We already knew, before this book, the grisly details of the murder of Daniel Pearl. We just didn't know what to do with them.

Until the last day of January, 2002, Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal's man in Pakistan. Sent the previous October by the Journal to cover the impact of the American war on the Taliban, the 38-year-old Pearl was already a veteran of alarums and excursions around the globe. He had taught himself enough Arabic and Urdu to get by, and had even written the Journal's handbook on the safety precautions journalists need to take in unsafe places—like Pakistan. In December 2001, Pearl turned his attention to a fresh investigation, on "the risks of the transfer of nuclear know-how from Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Taliban."

Pakistan exploded a nuclear device in 1998, and for some time now the unstable borders between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the onetime Soviet-stans to the north have been darkly populated with rumors of suitcase bombs for sale by ex-Soviet scientists. (Someone offered to sell Pearl some nuclear stuff bootlegged from Ukraine, but the deal turned out to be bogus.) In December, Pearl published a preliminary article in the Journal on the possibility of nuclear transfers, and then turned his attention to investigating a list of Islamist groups newly outlawed by Pakistan's president, Perez Musharraf. Pearl was delighted to make contact with an intermediary named Bashir, who promised to arrange a meeting for Pearl with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, the head of the radical sect Al Fuqrah and the mentor of the aerial "shoe-bomber," Richard Reid. Bashir met Pearl at a restaurant in Karachi on January 23, and they drove off to meet Gilani.

But there was no meeting. Instead, Bashir disappeared with Pearl, and the next news was a demand for his ransom, relayed by e-mail from the anonymity of a Karachi cyber-café.

But there was no ransom, either. On the morning of January 31, Pearl was executed—decapitated—by a knife-wielding Yemeni who slit the reporter's throat before a video camera.1 Or tried to, since Pearl bucked violently half-way through the throat-cutting, bursting out of the grip of a Pakistani mujahideen and collapsing on the floor, so that the camera had to be stopped and refocused before the Yemeni could pull the lolling, half-severed head back, re-insert his knife, crack the vertebrae, and finish the job with a triumphant flourish, swinging Pearl's head like a toy.

On February 13, Pakistani officials arrested Omar Sheikh, the pseudonymous Bashir, under suspicion of Pearl's kidnapping, and a week later, the video of Pearl's murder was delivered to Pakistani police. Not until May 17 was Pearl's body, chopped into ten pieces, found buried in the garden of a house in Karachi.

Bernard-Henri Lévy first heard of the Pearl murder while on a mission of his own to Kabul, representing the president of France to the new postwar president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. It is typical of Lévy's headlong impulsiveness that he dropped his mission to Karzai and threw himself instead into what became a year-long investigation of Pearl's murder, despite never even having known the man.

Pearl, however, had probably heard of Lévy. In France, it's hard to imagine anyone who hasn't. Born in Algiers in 1948 and raised in France, Lévy was a student of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Superieure when the great student revolt of 1968 blew the lid off Paris. The spell of 1968 enthralled, and then repelled, Lévy, and when the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973, the Marxist scales fell from Lévy's eyes. In 1977, he published Barbarism with a Human Face, a hideous play on the short-lived hopefulness of Alexander Dubcek and the "socialism with a human face" that perished in the Prague Spring. He became one of the stars of a generation of French anti-Marxists that included Jean-Francois Revel and Pascal Bruckner. More than that, with his rock-star good looks and a voracious appetite for journalistic headline-catching, Lévy became a celebrity, known simply as "BHL."

