Death In The Shadow War

Daniel Pearl's beard had not grown much since our last glimpse of him, in the e-mailed pictures with his hands in chains and the gun to his head. So the videotape of his execution, discovered last Thursday, left investigators to conclude that the Wall Street Journal reporter had really been murdered weeks ago, and we had been living on faint hope and false promise since then.

The tape was cut and pasted into a three-minute clip, so there may be a longer and even more gruesome version of it yet to be found. As fits the frame of holy war, in which everyone is a soldier and belief is a battlefield, it appears that Pearl's last words were a forced affirmation of faith and identity. "I am a Jew," he said to the captors offscreen. "My father is a Jew." He recited some criticisms of U.S. policies, as though from a script that echoed his kidnappers' demands. Then the tape cuts out and starts again as a knife stabs his throat. Then he is on the floor, wounded. And then, another cut, another image, as his severed head is waved in front of the camera.

The savage end to the senseless crime left families and newsrooms and governments reeling. Pearl was the victim, but Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf--despised by some in his country for having abandoned his extremist allies in favor of the U.S.--may have been just as much a target. News of Pearl's murder reminded us what an ominous storm Pakistan is, with war at its edges and zealots in hiding and a President willing to risk everything by siding with the U.S. in its war against terror. His effort to drag Pakistan away from its tradition of fostering religious militancy may have inspired the country's holy warriors to wage their own war against him: a battle in which Pearl may have been the first American casualty.

Pearl, based in India as the Journal's South Asia bureau chief, had decided not to travel to Afghanistan after the war broke out. He and his wife were expecting a baby, and it was just too dangerous. But that did not keep the war from coming to him. He was in Karachi, reporting on the militant mentors of accused shoe bomber Richard Reid, on Jan. 23, when he went to a restaurant in hopes of meeting a prominent but reclusive Muslim cleric. It was typical of Pearl's approach: take the risk, listen to all sides, try to figure out how they think. His wife Mariane, a free-lance journalist, had planned to go with him but, in her sixth month of pregnancy, wasn't feeling well that day. So she stayed home.

Pearl never came home again. In two e-mails from "kidnapperguy," a previously unheard of group called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty demanded, among other things, that the U.S. release Pakistani detainees being held in Cuba and the U.S. They accused Pearl of being a spy, first for the CIA, later for the Israeli Mossad. The charges were so absurd that experts immediately looked elsewhere for the real motives at work.