PESHAWAR: When Faisal Shahzad was arrested over the New York car bomb attempt, he joined a growing list of Western terror suspects inspired, trained or sponsored by extremists in Pakistan.

The son of an affluent air force commander, Shahzad was brought up in Pakistan but educated in the United States, where he got a job, settled his young family into suburbia and acquired citizenship.

But the American dream appeared to go badly wrong. Returning from a visit to Pakistan, he told US immigration officials he went to see his parents.

After his arrest on last Monday over the attempt to set off a car bomb in Times Square, he allegedly confessed to being trained in Pakistan to make bombs.

Pakistan is yet to confirm a link between Shahzad and a specific militant faction, but investigators are poring over who exactly he visited and where he went during a months-long stay in his homeland.

While the details are opaque, radicalised youth have long felt an irresistible pull to Pakistan as a nursery of modern jihad. The country’s borderlands with Afghanistan have been branded the headquarters of Al-Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden’s ideology of global jihad against the United States and its allies, rooted in the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistani border, has inspired myriad offshoot groups and galvanised alienated youth.

“Jihadi elements are coming here from all over the world because they can cross the border and can enter Afghanistan,” Malik Naveed Khan, police chief of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa northwestern province, told AFP.

“The mountains along the Afghan border are best shelter for them.”

Accidents of history and geography have made the 27,200 square kilometres (10,500 square miles) of Pakistan’s tribal belt, which lies beyond any government control, a hotbed of Pakistani, Afghan and foreign militants.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States sowed the seeds by sponsoring Afghans to fight against the Soviets in the 1980s. The war put huge pressure on the Soviet Union but spawned jihadist groups and Al-Qaeda.

“Pakistan allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry from all over the world to settle down in Peshawar, in the tribal areas,” said Imtiaz Gul, whose book on the tribal belt, “The Most Dangerous Place”, is to be published next month.

“They found a place where nobody questioned what they were doing and this continued all through these three decades,” he added.

The 1980s ushered in a major state-sponsored Islamisation of Pakistani society. The military and intelligence agencies supported hardline groups as an instrument of domestic and foreign policy towards Afghanistan and Kashmir.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan pushed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda into the tribal belt, where mountains, thick forest and lawlessness provided the perfect haven.

Although much of the radical Islamic backlash against US policies is rooted in the Middle East, analysts say Pakistan, with its free media and political system, is a more fertile breeding ground than Arab police states.

“It is a country where you can find the purpose of your life…. The message, unfortunately, going out is that you can come and survive and thrive here,” said Gul, who heads the Centre for Research and Security Studies think tank.

Five Americans are currently on trial in Pakistan for allegedly plotting to carry out a terrorist attack.

David Headley, the American son of a former Pakistani diplomat, has pleaded guilty before a court in the United States to surveying targets for the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba ahead of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

Britain says the majority of its terror plots originate in Pakistan.

The mastermind of the 2005 bombings in London, and two of the four Britons who blew themselves up on the city’s transport system, visited Pakistan.

Sophisticated transport links make it easy to travel to Karachi, Lahore or Peshawar, where young people can meet political leaders or clerics who can put them in touch with militants.

A police investigator in Karachi, where Shahzad is believed to have spent time, said there were “many” madrassas and mosques in the city where educated people were being indoctrinated and manipulated.

“In Karachi, in Lahore, in Peshawar, you have Islamic clergy that preaches radicalism. So it is easy access that makes Pakistan an attractive place,” said security and political analyst Hasan Askari.

“Out of those youths, only a very small number, maybe one or two per cent would adopt violence,” said Askari.