Can suicide bombings be rational?

I’ve always considered suicide bombings somewhat of a human anomaly. Yesterday, there was an attempted suicide bombing assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto immediately after her return from eight years of exile. There are already 124 fatalities, and this is expected to climb. Bhutto herself was uninjured. But it brought me to a more intrinsic question: Can suicide bombings be rational — or rationalised — both in terms of the individual decision-making, and in terms of the commonly catastrophic casualties?

Let me begin by stating the obvious. I’m no psychiatrist, and this is more an open forum for debate than any kind of personal statement on my part. The thought of taking the decision to end one’s life to assassinate and/or maim for a religious or political cause — and, in most cases, to take significant innocent lives with you — is so inexplicable to me that it warrants explanation. That actual moment, that second, when that decision is made, there must naturally be plenty of deliberation, plenty of thoughts about friends and families left behind.

But surely there has to be such an overriding desperation to achieve some kind of change; surely this cannot only be justified through thoughts of posthumous success or reward?

I am fully open to the proposition that I suffer from a Western way of thinking on this matter; a more capitalist-based ideology of the selfishness of the individual over the sacrifice for the greater good — but to me there seems something even more underlying than this. I find it only marginally easier to understand the rationalisation of the “death-decision” taken by Palestinian suicide bombers as they feel it is the only way to bridge the gap between themselves and Israel’s military might. They take this decision under a patriotic justification that it will drive the Israelis off “their” land and ensure a “better life” for their families left behind. But how does one explain suicide bombings for seemingly political causes, such as Bhutto’s attempted assassination? There must be the cultural tolerance of suicide bombings as a rational methodology.

Naturally, many of these suicide bombings (although there are many exceptions) are undertaken by Muslim extremists, and the religious element within the decision-making process naturally plays a significant role in easing the “death-decision”. The decision is rationalised by a faith that personal sacrifice will be rewarded by gifts in the afterlife, and thus by extension that targets of the suicide bombings must be believed to have a religious “us versus them” rationalisation. This is dangerous as almost any potential target could be rationalised as a religious target, especially to an impressionable and idealistic young religious warrior. But yet, through my eyes it still seems difficult for an individual to take this decision blindly.

However, I would concede that it is this that is the problem, I hold no indoctrination into a culture that preaches suicide bombings as noble, and thus the rationalisation escapes me. Is it this simple, that it is only a case of cultural indoctrination, or do you see suicide bombings as being rational decisions under any other framework?