requires tempered analysis, a careful consideration of complex cultural terrain and sobriety of recommendation. Unfortunately, Levy provides hyperbole, thrills and horror: Pakistan is a country “drugged on fanaticism, doped on violence,” a “nest of vipers, a powder keg,” this “sinister world of mad scientists and Islamist fanatics” and “this modern Nineveh.” Despite Levy’s claims of support for Muslim liberals and moderates, barely any are featured in his book (his fixers, his local facilitators, get minor mention). Levy finds precisely the fanatics whom he seeks; he views Pakistan and Muslims principally through the lens of extremism. Levy gives Muslim moderation short shrift, devoting less than two pages of his book to what he calls “gentle Islam,” the “other face of Islam.” He tells us that Pearl was sympathetic to Muslim liberals and that he is too.

Yet Levy writes that most of the Pakistanis he met are “proud” that Sheikh “followed his ideas through.” One wonders why he did not look around. In Pakistan he sees nothing of the Pakistanis who work on women’s health, literacy and development, who vote for nonreligious political parties, who have dared to oppose religious extremists and military regimes. He thinks nothing of the millions of impoverished Pakistanis whose daily anxieties are about food, sanitation, the possibility of a small loan. He does not hear all of the devout Pakistanis who do not traffic with terrorists and care nothing for mullahs or war. By using Pearl’s death chamber as his point of entry, Levy loses sight of a large point: The fight against extremism is -- and must be -- primarily fought among Muslims. The fight for Pakistan’s future as a moderate Muslim place may be imperiled, but it is not lost. It demands description.

In his book, Levy correctly describes the gravest threat as the possible usurpation of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons by Islamist extremists. Yet this self-described regional expert (who has not been in India in 30 years, he says) and avid user of Indian intelligence sources does not know that the most likely catalyst of nuclear danger in the region is not terrorism but a conflict between India and Pakistan. What Levy should worry about most is when India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, butt heads. Little more than a year ago, the two countries massed a million men on their borders; that was when the danger was highest -- not only the danger that both countries would use nuclear weapons but also that their weapons would be captured by Islamist terrorists. Why? Because the most reliable reports say that Pakistan’s military keeps the weapons unassembled. Only in times of crisis with India are they likely to be moved around or even put together. That’s when the danger to their security is greatest.

So, Levy’s tome about this American tragedy takes on all the themes at the heart of American foreign policy since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: the war on Islamist terrorism, the dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction and U.S. relations with such mostly Muslim countries as Pakistan. Popular in Parisian society and policy circles (Levy served as French President Jacques Chirac’s special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002), this book is issued as a clarion call to the sleeping American giant.

But though U.S. leadership is preoccupied by Iraq, Pakistan’s dangers are not unknown. Pakistan is not seen as an easy place, nor is Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf seen only as a loyal ally. For the United States, the challenge is to find ways to balance a necessary dependence on Pakistan’s military to fight the war on terrorism with a recognition that Pakistan’s security, social and political crises are profound; and that for the sake of the region and the world, a soft landing must be found for the country. Neither Americans nor Pakistanis have grand illusions. Both recall a historical fact: No U.S.-Pakistan alliance has outlived its strategic purposes.

Finally, Levy speaks not at all about what should be the greatest challenge to intellectuals today: finding ways to extricate us from this paralyzing historical moment in which the vicious, mindless zealotry of Islamist extremists can at times be reinforced by the righteousness -- under President Bush, Christian righteousness -- of American power. We are in a time when, through our own sense of superior mission and our inability to see how our means (from weapons to language) can corrupt our secular democratic ends, America is fast losing what it needs most: the vital legitimacy and practical ability to help alternative futures prevail in Muslim countries. Since Sept. 11, we all have learned about religious extremists. Levy’s brooding disquisition on the blackest aspects of pseudo-religious militancy sheds little new light on where we go next.

Varieties of anti-Americanism are also well worth parsing carefully. Flourishing among Islamist terrorists, traces also can be found not only among European intellectuals but also worldwide among secularists, nationalists, human rights activists, anti-globalization groups and others. Even in America, domestic opponents of the Iraq war policy or of aspects of the USA Patriot Act are being called anti-American, unpatriotic or worse. Reading “Who Killed Daniel Pearl,” I was left wishing that Levy, the journalist-adventurer, had matched the physical courage of his journey with the intellectual courage to delve into the troubling complexities of places like Pakistan and places like America. That is the kind of courage I am told Pearl possessed, and that is what we vainly look for today.

Levy dedicates the book to Adam Pearl, the son who was yet to be born when Pearl was killed. Pearl’s family, whom Levy envelops in his text, is of course the best judge of this dedication. Here is Levy, thinking as Pearl in the moment before his slaughter: “The nape of the neck, he thinks, shaking his head and trying to free himself -- the center of voluptuousness, the weight of the world, the hidden eye of the Talmud, the executioner’s axe.... And the gaze of this man ... [who] is going to slit his throat.” It is ugly. *