The visit of Gen.Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's President, to the White House on February 13,2002, would coincide with the completion of one month since he made his much-applauded (in the US) telecast of January 12,2002, in which he had expressed his determination to act against religious extremism and terrorism in Pakistani territory.

It would also mark the completion of three weeks since the subsequent kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based journalist of the "Wall street Journal" of the US while he was on a visit to Pakistan, reportedly to enquire into the alleged links of Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber presently under detention in the US, with the Jamaat-ul-Furqa (JUF) a Pakistan-based terrorist organisation led by Sheikh Mubarik Ali Shah Jilani. The JUF has had an active presence in the US, Canada and the Caribbean since the early 1980s. The similarity of its modus operandi (MO) with that of the Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden has once again drawn the attention of the US counter-terrorism experts to its present activities.

There is a continuing suspense over the fate of Pearl despite frequent expressions of optimism by the Pakistani authorities, including Musharraf himself, that he would be got released. The individuals or organisations, which kidnapped him, have been disturbibgly silent for more than a week now, after the initial statements disseminated to the media, demanding better treatment of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban members in US custody in Cuba, the setting-free of the Pakistani terrorists arrested by the US and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and the release by the US of the F-16 aircraft ordered by Pakistan before 1990, which were impounded by the US authorities in October,1990, after the then President, George Bush, the father of the present President, had invoked the Pressler Amendment against Pakistan.

rest of the article is at http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper409.html

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