The Wall Street Journal Opinion | December 3, 2008
Let's Give Pakistan the Attention It Deserves The Mumbai attack is the latest wake-up call.
By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
"The world is decidedly poorly made," Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and president of Pakistan, must be saying to himself. The French expression Le monde est décidément mal fait sums things up quite nicely.
For it was at the very moment that Mr. Zardari was attempting to modernize his country -- to break with the equivocations of the Musharraf years and move forward with a peace process with India for which he took the initiative -- that the tragedy of Mumbai occurred.
But what's done, unfortunately, is done. And if the authors of the carnage are, as it seems, linked to the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, we can already draw a certain number of appalling and unquestionable conclusions.
The Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the jihadist groups with which I became familiar while working on my book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl." This group is, without a doubt, based in Pakistan.
It is likely that the Lashkar-e-Taiba has within India ideological or religious "correspondents" in the vast Muslim community that sees itself (not without reason) as discriminated against by the Hindu majority. Still, there is very little doubt that the initiative, strategy and money for the assault on Mumbai came from terrorist leaders inside Pakistan.
Far from concentrating only on the cause of Kashmir's independence, and most of all, far from existing only in the notorious and officially ungovernable "tribal zones" on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba is an all-terrain group with great political influence. It includes militants in every city of the country: Peshawar, Muzaffarabad, Lahore and even Karachi (Pakistan's economic capital).
Since its creation 15 years ago, the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been linked to the ISI, the formidable Inter-Services Intelligence agency that operates like a state within a state in Pakistan. Obviously, this link is not widely publicized. However, from the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl to the July 2005 attack on the Ayodhya Hindu temple in Uttar Pradesh, there is abundant evidence that the jihadist wing of the ISI has assisted the Lashkar-e-Taiba in the planning and financing of various operations.
Worse yet, the Lashkar-e-Taiba is, as I discovered while researching and reporting my book on Daniel Pearl, a group of which A.Q. Khan, the inventor of Pakistan's atomic bomb, was a longtime friend. Mr. Khan, one may recall, spent a good 15 years trafficking in nuclear secrets with Lybia, North Korea, Iran and, perhaps, al Qaeda, before confessing his guilt in early 2004. Later pardoned by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Mr. Khan remains perfectly free to travel within Pakistan, as he was just admitted this Monday, under the protection of the ISI, to the most elite hospital in Karachi.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges