Stardate 20020127.2144

(On Screen): It continues to be the case that American civilians are targets in this war. We have not had another successful mass attack on the US (so far) but we have now had the first in what is certain to be a long string of kidnappings. An American reporter has been taken by Islamic radicals in Pakistan, who claim that he is an operative for the CIA. It's probably untrue; the CIA generally doesn't use reporters for that. But it doesn't really matter, because the people who took him don't ultimately care either. What's important is that he is an American.

They're making demands. Some of those are for local consumption (i.e. better treatment for the prisoners at Guantanamo). But their key demand is for release of Pakistani detainees.

We can't negotiate. We can't even acknowledge their demands. Daniel Pearl may be rescued via a raid or other surreptitious activity, but we cannot buy him back because if we do then a hundred more Americans will be kidnapped world wide. The price of Daniel Pearl's life now is the deaths of dozens of other Americans in the months ahead, and that is too high.

What would Stalin have done? It's interesting to think about that kind of thing: what would a ruthless leader have done in such a situation? Stalin would have ordered that all the detainees whose freedom had been demanded instead be publicly executed immediately. There's a finality about death; it's non-negotiable. We won't do that, of course; we're not ruthless.

But our enemies are, and we have to be hard-hearted. In war there are casualties, and now Pearl has to be thought of as one of them. We can hope that Pearl will live through this, but we cannot change our policy or strategy in the war to try to save him.

Several times in this war reporters thought that they were immune to combat, and discovered that they were not. Pearl was taken when he fell for a hoax; he was offered an important interview and went voluntarily to an unidentified location with two men who, evidently, he was wrong to trust.

Like the reporters who were killed by ambush in Afghanistan, he seems to have believed that he was outside of the war, a non-combatant, immune to the violence. It is amazing that only five months since thousands of "non-combatants" were slaughtered in NYC that this lesson has already faded: there are no non-combatants in this war. Every American has a target painted on his chest.