The big unanswered question in the never-ending war on terror, the question the West is afraid to tackle, is: how can we win against an enemy who is prepared to die for the cause he or she espouses? How can we beat the suicide bomber?

The West has tried to play down their role in the war by denigrating them: suicide bombers are crazy, depressed, half-wits manipulated by terrorist masterminds; their acts are more about suicide than about terrorism. Or suicide bombers are ignorant religious fanatics who believe that they will reap their rewards in the afterlife.

Surprisingly, there has been little real research about what motivates the suicide bomber or what their motivation is. Unless they have left statements explaining themselves there has been little material to work with, interviews after the act obviously being impossible.

Shankar Vedantam, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, has set out remedy this gap in our knowledge. He has written a book called “The Hidden Brain: how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars and save our lives” (Scribe).

He draws heavily on the work of an Israeli psychologist, Ariel Merari, who has collected the biographies of suicide bombers whose missions were aborted, who changed their minds or who failed for other reasons. He found them in Israeli and other prisons and spent hours interviewing them.

The results are astounding. Suicide bombers are not crazy, a conclusion reached not only by Merari but by other psychologists as well. If anything, they have better mental health than the rest of the population. Religion is not their main motive and they are not more religious than anyone else. Many of them are secular. Some are even atheists.

They are not deprived underdogs of society. Many come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. They list professions like architects, doctors and engineers in their CVs. They are not suicidal by nature. Nor are they nihilists. If anything they are more idealistic than average and more prone to feelings of guilt. To my mind not enough thought has been given to the suicide bombers’ sense of injustice and their feeling that they are fighting against an enemy so powerful that they can only make a mark by sacrificing their lives. Merari says that only a few listed personal vengeance as motivation but I have read that interrogations by Pakistan authorities of terrorists revealed that humiliation at the hands of their Western enemies and the ongoing Arab-Israeli confrontation was behind their decision to resort to terrorism.

So what does turn a person into a suicide bomber?

Shankar Vedantam says that one cannot believe what the bombers say are their motives. They may cite religion and may carry out their mission in the name of religion in part to explain their behaviour to themselves.

So in the end we are left with theories and he and Merari theorise that suicide bombers are influenced by what they call the psychology of small groups, the “band of brothers” syndrome known to all military historians.

“Military commanders have known for generations that people don’t give their lives for King, God and country. That may be what they say. In reality ordinary men and women give their lives for the sake of the small group of buddies in the trench ?next to them.

“The power that small groups wield over individuals explains why in every historical instance that has produced suicide bombers, the supply of men and women willing to volunteer to kill themselves has exceeded the demand . . . Suicide bombers belong to a very exclusive club and the exclusivity is one of its central appeals.”

One thing is certain. The suicide bomber is not going to go away until the conditions that brought about their rise go away. Many told Merari that if they were released from prison, they would volunteer for another mission and they thought the Israeli was crazy for not seeing how obvious and rational was their course of action.

Published in The Khaleej Times.

It is nearly nine years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not called a war on terror anymore. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.

But whatever it is termed, the answer to how it is going is: very badly. Not only is there no end in sight—some military men talk of victory in 25 years—but Osama bin Laden, the man America vowed to get “dead or alive”, is as elusive as ever.

Britain and the United States claim that terrorism has grown into an international force that threatens all those who stand with the US. But wait a ?minute. This growth in terrorism has occurred during their colossal war against it, using all the military, political and intelligence powers at their disposal.

So as Saad al-Fagih, director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, pointed out, “the logical conclusion must be that the so-called war ?on terror in its present form, is yielding precisely the opposite results to those intended.”

Further, as Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, charges, “War is itself terrorism… that taking away people and subjecting them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less.”

The main front in the war, now Afghanistan, remains a disaster. The British Army is taking casualties at a level not seen since the 1950s. The United Nations reported recently that Afghan civilian deaths doubled in 2009.

Two thirds of the British public believes that the war is unwinnable and all the troops should be brought home by Christmas. The hawks urge the Pentagon to put even more troops into the war, forgetting that General Westmoreland had a million soldiers in Vietnam but said he needed a million more in order to win.

At home there has been a shift in the public mood. Insiders are said to be telling President Obama he should follow the advice given to President Johnson in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire – “Declare victory and leave.”

And abroad the United States slides steadily downwards in the Anholt-GMI Nations Brand Index, the equivalent of a world popularity contest.

Some knowledgeable Americans recognise the danger. Robert Baer, a former top CIA officer, says: “Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it is an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere.”

The unpalatable fact is that Britain and America are fighting an unwinnable war against an unidentifiable enemy. How can they fight terrorism when they cannot even agree what terrorism is?

That seems unlikely but either way what journalists should certainly be doing is reporting the views of terrorists so as to try to understand their motives. Would it not be more productive to try to understand what the terrorists want and what they would be prepared to accept to end their operations.

Instead acres of newsprint and hours of TV time have been devoted to condemning them as “evil”, a word which absolves us from thinking about the problem: if they are evil (born evil; grew up to be evil; taught to be evil? Which is it?), then it is useless to try to understand them.

But as David Clark, the former British Labour Party adviser points out, those who condemn terrorists as evil cannot answer the question: why is there more evil around today than there used to be? And they have nothing to contribute to the debate about what needs to happen next.

Published in The Khaleej Times.