As investigators probe the Times Square bombing plot and delve deep into the personal history of suspect Faisal Shahzad, scores of Pakistani Americans are left wondering why their worst fears came true and why this seemingly ordinary citizen tried to harm them and their fellow citizens.

Shahzad drove into Times Square May 1 late evening and parked his Nissan Pathfinder rigged to explode. Mishaps dogged his steps. He fled the scene taking a train back to Connecticut, leaving his getaway car and a trail of evidence that helped investigators track him in less than two days.

In interviews with News India Times, several Pakistani Americans revealed they were not just deeply dismayed and disappointed, but felt beleaguered and frustrated about the setback in their struggle to portray their community in a positive light. As with any such incident, the backlash usually manifests itself against the larger community, they fear.

"Please don't let it be a Muslim or Pakistani dude. Please don't let it be a Muslim or Pakistani dude," was what Wajahat Ali, born and brought up in the United States, was repeating to himself in the hours before Shahzad's name was revealed.

He calls it the "Post-Crisis Minority Mantra" in his piece on Salon.com, titled "What I understand about Faisal Shahzad."

"As a Muslim Pakistani, I can't tell you why he did it. But I know one violent nut can change how Americans see me," Ali writes.

Born in the area of Peshawar in a well-to-do family with a father who rose high in the Pakistan Air Force, Shahzad came to America, studied here, got two degrees, one an MBA from Bridgeport University in Connecticut, and became an American citizen just last year.

He lived in Shelton, Conn., where he owned a home that he bought in 2004. Like many other Americans, he faced foreclosure and news reports say he took a second loan of more than $200,000. His wife, U.S.-born Huma Mian, a University of Colorado graduate, is reported to have left for Pakistan and lives with her parents.

The Associated Press reports Mian's social networking page lists her languages as English, Pashto, Urdu and French, her religion as Muslim, her ideological bent as "nonpolitical," and her favorite shows as "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Friends." The couple has two children.

Since his arrest at John F. Kennedy International Airport on May 4, Shahzad has been singing like a bird about everything, including his training in Waziristan, Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistani authorities have arrested at least eight people connected in some way to him.

An intelligence official tells Reuters Shahzad received militant training in northwest Pakistan near the garrison town of Kohat, an area known to be the stronghold of Tariq Afridi, the Pakistani Taliban commander in the region. "We believe this suspected terrorist fashioned a bomb from rudimentary ingredients, placed it in a rusty SUV and drove it into Times Square with the intent to kill as many innocent tourists and theater-goers as possible," Attorney General Eric Holder says.

A Dr. Anwar, who knew Shahzad, tells CNN that over the last few years, the suspect was becoming more reclusive, but that he was a "caring father, a caring husband." However, Shahzad was also expressing views that were more "black and white" and there was an element of anger in his religious views, the doctor says.

While boarding the subway in Washington, D.C. to work the day Shahzad's name was out, Taha Gaya, 28, a lawyer, saw the front page of the local Metro Express newspaper blaring "Made in Pakistan" with Shahzad's photo. Gaya's organization, Pakistani American Leadership Center (PAL-C), works to build bridges between the Pakistani-American population and U.S. Congress, and to improve Pakistan's image in this country.

For him, "Just seeing 'Made in Pakistan' being associated with the face, it was a huge setback, even for the work I do. The nuances always get lost when everyone is going to read that headline."

That negative image of Pakistan is never going to be rounded out by positive images, he says, though he remembers an earlier documentary with the same title "Made in Pakistan" about a string of successful Pakistanis rebranding their country as a progressive and modernizing hub. Pakistan usually makes the headlines when it is bad news, he complains, leading to a very biased representation in the media and the general population.

Shahzad mostly lived what is considered an "ordinary" life, or, as one terrorism expert believes, too ordinary to meet his own high expectations. Professor Lawrence Likar of La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pa. says Shahzad exhibits a nihilistic bent and draws possibly from radical Islamist ideology.

"In reality, people are becoming radicalized since the 1700s and before that, they were radicalized in the biblical era," Likar tells News India Times.

"When there is a movement out there, a social movement, there are certain people who will become part of that and some of those individuals, it takes over their lives."

For some followers, the movement does not move fast enough.

The issue is who can become radicalized enough to become violent and harm people or property. But the idea that this is somehow restricted to Islam is wrong, he adds.

"The idea that this is some Islamic technique is not true. It is the cause they are drawn to," Likar says. Usually, those most nihilistic are ones that are not very successful, not achieving what they thought they would, and in some cases, they reach a point where anger and frustration take over.

Likar's views reflect those in Ted Gurr's classic treatise, Why Men Rebel, which links psychological frustration with political violence and aggression, arguing it is more the perception of the person about his or her "relative deprivation."

"The potential for collective violence varies strongly with the intensity and scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity," Gurr says in his book, defining "relative deprivation" as the discrepancy between what a person thinks he/she deserves and what he/she can get. "This is a classic case of someone who wanted to be more. Maybe he was achieving, but not to his expectations. It is like what you think you are achieving is not up to the mark," Likar contends.

