The Mum­bai attack is the lat­est wake-up call.

By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
WSJ

“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.

No, this is not a dream — it is real­ity. Pak­istan is home to a man both father of his country’s nuclear pro­gram and known sym­pa­thizer of an Islamist group whose lat­est demon­stra­tion has net­ted at least 188 dead and sev­eral hun­dred wounded.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba is, ulti­mately, one of the con­sti­tu­tive ele­ments of what is con­ven­tion­ally called al Qaeda. For too long we’ve told our­selves that al Qaeda no longer exists except as a brand; that it is only a pure sig­ni­fier, “fran­chised” by local orga­ni­za­tions inde­pen­dent of one another. Yet there indeed exists in our world what Osama bin Laden called the “Inter­na­tional Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Cru­saders,” which is like a con­stel­la­tion of atoms aggre­gated around a cen­tral nucleus. These atoms find them­selves, for the most part, clus­tered in this new zone of tem­pests that forms the whole of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Three days after the mas­sacre, in a moment of anger and frus­tra­tion that rings true, Pakistan’s Pres­i­dent Zardari said: “Even if these activists are linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who do you think we are fighting?”

The prob­lem, unfor­tu­nately, is beyond him. Like his pre­de­ces­sor, Pres­i­dent Zardari lacks the means to break the back of crim­i­nal ele­ments within the ISI and Pak­istani mil­i­tary. To an even greater extent, he lacks the back­ing of those who asso­ciate it with the darker side of his own admin­is­tra­tion. And therein lies the chal­lenge — per­haps the most fright­en­ing of our era. After the bleed­ing of Mum­bai, it is time the entire inter­na­tional com­mu­nity — not just those in the region — took notice.