But Afghanistan was not just another exercise in Lévy's pursuit of the exotic. He had been on the borderlands of the India-Pakistan conflict and the Bengali civil war in the '70s, and produced a film on the massacre of Bosnia's Muslims in the '90s. Pakistan, Lévy writes, is a nation "drugged on fanaticism, doped on violence, and has lost even the very idea of what a free press could be." He had learned never to "take a hotel room facing the street; never flag down a taxi in the street; never, ever speak of Islam, or of Pakistan's nuclear program; and especially and above all, never go to street markets, cinemas, crowded areas, or public places in general without taking precautions, without telling someone you trust where you are going and what time you should be back." He understood that, despite General Musharraf's nervous appeasements of the Americans, Pakistan was a land governed by terror, by its internal secret police, the dreaded Interservices Intelligence Agency. "No one in Karachi ever says 'isi,' " Lévy explains, "They just say 'they,' or 'the agencies,' or 'the invisible government,' or even 'the three letters,' just 'the three letters.' "

Hence Lévy was no quixotic interloper when he undertook the investigation chronicled in his novelistic work of reportage and informed imagination, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? It's clear that he saw Pearl as something of a doppelganger of his younger self—a Jew, a journalist, "liberal, hostile to everything stupid and arrogant about America, friend of the neglected, of the downtrodden, of the disinherited." Pearl was a classic California liberal, relaxed, spontaneous, "open to the cultures of the world and to the culture, particularly, of the other." He took up the white man's burden, a cheerfully guilty empath who "pays his debt, our debt, the debt of the hordes of smug and overfed Westerners who couldn't care less about world poverty and don't consider themselves their brother's keepers." Which was, of course, what ultimately killed Pearl, because (and the older, wiser Lévy now steps in) it was exactly Pearl's burden which disabled him from taking seriously the radicalness of the evil he was confronting. The West had created the evils of the East, imposed them through oppression, colonialism, exploitation, and therefore Westerners understood perfectly how to deal with those evils. But "the risk of understanding so much" is that "you excuse it in the end." It leads, "little by little, by a gradual seduction of sense and reason," to the illusion of all-knowing benevolence, the newest imperialism, the imperialism of the unctuous.

Still, this didn't explain the theatrical death Pearl's kidnappers concocted for him, and that mystery made Lévy flutter like a moth by the porch-light. The mystery twisted the more Lévy learned about Pearl's kidnapper, Omar Sheikh. Lévy was prepared to discover in Sheikh, "this madman, this hardened criminal, this zealot of kidnapping," one of the genuinely wretched of the earth. Instead, he found that Sheikh was "born in England, has an English passport, and spent his childhood and adolescence in England, that in England he was quite a brilliant student, that his family lives in London, his address is in London—that he is, in short, English."

Like Richard Reid, who was educated in Catholic schools in London, Omar Sheikh qualified as a Pakistani only because his father, a ready-to-wear clothing manufacturer in London, had emigrated from there. It was not misery but ideology that turned Omar Sheikh into an Islamist warrior, led him to Bosnia in 1993, and to Qaeda training-camp in Afghanistan in 1994.

Omar proved his terroristic mettle right out of training when he abducted four English and American tourists in New Delhi in 1994. Imprisoned in India, he was freed in exchange for a hijacked Indian Airlines jet, landed by its hijackers in Kandahar in December 1999. He became fully as much a celebrity in the world of Islamic terrorism as Lévy was in France, a hero among the Taliban and hailed by Osama bin Laden as "my special son."

But at the same time, there were tell-tale traces that Omar Sheikh was playing two games: when he was exchanged at the Kandahar airport in 1999, the voices giving directions to the hijackers, the shadowed figures checking identity cards and greeting Omar, were agents of the dreaded Pakistani isi. When Omar's arrest was announced by the Pakistani army on February 13, he had actually been in custody—had even turned himself in—for a week, without any announcement. Whose side was Omar on? Or was there really only one side, after all?

Lévy came finally to the conclusion that Pearl's death had been a collusion. Pakistan, the pseudo-ally of America in the war on terror, had no choice but to appease the Americans by day, while protecting and cooperating with Al Qaeda by night: "Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and then murdered by Islamist groups who were manipulated by a single fringe group of the secret service—the most radical, the most violent, the most anti-American of the factions fighting for control of the services."

