New York (CNN) -- The suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt was caught as he was seeking to flee to Pakistan, a nation that analyst Fareed Zakaria calls the "epicenter of Islamic terrorism."





"It's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan," said Zakaria. He added that Pakistan's connection with terrorist groups goes back decades and has often been encouraged by that nation's military for strategic reasons.





Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized citizen of Pakistani descent, had recently been trained in bomb making in Pakistan's Waziristan province, according to a federal complaint filed in court Tuesday. CNN reported Tuesday that Faisal Shahzad's father is a retired vice-marshal in the Pakistani Air Force.





Shahzad was arrested around 11:45 p.m. ET Monday at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport just before he was to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, by way of Dubai.





Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," spoke to CNN on Tuesday. Here is an edited transcript:





CNN: Based on what we know so far, what lessons can be learned from this incident?





Fareed Zakaria:  This does not seem to be part of a larger and more organized effort to penetrate the United States. That doesn't mean such efforts are not under way....it does make you realize just how open we are as a country and how open we are as a society.  There is always a level of vulnerability that comes from being an open society and this guy, Mr. Shahzad obviously took advantage of that openness.





CNN: Apparently he traveled to Pakistan on a number of occasions. Does that signal that Pakistan isn't vigilant enough about terrorism?





Zakaria: Well it certainly signals something that we have known for a while, which is that Pakistan is the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. ... The British government has estimated that something like 80 percent of the terror threats that they receive have a Pakistani connection.





So there's no question that Pakistan has a terrorism problem. It has radical groups within the country that have the ability to recruit people and have access to resources that makes for a very combustible mixture.





It should remind us that even when looking at the war in Afghanistan, ultimately  the most important place where jihadis are being trained and recruited is not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. And there's no other part of the world where you have quite the same concentration of manpower, resources and ideology all feeding on each other.





CNN: What feeds the ideology that drives the terror effort?





Zakaria: Pakistan has been conducive to this kind of jihadis for a number of reasons. For the last three or four decades, the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military has supported, funded many of these groups in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, in a bid to maintain an asymmetrical capacity against India -- in other words, to try to destabilize India rather cheaply through these militant groups rather than frontally through its army.





So it has found it useful to have these militant groups and to support them. It has always assumed that these groups will not attack Pakistanis and therefore was not a threat to Pakistan itself. And to a large extent that's true, these groups by and large have attacked people in Afghanistan, India, in the West but not in Pakistan. But that is changing, because these groups are so intermingled and often sufficiently ideological, and also because the Pakistani military is beginning to take them on.





But fundamentally the reason this has gone on is that there has been a policy of the Pakistani state and particularly the Pakistani military, to encourage these groups, to fund them, to ignore their most pernicious activities. And some of it goes back even further than four decades. In the 1965 war against India, the Pakistanis used Islamic jihadis...





And the great hope now is that finally the Pakistani government is getting serious about this.
Who received bomb training in Pakistan's Waziristan region? What does Zakaria say? Who was charged in Times Square bomb probe? Who was charged in Time Square bomb probe? when did this happen
Faisal Shahzad, "It's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan," Faisal Shahzad, Faisal Shahzad, 11:45 p.m. ET Monday
question: Who received bomb training in Pakistan's Waziristan region?, answer: Faisal Shahzad, | question: What does Zakaria say?, answer: "It's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan," | question: Who was charged in Times Square bomb probe?, answer: Faisal Shahzad, | question: Who was charged in Time Square bomb probe?, answer: Faisal Shahzad, | question: when did this happen, answer: 11:45 p.m. ET Monday