The logic of the suicide bomber

An article from, of all things, The American Conservative, who interview Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. His book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is based on his research in compiling the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. He says that "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". Amongst other things, he points out in his book that suicidde terrorism actually originated in Sri Lanka, with the Tamil Tigers, rather than being a Muslim phenomenon.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html