But why murder a mere journalist like Danny Pearl? Was he simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it because he was an American? A Jew? But in any of those perfectly plausible cases, why wasn't Pearl simply shot or strangled at once? His kidnappers knew all about Pearl, and yet they waited until January 31, eight days after he had been kidnapped, to kill him for these things.

The crucial clue, for Lévy, lies in the article Pearl was working on at the time of his kidnapping, about the transfer of nuclear weapons-making secrets from Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Taliban. At some point, Lévy hypothesizes, Pearl saw too much—saw Pakistani intelligence operatives and Qaeda militants at work together, saw how the Pakistani nuclear program, or Soviet nuclear materials passed by the Taliban to isi, were putting capabilities within bin Laden's reach that would make 9/11 look like a firemen's benevolent parade. Or maybe Pearl simply talked too much about the research he was doing for the article, and the very possibility that he even suspected a link between isi and Qaeda made him too dangerous to release. Either way, Lévy concludes, once Pearl's kidnappers realized (or guessed) what he knew about the open line between Qaeda and our supposed-ally Pakistan, his death certificate was as good as printed, no matter how grand the ransom. The Wall Street Journal, of course, denies that Pearl had any such information. But it also politely urges "all the authorities involved in the investigation" of Pearl's murder to "review" Lévy's book to "see whether it provides any useful information which could help in the effort to bring Danny's killer to justice."

It is not Iraq, Lévy contends, which has posed the greatest threat of an atomic 9/11—he is quite scornful about the claims of the Bush Administration:

I assert that Pakistan is the biggest rogue of all the rogue states of today. I assert that what is taking form there, between Islamabad and Karachi, is a black hole compared to which Saddam Hussein's Baghdad was an obsolete weapons dump. The stench of apocalypse hangs over those cities; I am convinced that Danny smelled that stench.

American readers will be astonished to learn that Sheikh Gilani's Al Fuqrah maintains a string of gated rural camps in Virginia, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Canada, and the Caribbean, "Islamic kolkhozes in the middle of enemy territory." John Allen Mohammed, the D.C. sniper, was among Gilani's two-to-three thousand American converts. Their undisturbed and secretive presence, Lévy writes, represents "an extraordinary historical error in which the leaders of the free world welcomed to their breast and sometimes generated the Golem that we must now drive out from one end of the planet to the other."

M. Lévy, you cannot be serious. And indeed there are many perfectly respectable and logical reasons for saying that. The breathless sentences, the almost-voyeuristic preoccupation with Danny Pearl, dodging guards around the Binori mosque, recording the suspicious stares of strange men in the lobbies of Pakistani hotels. This is just the kind of cinematic, conspiratorial concoction we should expect from the flamboyant M. Lévy, is it not? What else, from the media star with the flamboyant lion's-mane of hair, the trademark white shirt open to the waist, the inevitable black suit, this bizarre mix of Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, and Émile Zola? The book is poorly bound; the English translation is beset with misspellings; maddeningly, it has no index (because Lévy was in too much of a hurry to beat other budding Pearl books to the bookseller). How seriously can we take a book stuffed with supposition and speculation, with I bet and one can imagine that and had he seen? This is too embarrassing, too absurd. Liberal democracies do not know how to deal with absurdities—like barbarism. "To re-read" what Geoffrey Wheatcroft called that "catalogue of nonsense" which spouted unbidden from the pens of respectable Westerners after 9/11 is to realize "the final bankruptcy of a large part of the progressive tradition 200 years after 1789."

So, let us ignore Lévy. And let us forget about Daniel Pearl. If Lévy will let us.

Allen Guelzo's new book, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, will be published in February by Simon & Schuster.

1. U.S. officials announced on October 22 that they believe the "Yemeni" who slit Pearl's throat was actually Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the one-time chief of Al-Qaeda's military operations and now an American prisoner. Pakistani officials "remain unconvinced." Omar Sheikh, who was condemned to death by a Pakistani court in July, 2002, has been permitted to appeal his sentencing.

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