Heartbreaking to his family and colleagues, the ritualistic slaughter of reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is more than a personal tragedy. This is a political murder that exposes the fractures and violence of a land that has escaped the control and influence of the Westernized, affluent elite that pretends to govern it.

The killers of The Wall Street Journal correspondent made sure the religious fanaticism that has undermined the rule of law in Pakistan featured prominently in their ghastly work. According to Pakistani officials quoted by news agencies, a videotape shows an assassin slashing the reporter’s throat immediately after Pearl says into the camera: “I am a Jew, my mother is a Jew.”

Abductions and murders happen in the most orderly of societies. It is logically possible to write off Danny Pearl as the victim of a deranged criminal act that could have occurred anywhere. Possible, but not wise: This murder happened where it happened as it happened for a reason. And, other governments investigating this crime would not have surrounded it with exactly the same odd collection of half-truths, misstatements and evasions that came out of the regime headed by President Pervez Musharraf.

The killers had their own symbols in mind for the world to take away from this event. They may have been trying to undermine Musharraf’s regime, which is one of several explanations the general has given in the month since Pearl was abducted in the chaotic drug-smuggling port of Karachi.

But there is a larger symbolism available. The lawlessness of Karachi that helped cost Pearl his life is the result of a decades-long, losing struggle by the country’s tiny, highly sophisticated and essentially secular upper class to run a country founded as an Islamic state. The impoverished and uneducated populace is virtually invisible to its leaders as they sit in the palaces of the remote, sterile capital of Islamabad.

Musharraf, his finance, foreign and interior ministers, along with other senior officials I also met last month in Islamabad, can hold their own in the chancelleries and salons of any Western capital. They are charming, articulate and expert in their fields. And like the generals and political brigands who held office and robbed the nation blind before Musharraf seized power, they have cultivated fan clubs of influential foreigners to explain how well things are going now, whenever “now” happens to be. Colin Powell’s State Department and the woefully uninformed U.S. Embassy in Islamabad lead the cheering and tribute-paying.

But the conversations with Musharraf and other officials uncovered both a fear and an ignorance of political and social behavior in the rural areas and biggest cities of Pakistan. Musharraf repeatedly explained that he had been astonished to discover that he could denounce religious extremism, as he did on Jan. 12, and not face serious upheaval in the streets of his cities. And he said he would not increase the miserly amounts now spent to educate girls in rural areas because that would be culturally controversial.

There is a political schizophrenia as well as a cultural divide in Pakistan. Asked one day about Pearl’s abduction, Musharraf sought to blame it on India. Then the general said his domestic opponents had done it to embarrass him. His security officials leaked word of the arrest of a prominent Islamic militant, Sheik Omar Saeed, on kidnapping charges as Musharraf was arriving in Washington on Feb. 12. It now turns out that Saeed turned himself in a week earlier. Word was withheld for the purpose of political spin, The Washington Post suggested in Friday’s news pages.

Unraveling the details of what happened to Pearl would be difficult under the best of circumstances in the gangland shadows of Karachi. But with the investigation under the control of an intellectually inconsistent regime that merely pretends to be in touch with its own disinherited population, that task will be next to impossible. Despite Musharraf’s assurances in Washington that Pearl was likely to be rescued soon, the leads that would have made that possible never developed.

Daniel Pearl died in a journalist’s search for truth, in the best tradition of his profession. But the political uses of his murder implicate all Americans in his fate. Washington is pouring billions of dollars in aid and debt relief into a very shaky society, which has grown embittered over repeatedly seeing aid money disappear before it ever gets to the villages and ghettos. The U.S. assumption is that Musharraf wants to and can stabilize the collapsing system he inherited. This abduction-murder and its bungled investigation are more signs of how tenuous those assumptions and Musharraf’s grip really are.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.