Shahzad's Pakistan Past Shadowed by 'Sad Story'

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (May 5) -- Suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad appears to be the latest iteration of what terrorist experts call a "clean operative," unmarked for most of his life by any record of political passion or bad behavior.

That straight-arrow past is visible at the home where his parents lived until Tuesday evening, when according to local reports two cars pulled up and took them away into what Pakistani government sources have called protective custody.

The gated, two-story home in Peshawar's posh Hayatabad district screams blandness, its tree-lined perimeter wall guarding a pair of nondescript sedans parked inside. Neighbors are at a loss to say anything interesting about the couple.

"What can I tell you about them?" says Yasir, who has lived alongside the house for the past 10 years. "They were a quiet couple, religious but not in the extreme. His father never grew a beard. They went for walks in the evening but otherwise stayed at home most of the time."

Neighbors say Faisal visited his parents here several times since they moved in 1998 from Karachi, where his father, Bahar ul-Haq, served a three-year stint as deputy director of Pakistan's Civil Aviation Authority.

He had taken that post, according to neighbors and Pakistan press reports, after his career in the Pakistan Air Force seemed to stall at the rank of vice air marshal -- a rank below the further promotion he sought.

"It's quite a sad story, really," says a man who served with Shahzad's father in Pakistan's air force. "Things ended badly for Bahar in the air force. He was very upset that he was never promoted to full air marshal, so when he left, he never came back. We never saw him again."

Shahzad was 15 at the time and must have witnessed the extreme disappointment of his father's failed military career, the former air force officer adds, requesting anonymity.

That biographical detail is one of many that experts are poring over as they seek to understand what motivated a Western-educated, upwardly mobile father of two from a moderately wealthy background to throw his life away in the name of a violent ideology.

In Peshawar, a city at the epicenter of the nearly decade-old war on terror, the life of this latest would-be global jihadist stands out for its banality. And Shahzad's life in Bridgeport, Conn., was everything that the American dream is supposed to be: an intelligent young man arrives in the U.S.; works hard at his studies, first in computer science and then for an M.B.A.; marries a pretty young woman; and settles into a stable job as a financial analyst. It's about as apple pie a life as it gets.

But somewhere along the line something changed.

According to investigators, Shahzad has admitted to receiving rudimentary bomb-making training in North Waziristan, in Pakistan's restive tribal belt, during a five-month sojourn in the country last year. On Tuesday police in a suburb of Karachi detained Muhammad Rehan, a man with whom Shahzad allegedly traveled to Peshawar and Waziristan last July. Rehan has been linked to the Kashmir militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad.

Pakistan authorities have detained at least seven other individuals in connection with Shahzad, but few details have emerged about the nature of those connections. Tehrik-e-Taliban, the Pakistan Taliban -- whose leader Hakimullah Mehsud emerged defiant late last month for the first time since American and Pakistani military sources suggested he had been killed in January -- claimed responsibility on Sunday for the Times Square bomb. But today the organization was quoted as saying the group wasn't involved.

That leaves much to be uncovered about when, why and how Shahzad embraced terrorism.

"He was always a religious person," says Faisal Zeb, another neighbor in Hayatabad. "Whenever he visited his parents, I noticed he spent a lot of time at the mosque. But the last few times I saw him, especially last summer, I noticed that he'd grown a beard, and he always had an angry look to him. To be honest, it made me a little nervous."

According to the same neighbors, Shahzad's parents had worked hard to ensure their children received the best possible education. "All of the children went abroad to school," says Zeb. "Now, I think they all live abroad, so it's just the mother and father that are staying in the house."

That is perhaps the most atypical element of Shahzad's family life. In Pakistani society, it's rare for all the children to leave home. Pakistanis often criticize Western society for the lack of care and respect accorded to aging parents.

Partly for that reason, some Pakistan observers have speculated that Shahzad was in the process of returning to a more austere, traditional Muslim life in his country of birth. Before returning to the U.S. in February -- after his training in Waziristan and likely with the initial rough outline of a plot to bomb New York City -- he had moved his wife and daughter to Pakistan.

Was the Times Square attack a sort of initiation, a first plot for a virgin terrorist returning to Pakistan to join his family and potentially enter the ranks of jihadists there? It's obvious from the investigation in the U.S. that Shahzad had no intention of ever returning to the U.S., even if his plan had succeeded. He had defaulted on his mortgage payments and left his job; the fertilizer investigators found at his house in Bridgeport was just one of countless indications that he was not interested in covering his tracks.

But the plot failed, and now Shahzad is languishing in jail, facing charges that include attempting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. He faces a possible life sentence if convicted, and the prospect of never seeing Pakistan, or his family, again.