This is a learned, well-researched, well-written, and ultimately unsatisfying book. Its goal is to trace the causality behind the wave of suicide attacks since the late 1990s. And its primary argument is that Salafi-Jihadist organizations, formally affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaeda, are responsible for nearly all of them. But the book does not always make its case persuasively, and its analytical focus—suicide attacks—may be as misleading as it is informative.

Assaf Moghadam's basic contention is that centuries of suicide attacks in localized, largely secular contexts—such as Hizballah-Israeli, Tamil-Sinhalese, and Turkish-Kurdish—have been superseded by an era in which the vast majority of suicide attacks occur in the service of a burgeoning Al Qaeda–led, globalized, ideological, Salafi-Jihadist war against the West. “Al Qaeda's and Salafi Jihad's influence on the phenomenon of suicide attacks is so profound,” he writes, “that we can identify an entirely new pattern of attacks, namely ‘globalized suicide attacks’” (p. 3). This new reality has “gradually sidelined the traditional pattern of suicide attacks”; and, more to the point, the new pattern constitutes “the most vital threat to the security of the United States and its allies today” (p. 4).

This last statement is never defended at length in the book—one of many examples of its analytical unevenness. The “most vital” security threat? More so than Russian nuclear weapons? Chinese cyber- and economic tools of asymmetric conflict? Global warming? But the book ignores all of that in favor of suicide attacks, its sole focus, in favor of an apparent assumption that the global Salafist ideological threat remains as strong as it was seven or five or three years ago, in the face of mounting evidence that moderate (and even Islamist) Muslims are increasingly rejecting its appeals.

In terms of methodology, the book combines several elements: criticism of other models, historical contextualization, and statistical analysis. It disapproves of other single-reason analyses of suicide attacks—arguing, for example, that Robert Pape's emphasis on resistance to occupation is too narrow. The same charge, of course, could be laid against Moghadam's own single variable—it captures too few explanatory dynamics.

A second major element of the book is a history of radical Islamism—the ideological basis, the rise of Al Qaeda, and its turn to the theory of the “far enemy.” This is well done, but it has been done even better before—and in more depth and personal engagement—by the likes of Lawrence Wright, Jessica Stern, Gilles Kepel, and others. So if this book is going to add something, it is going to be on the narrow ground of suicide bombing; and the history in and of itself does not prove anything about the category of suicide bombing. On this ground, how does it fare?

Moghadam uses statistical databases to contend that the number of suicide attacks has ballooned between 1981 and 2007—particularly after 9/11 and most especially after 2003, when the number really takes off. He attributes this to Salafi-Jihadists by tracing the organizations conducting the attacks, and then connecting them to a global Salafi-Jihadist movement. From a methodological standpoint, he is using an approach similar to that of many current analysts of terrorism who rely on databases, interviews with captured terrorists, and other sources to categorize attacks and draw inferences from those categories.

The problem is that, as with other such analyses, when looked at objectively the data support many conclusions. Tracing attacks from 1981 to April 2007, Moghadam “codes” groups into several categories. One is Salafi-Jihadist; another is “mainstream Islamist and nationalist/separatist”; another is “nationalist separatist” without an Islamist element. By this categorization, Salafists are responsible for only 15% of suicide attacks since 1981, with nationalist/separatists a close second at 13% and Islamist/nationalists in third place at 10%. Given error margins, this almost counts as a three-way tie (50–51)—not what Moghadam is trying to argue.

As Moghadam contends and as history teaches, however the real Salafist wave did not hit until after the Soviet-Afghan war concluded in 1989, so we should not expect the big Salafist suicide numbers until after 1990. Strangely, though, when he breaks them out into year groups, in the period from 1996 to 2000 Salafists are still tied with mainstream Islamist/separatists at less than 20 suicide attacks. Leading the pack by far in these years are secular nationalists, with about 70. Only after 2001 do the Salafists leap into the lead, with 200 suicide attacks to about 99 for Islamists and 80 for secular nationalists (p. 52). Even these numbers do not strike this reviewer as evidence of an overwhelming dominance of this method by Salafists.

