The war on terrorism is heading south. The key reason is that the West's strategy for this war is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that suicide terrorism is mainly a product of an evil ideology called "Islamic fundamentalism" and that this ideology would produce campaigns of suicide terrorism wherever it exists and regardless of our military policies. This presumption is wrong, and is leading towards foreign policies that are making our situation worse. I have studied every suicide terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. More than half of all suicide attacks were carried out by secular groups and individuals. In fact, the world's leader in suicide terrorism was the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group that is completely secular and that recruits from Hindus. More than a third of all suicide attacks by Muslims were also carried out by secular groups, such as the Kurdish PKK in Turkey and the Communist Party in Lebanon.

What more than 95 per cent of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world have in common is not religion, but a specific political goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, the central objective of every suicide terrorist campaign since 1980 has been to compel a democratic state with military forces on territory that the terrorists prize to take those forces out. Although terrorist leaders may harbour other goals, history shows that the presence of foreign combat forces is the principal recruiting tool used by terrorist leaders to mobilise suicide terrorists to kill us. In the early 1990s, the US abandoned its traditional policy in the Persian Gulf and shifted to the sustained presence of tens of thousands of combat forces, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighters on the Arabian Peninsula. Since then, Osama bin Laden has given numerous speeches to mobilise terrorists against the US. Many are entitled "The American occupation of the Arabian Peninsula", and typically begin with pages of detailed description of American and Western combat operations on this land.

From 1995 to 2004, there were a total of 71 al-Qaeda suicide terrorists - that is, 71 individuals who actually killed themselves to carry out al-Qaeda's attacks. More than two-thirds were nationals from Sunni Muslim countries where the US has stationed combat troops since 1990: Saudi Arabia, other states on the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Even the one-third of al-Qaeda suicide attackers that are more transnational in nature are powerfully motivated by anger over Western combat operations on the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, the al-Qaeda group that claimed responsibility for the London attacks said they were to punish Britain for British military operations in Iraq. The British Home Office conducted a detailed survey of the attitudes of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain in April 2004, and found that, while 85 per cent condemned suicide terrorism, 13 per cent believed that more suicide attacks against the US and the West were justified. The survey went further to identify the specific reason: Iraq.

In other words, the principal factor driving support for suicide terrorism among British Muslims was not an evil ideology, but deep anger over British military policies on the Arabian Peninsula. As we now know, the Bali bombings in October 2002 were an al-Qaeda suicide operation. Months before the Bali attack, a mid-level al-Qaeda leader met Indonesian terrorist groups to ask them to recruit local Indonesians for suicide attacks to punish Australia for sending combat troops to Afghanistan and to deter Australian forces from going to Iraq. The al-Qaeda operative selected the nightclubs for attack and paid $US20,000 ($A26,100) for the mission, while Indonesians angry at Australia's military operations in East Timor carried it out. Since the London bombings, many are asking how local, middle-class, educated British Muslims could kill themselves to kill others. Alas, the answer is both simple and disturbing: deep anger at Western combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.

As long as the war on terrorism ignores the actual strategic logic of suicide terrorism, it will be impossible to win and our actions may well end up helping terrorist leaders recruit many more suicide terrorists to kill us.