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And so we kept seeing each other and I became accustomed to the idea of her as my girlfriend. I was deliriously happy but that happiness came at a price: in traditional Pakistani families like mine, the power of love was eclipsed by the expectation of duty. I had always assumed that my wedding day would be the saddest day of my life because I could not envisage being able to marry someone I truly and completely loved. Now I had met the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with – the girl I would end up marrying – and after thirty years of living in fear I have finally decided to place my faith in love.

Lorraine Adams
with Ayesha Nasir

 

O
n 1 May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born naturalized American citizen residing in Bridgeport, Connecticut, drove an SUV loaded with explosive devices to the corner of 45th Street and Seventh Avenue in Times Square, New York. He began the detonation process, walked away, and took a train back to his apartment. The bomb failed to ignite. Police found him easily through the car’s Vehicle Identification Number. He was arrested on 3 May 2010 on board an Emirates flight to Dubai that had pulled away from the gate but had not yet been cleared for take-off.

B
ridgeport is a beaten-down city of 140,000, only a half-hour away from yacht-friendly Westport on the Manhattan-bound commuting coastline. An abandoned port hobbled by
lower-than-average
incomes and education, it seems an unlikely place to call home for Faisal Shahzad, the thirty-one-year-old, MBA-graduate son of an eminent Pakistani father. Shahzad rented a second-floor apartment (for $1,150 a month) in a three-storey tenement similar to others on the block. Recently renovated, his was the cleanest. Even so, its pale biscuit siding was gimcrack vinyl, its chalk-white trim a flimsy metal. The garage in the back, where he assembled the bomb inside his Nissan Pathfinder, was missing its door and guarded by a barking dog on a heavy chain.

This apartment was a month-long way station for Shahzad. He spent most of his ten years in America in Shelton, Connecticut, a slice of exurbia fifteen minutes north of Bridgeport. His house there is empty and strewn with discarded toys and two lawnmowers. A front window is smashed, another above the front door gone. He abandoned it exactly one summer ago. His income as an account analyst – a position which pays on average $50,000 a year and sometimes as much as $70,000 – wasn’t enough to sustain making payments on the $218,400 mortgage. Shahzad’s American career began in disappointment and mired in that house. With two degrees from the University of Bridgeport, a school so poorly rated by its peers that it doesn’t even have a ranking in the
US News and World Report
college list, the best work he could find was a series of jobs as an account analyst, the last of which he quit last summer. By his own account, Shahzad was ditching Shelton to return to Pakistan with his family.

S
hahzad’s father, Baharul Haq, began life as the son of a servant in Mohib Banda, a poor village near Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly called North West Frontier Province. He trained as an airman and rose to one of the highest posts in Pakistan’s air force. In a country where who you know is far more important than what you know, Haq defeated phenomenal odds. Shahzad, one of four children, grew up on military bases in Peshawar, Sargodha and Karachi, studying at air force schools. His grades were average; he developed a weakness for fast cars and a taste for the Eurotrash look. ‘He was a loafer, always wasting his father’s money,’ said Faiz Ahmed, a villager who knew the family. ‘There were problems between him and his father –
Bahar sahab
was tight-fisted while Faisal was a spendthrift.’

Baharul Haq’s economizing paid off. When he retired he moved into Hayatabad, a Peshawar neighbourhood of palatial villas staffed by guards, servants and chauffeurs, favoured by foreigners, military grandees and business notables. Shahzad’s Shelton neighbours, by contrast – among them a dental technician, a computer consultant, a schoolteacher and a nurse – drive their own mid-range cars and mow their own lawns. ‘He was here by himself at first,’ his
next-door
neighbour, a Shelton native, told me. ‘Then, he got married. It was an arranged marriage. She was very quiet. I talked to him more than her. We used to talk when he was mowing the lawn. She’d had a really good job. He told me they were getting the children phase over and then she was going back to work.

‘He worked in Norwalk. It’s about thirty-five minutes away, but it’s a terrible commute, and he used to talk about that. Much worse than he expected. I could tell he wasn’t happy …’

I asked about visitors.

‘It was always her family. There was a sister who came from Massachusetts, and she was always in traditional dress. I don’t know what you call it, but the kind of clothing you see in India.’

It was the house, the neighbour said, that increasingly preoccupied him. Records show that Shahzad had bought it in 2004 for $273,000. He tried to sell in 2006 for $329,000, in 2008 for $299,000, then dropped the price again. Trapped in the collapsing American housing market, he took out a second mortgage for $65,000 in January 2009.

I asked why they wanted to sell.

‘He told me his parents were in Pakistan; he was the youngest child and it was the custom in their culture that it was up to him to go back and take care of the parents.’

What, I asked, is the most lasting image she has of him? The videotape capturing him buying fireworks? The mugshot after his arrest?

‘I see him in the yard with her.’

His wife?

‘The little girl. He was so good with her.’