Even this lead is inflated by a large number of suicide attacks attributed to Salafists in two places—Iraq and Afghanistan. In the book, Moghadam suggests that 49.1% of suicide attacks from 1981 to April 2007 took place in Iraq after 2003, and 11% in Afghanistan after 2001; in a later published essay, taking into account subsequent numbers, he increases these figures to 54.8% for Iraq and 13.6% for Afghanistan (see CTC Sentinel 2 [January 2009]: 12). This means that some 70% of all suicide attacks since 1981 (and vastly higher percentage since 2000) have taken place in two countries subject to U.S. intervention since 2001—hardly a promising basis for large-scale research conclusions about global trends (and, in fact, possible support for Pape's contention about resistance to occupation).

The conflict in Iraq, for example, was about far more than globalized Salafi-Jihadist violence. Insurgent violence was, first and foremost, a reaction to American intervention, and secondarily an enactment of sectarian conflict in which both Sunni and Shi'ite extremists played important roles. Focusing on suicide attacks—to the exclusion, for example, of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), direct attacks, or other tools used by the Sunni insurgency or Shi'ite militias—gives the false impression that the Iraq War has been largely a Salafist affair. It was not (and is not). It has been instead much more of what Moghadam would “code” as a “traditional” conflict—nationalist/separatist, with local goals such as expelling U.S. forces.

On Afghanistan, the analytical problems are similar. Moghadam, for example, writes offhandedly of “the Taliban—a longtime Al Qaeda ally” (p. 51), again grouping everyone conducting suicide attacks into an offshoot of a “global Salafi-Jihadist” conspiracy. But in fact, the insurgent elements in Afghanistan are a tremendously varied and complex lot. No single insurgent group can be understood as a simplistic “Al Qaeda affiliate.” Yet Moghadam treats them in more or less this way (as he does with groups like the “Pakistani Taliban's” Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan).

In both the Afghan and Pakistani cases, the central movements in play are at least as much “traditional” as “globalized Jihad”: Responding to local conditions, fighting perceived outside intervention, and drawing support because of a lack of governance and social opportunity, they use terror as an instrument of political struggle. Of course, elements of these same dynamics exist for the global movement in different ways. The question is, What is the target? The near or far enemy? For the Haqqanis, Hekmatyars, Omars, Mehsuds, and Fazlullahs of the world, the answer is an intricate blend of the local, the global, the religious, the political, the tribal, the economic, and much more. Too often Moghadam equates “support” with a local group merging with Al Qaeda, when in fact offering rhetorical aid to the global movement might translate into financial and technical aid useful for a primarily local struggle. But these complexities evade Moghadam's analysis.

At base, this book stems from a dated concept of global Jihad: “The conclusion is inescapable that Al Qaeda has successfully implemented its vision to become an actor with global scope” and, having been ejected from Afghanistan, the group has “been able to reconstitute itself” along the Afghan-Pakistan border (pp. 252–53). This is the book's main conclusion. And while it may seem inescapable to Moghadam, it would be disputed by many who study Al Qaeda, who see an organization increasingly alienated from most Muslims and even most Islamists, under tremendous pressure in its supposed “safe areas,” according to a number of published reports, and having lost the strategic initiative in Iraq, Indonesia, and elsewhere. (Moghadam's analysis does not account for the dramatic decline in suicide attacks in Iraq after late 2008, for example—a trend now ticking back up, but varying in ways that the singular analysis does not explain.) Al Qaeda is a real threat, but it is nonetheless long past time to stop talking about global conspiracies, to abandon our national sense of besiegement, and to begin seeing most local terror/insurgent movements for what they are. The tone of The Globalization of Martyrdom, for all its good intentions, points our lens in the wrong direction.