U.S. seen vulnerable to radicalized immigrants

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani-American's failed bid to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square is bound to raise fears that the United States is just as vulnerable to violence from immigrants as other Western countries.

Attacks on London's transport system in 2005 by four young suicide bombers, three of them of Pakistani descent, highlighted the danger of radicalization among alienated young men from down-at-heel immigrant neighborhoods in bleak British cities.

But there has been a sense that Pakistani immigrants to the United States were much better off economically and much more assimilated than migrants in Britain, and were thus far less likely to try to launch attacks at home.

That assumption will be shaken by Faisal Shahzad who was born in Pakistan, studied in the United States and became a naturalized U.S. citizen last year, Pakistani analysts said.

"Britain has a large Pakistani immigrant community, many of these youngsters are culturally alienated but the phenomenon of radicalism goes beyond living in a ghetto," said Ayaz Amir, a Pakistani political analyst turned politician.

"Living in Pakistan doesn't make you a radical and living in America doesn't make you less of a radical, if you are inclined that way," he said. Shahzad, arrested as he was trying to leave the United States on Monday, has admitted to trying to detonate the bomb in a sports utility vehicle and receiving bomb-making training in a Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold in Pakistan, U.S. prosecutors say.

A former financial analyst who worked in the U.S. state of Connecticut, Shahzad is the son of a retired senior Pakistani air force officer.

"SHUT THEIR EYES"

There are about 750,000 people of Pakistani origin in Britain, many of them with roots in troubled Kashmir, the Himalayan region at the heart of decades of hostility between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

Islamist militants have been battling security forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir since the late 1980s.

According to U.S. census data from 2005, the most recent available, there were an estimated 210,410 people of Pakistani origin in the United States. Nearly 15,000 Pakistanis got U.S. immigrant visas last year, according to the U.S. embassy.

More than half of people of Pakistani origin in the United States hold a bachelor's degree or higher and many are professionals.

Such data might have lulled the United States into a false sense of security, even if it is only one or two people intent on violence, said another Pakistani analyst.

"This is the reality. Wherever you have Muslims, there's always the possibility that one or two will fall into the hands of militants," said Imtiaz Gul, who runs an Islamabad-based security think-tank.

"They (the United States) simply shut their eyes. They externalized the problem rather then indulging in some form of introspection," he said.

"The U.S. will also have to pursue the matter the way Canada and Great Britain did. There has been a lot of pre-emptive, pro-active intervention in the form of social reform programs."

The arrest in Pakistan late last year of five young Muslim Americans should have set off alarm bells.

But Pakistani police said the five students from the U.S. state of Virginia were suspected of trying to plot attacks in Pakistan or perhaps in neighboring Afghanistan.

There has been no hint that any of the five, who are being tried in Pakistan on terrorism charges, planned on going home to unleash violence. They said they only wanted to help fellow Muslims in Afghanistan with medical and financial aid.

Shahzad might have been motivated by a similar sense of injustice, said Amir.

"The Americans don't like to admit it but just as their occupation of Iraq fueled radicalism and gave al Qaeda a foothold there which previously it didn't have, the American occupation of Afghanistan is also fueling radicalism," said Amir.

(Editing by Chris Allbritton)