www.monde-diplomatique.fr/dossiers/bhl/
Le Monde Diplo also published a translation of William Dalrymple's devastating review of Levy from the NYRB:
It is apparent from its opening pages that with Pakistan Lévy is way out of his depth...The book's principal problem is the amateurish quality of much of Lévy's research. The section on the English childhood of Omar Sheikh begins raising one's doubts about the author's veracity: Omar Sheikh's family live, we are told, on Colvin Street, which does not exist on the London A–Z street atlas. Once we arrive in Pakistan the factual underpinnings of the book fall away. BHL's grasp of South Asian geography is especially shaky: he thinks Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-held Kashmir (and the major jihadi center on Pakistani soil), is in India. The madrasa, or religious school, of Akora Khattack, not far from the Indus, he thinks is in Peshawar (it is more than eighty miles outside), while the town of Saharanpur, four hours' drive from the Indian capital, is said to be a remote part of Delhi.
More importantly, Lévy quickly shows that he is deeply ignorant of South Asian politics. Abdul Ghani Lone, the leading Kashmiri moderate, assassinated on May 21, 2002, almost certainly by ISI-backed Islamists for being willing to reach a democratic settlement with India, is said to be "notorious" and his presence in a hotel in Rawalpindi proof of its links to the darker side of Pakistani intelligence. His party, the Hurriyat, now the main force for compromise in Kashmir, is elsewhere mistakenly described as a fundamentalist Islamic NGO. Gossip and hearsay are repeated as fact: bin Laden, we learn, went to Peshawar to have medical treatment after the bombing of Tora Bora. A few pages later, bin Laden is said to have been given shelter in a madrasa in Karachi. This of course would be a major scoop if true, for Lévy would have solved a problem that has eluded the combined resources of every Western intelligence agency: how bin Laden was nursed to fitness under the noses of the Pakistani military. But no source is quoted, no evidence presented. It's just a throwaway remark.
More seriously, there are numerous occasions where Lévy distorts his evidence and actually inverts the truth. While seeking to prove that the ISI and al-Qaeda were jointly responsible for abducting Daniel Pearl, for example, he cites three precedents in which journalists were "kidnapped in Pakistan by ISI agents suspected of being backed up by al-Qaida." In reality, in two of the cases he cites—Najam Sethi and Hussain Haqqani—both were arrested by the regular Punjab police as part of a campaign by Pakistan's last civilian prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to intimidate the press. The case of the third journalist, Ghulam Hasnain, remains a mystery: he was picked up for a day and then released. He has never identified the agency that arrested him; but no connection has ever been shown—or, up to now, even suggested —with al-Qaeda. Lévy's misuse of evidence here is revealing of his general method: if proof does not exist, he writes as if it did. The ISI has been involved in many dubious activities, but there has never been any suggestion that it has abducted Westerners, least of all an American. This record is important evidence against any direct link between the ISI and Pearl's abduction rather than the reverse.
Toward the end of the book, Lévy presents a series of elaborate and unprovable conspiracy theories...Throughout his book Lévy shows an intermittent disdain for Islam, and something approaching hatred for Pakistan...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16823 Dave
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