A
jani Marwat is an officer in the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, formerly Special Services, or the ‘red squad’. After 9/11, Adam Cohen, a streetwise Boston native formerly of the CIA, came out of retirement to revamp the Division. Marwat is an unlikely Cohen acolyte. He has a sinking feeling that Jewish financiers control the world. He thinks the United States is being used by Israel to do its dirty work. But Marwat is also a man in possession of the highest level security clearance. He is fluent in seven languages and three of them – Urdu, Pashto and English – he shares with Faisal Shahzad. The other four – Hindi, Farsi, Dari and Tajiki – enable him to work with informants or witnesses from India, Iran and Afghanistan.

Today Marwat is sitting in my kitchen drinking tea and eating cherries. He does not want his birthplace or real name mentioned in this story; Intelligence Division officers are not allowed to talk to the media. What he will do is offer a window into what he thinks motivated Shahzad, and what his New York-born colleagues do not, and perhaps cannot, understand about the Shahzads they encounter. Marwat lost eight brothers and sisters to starvation, rocket strikes and bombings in his native country. One day when he was eleven, he had to go to the market to buy bread. At that time, any such excursion was a risk. His best friend went with him.

‘There’s a big noise. All I see is smoke. Then I can’t hear anything. I look at my friend. He’s running. But he has no head.’

The damage that United States aerial bombing causes in Pakistan is most heavily concentrated where ethnic Pashtun live. Shahzad’s family was Pashtun, and he married one. The village of Shahzad’s father is only a twenty-minute drive from one of the largest madrasas in Pakistan, the Dar-ul-uloom Haqqania, widely considered the incubator for the Taliban movement. But the village itself is in Nowshera, one of the most secular districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the liberal Pakistan People’s Party regularly wins elections. It is also not an area saturated in drone attacks. That distinction belongs to a belt of villages further south-west along the Afghanistan border.

I
n 2009, the year Shahzad abandoned his Shelton home and was living with his parents in their posh neighbourhood in Peshawar, approximately forty-seven drone attacks killed 411 people in Waziristan. Peshawar, however, suffered no drone attacks. The violence there is different. In the last year, Taliban suicide bombers have struck an average of three times a week, killing civilians in markets, mosques and police stations. As a military man, Shahzad’s father’s allegiance would be to the government, his sympathies with the victims of the suicide attacks in the city where he and his wife now live.

These intricacies are beyond esoteric for most NYPD police officers. Disrupting plots is more about interpretation than enforcement. But what if, as is so often the case, a man’s history is not enough to fathom his future intentions? Marwat is a striking example. Like Shahzad, he too left for the West as a teenager. But Marwat didn’t arrive the way Shahzad did – a proficient English speaker in designer sunglasses with a university scholarship. Marwat was a seventeen-year-old who slept in train stations. His life story, not Shahzad’s, should have produced a militant.

Instead, Marwat’s exposure to atrocity and poverty galvanized him. He laughs at what some might consider Shahzad’s minor deprivations – a suburban house that wouldn’t sell, a lousy commute. And he doesn’t think they had much to do with Shahzad’s radicalization.

‘If I put myself in his shoes, it’s simple. It’s American policies in his country. That’s it. Americans are so closed-minded. They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. And he did know. Every time you turn on Al Jazeera, they show our people being killed. A kid getting murdered. A woman being beaten. 24/7.’

‘We don’t have to do anything to attract them,’ one terrorist organizer in Lahore explained to me. ‘The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us,’ he said. ‘Then it’s simply a case of converting these sentiments into action.’

Marwat’s fellow counterterrorism colleagues on the force mean well but they don’t always know what to look for. ‘They’re constantly looking to see if a guy goes to a mosque,’ he says. ‘I tell them, people who go to mosque, don’t worry about them. People who go to mosque, they learn good things. People who don’t go to mosque – you have to worry about them.

‘A lot of times when cops are interviewing people, they think everyone’s a terrorist. I have to tell them, actually, the way this guy’s talking, it’s nothing. Every Muslim in the world thinks what this guy thinks. This is the problem. If you train American-born guys, spend a lot of money teaching Arabic, the culture, the most they get, even after all that, is 30 per cent.’

M
artin Stolar was one of four lead attorneys in
Handschu
v.
Special Services Division
, a landmark federal civil rights case filed on behalf of Barbara Handschu, a political activist and lawyer who represented the Black Panthers and other groups under surveillance in the 1960s. The 1985 decree that resulted prohibited unfettered police monitoring of religious or political groups. In 2002, when Adam Cohen was revamping the Intelligence Division, the police department sought a weakening of the Handschu decree from the original judge, paving the way for the surveillance of Muslims. They won it in 2003.

Today, I’m sitting across from Stolar in his grotty fourth-floor law office above lower Broadway between a carry-out called New Fancy Food and a store that sells ‘Hats & Sun Glass’. He is smoking Merit cigarettes, still hippie skinny with a beard now silvery grey. He has agreed to talk to me about the only other convicted Pakistani
bombplotter
in New York City.

His client, Shahawar Matin Siraj, was found guilty by a federal jury of participating in a conspiracy to attack the Herald Square subway station in 2004, three days before the Republican National Convention was to begin at Madison Square Garden. Twenty-three at the time, Siraj was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Today he’s in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.