The logic of Suicide Terrorism

Yes, this comes from an unlikely source, The American Conservative Magazine. However, I recommend reading it. It's an interview with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, who wrote a book on this subject called Dying to Win.

What the article contains might surprise you, such as this:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.