Other than using perl or command line scripts is there a native php way to call ldap's extended operations?
You could find it on your own, but sure I can provide some info for you. Take a look at this http://php.net/manual/en/book.ldap.php.
This is entire chapter of php manual about ldap functions. Although in order to use ldap functions you need to probably recompile PHP with --with-ldap[=DIR], if you're not working on Windows. In Wamp I could just enable ldap extension and it should work.
Here are some info about ldap functions enabling http://www.php.net/manual/en/ldap.installation.php.