Here was a man whose job was not paying him much; he could not maintain his lifestyle.

He was previously from an upper-middle-class family. Now he is not in that class. He is obviously isolating himself to some degree. But, "He does not fit into the category of someone indoctrinated from a very young age," Likar says.

Gaya tells News India Times, that like any other Pakistani or Muslim American, he was hoping it wouldn't be a Pakistani, but it turned out to be a definite disappointment. "You are always being called to prove your Americanism," he says.

"I felt a sense of frustration and disappointment and yet another huge challenge we have to overcome, not just for Pakistani Americans, but even Indian Americans. We work very closely with the Sikh coalition. They have faced an enormous amount of discrimination which has come out of bigoted people who think they are Muslim."

But he puts a positive spin on it. He says Pakistan coming forward right away to help with the investigation is a big plus.

"We (Pakistan and the United States) are in a symbiotic relationship. The more that the U.S. and international community can provide assistance, military assistance and helping displaced persons from that area, it goes a long way in making sure these kinds of things don't happen."

Fu'ad Butt, 39, a Pakistani American in the financial services sector in New York City, feels the likes of Shahzad threaten him just as much as anybody else in Manhattan. "I'm an American, I go to Times Square, I enjoy a hot dog there. The common man doesn't realize that it threatens my life. They (terrorists) are against me, too. I don't appreciate that either."

Like other Pakistani Americans, he voiced the inevitable "not again" when news came out about Shahzad. But, he says, all South Asians, and sometimes even Latinos, are threatened because they may look like they belong to the same crop Shahzad comes from.

"You feel like it could have been you getting killed – makes you angry – what is this guy doing? It's almost beyond angry, it's like, pathetic.

"What's the message he is trying to send? They haven't really thought anything through, are short sighted, and doing a great disservice not just to Pakistani Americans. No one on the street can make out if you are Indian, Nepalese, Bangladeshi."

It takes 10 positive steps to make up for one negative one, Butt says.

South Asians have built their reputations over the last half century in various fields – finances, hospitality, medicine, all of which is threatened by such an act. South Asians are put on the defensive and every word counts when speaking to anyone, Butt says. It becomes everyone's duty to counter the negative image and work the media to put out a contrary view to the one being fed by a failed bomber.

"The irony is you can't even use the word 'Islam' in the same sentence, even though it is a religion of peace," Butt says. He is as much against the home-grown militias in the United States as Shahzad, or Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor in the 2008 Mumbai attack, who received the death sentence in India on May 6.

Those born and brought up here also end up bearing the brunt of something they feel they have nothing to do with. "What I did know, with a sinking feeling, was that many moderate, peaceful Pakistani Muslims like me were further doomed to collective mistrust and suspicion," Ali says in the Salon.com article.

It is ironic that minorities are seen through the lens of one person's misstep, Pakistani Americans opine. At the same time, no one can deny that it was the level of freedom and anonymity Shahzad enjoyed in his day-to-day life that he was able to get that Nissan Pathfinder to Times Square; that as much as there are cries to revoke his citizenship, there are those fighting to read him his Miranda rights, to leave him the choice of talking or not, to not send him to death row and to preserve his right to buy a gun as he did in mid-March.

The Government Accountability Office, in a May 5 report, notes that from February 2004 through February 2010, FBI data show that individuals on the terrorist watch list were involved in firearm or explosives background checks 1,228 times; 1,119 (a whopping 91 percent) of these transactions were allowed to proceed because no prohibiting information was found. Only 109 were denied.

So even if Shahzad had been on a terror watch list, he probably would have ended up buying the weapon found in the vehicle he used to get to the airport.

The New York Times report, "Suspect's gun proved easy to obtain," is a spine-chilling account of what havoc Shahzad might have created, if he had not depended on his unwieldy product that connected an arcane clock to propane tanks.

The gun he bought after strolling into a store in Shelton, is a "fearsome looking" carbine, the Kel-Tec SUB-2000 rifle, the Times reports.

Gaya says he finds Shahzad's reactions at the time of his capture intriguing. What's really weird, he says, is when Shahzad was caught, he said words to the effect, "What took you so long, I was expecting you." That would not be the question you would generally ask. "That's really disturbing," Gaya says.

Did Shahzad intend to fail?

That is a question yet to be looked into. That he was not a good student of the alleged Taliban trainers who were supposed to have schooled him in how to build a bomb is obvious from the many missteps Shahzad committed.

He thought he was buying a fertilizer that would help when the detonation took place, it was not; he left his keys for the getaway car and his house keys in the Nissan Pathfinder that was rigged to explode; he went home by train and had to call his landlord to open the apartment for him; he had scratched off the vehicle identification number from the dashboard but failed to remove it from the engine block; he paid for the bomb-car with cash but did not change ownership, to name some.

But even this clumsy attempt could have succeeded in perpetrating death and destruction on Times Square, were it not for the alert roadside vendors who called the cops.

In Pakistan for five months before returning to America in February, Shahzad seems to have begun putting his plan into action in March. His execution of the plan left much to be desired, like much of his life. Despite that, some Taliban groups in Pakistan are claiming it was a success.