Monday night\u2019s arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday, will undoubtedly stoke the usual debate about how best to keep America safe in the age of Islamic terrorism. But this should not deflect us from another, equally pressing, question. Why do Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora churn out such a high proportion of the world\u2019s terrorists?<\/p>\n
Indonesia has more Muslims than Pakistan. Turkey is geographically closer to the troubles of the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Syria are immeasurably more hostile to America and the West. Yet it is Pakistan, or its diaspora, that produced the CIA shooter Mir Aimal Kasi; the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef (born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents); 9\/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl\u2019s kidnapper, Omar Saeed Sheikh; and three of the four men behind the July 2005 train and bus bombings in London.<\/p>\n
The list of jihadists not from Pakistan themselves\u2014but whose passage to jihadism passes through that country\u2014is even longer. Among them are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed Atta, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. Over the past decade, Pakistani fingerprints have shown up on terrorist plots in, among other places, Germany, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands. And this partial catalogue doesn\u2019t include India, which tends to bear the brunt of its western neighbor\u2019s love affair with violence.<\/p>\n
In attempting to explain why so many attacks\u2014abortive and successful\u2014can be traced back to a single country, analysts tend to dwell on the 1980s, when Pakistan acted as a staging ground for the successful American and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But while the anti-Soviet campaign undoubtedly accelerated Pakistan\u2019s emergence as a jihadist haven, to truly understand the country it\u2019s important to go back further, to its creation.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Monday night’s arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday, will undoubtedly stoke the usual debate about how best to keep Ame<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1517,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n