202 ISLAM AT WAR
in the Afghan heart. Aside from the border issues—the Pakistan border
cuts off many ethnic Pushtuns from their Afghan brothers and prevents
the formation of an ethnically cohesive Pushtunistan; a longstanding ri-
valry exists between these two states. Both have meddled in the other’s
internal affairs. In addition, the Afghans have long viewed the Pakistanis
as objects of prey. When Pakistani volunteers came into Afghanistan to
join the Taliban, they were already despised foreigners, but even more
they were now perceived as supporting the oppressive central government.
It is not at all surprising that many Arab and Pakistani Taliban fighters
were slaughtered if caught.
In March 2003 the most recent Muslim experience in war occurred.
Saddam Hussein’s continued violations of the First Gulf War’s armistice
and continued weapons programs provoked an alliance of western nations
to remove him once and for all. From the Muslim perspective the on-
slaught that exploded over Baghdad was stunning in its precision and
magnitude. Technological progress and the science of applied military
force had undergone a massive evolution since the 1991 Gulf War that
was beyond the comprehension, not only of the Iraqi military, but of the
world that watched it nightly on their televisions. Precision munitions
absolutely eviscerated the Iraqi command and control system, leaving
their combat troops directionless and easy victims to the rapidly moving
American columns. The only Iraqi successes were, strangely enough,
achieved by the para-military militias that had hidden from and were by-
passed by the American armored columns. The tanks past, they suddenly
found themselves confronted by the noncombatants of the American lo-
gistical system, which did not have the combat training or weapons sys-
tems of their big brothers. These limited successes, the destruction and
capture of elements of a single ordnance company or the random sniping
of stray Western soldiers, stand in poor comparison to the overrunning of
their country in three weeks. However, they can easily be seen as yet a
further example of the historical Middle Eastern flair for small actions of
a hit-and-run nature. This is a form of guerilla or nonconventional warfare,
but the geographical environment of Iraq and most of the Persian Gulf
region is not as conducive to that style of warfare in an age of pilotless
drones, reconnaissance satellites, and laser guided bombs as it was 1,000
years earlier. The very best it can hope to accomplish is to produce a
politically difficult situation for the Western powers that occupy Iraq until
a new Iraqi government is established and they withdraw. This, however,
becomes a political and diplomatic issue and not a military one.
The backwardness of the Taliban and, to a lesser degree, Iraq, are only
the most recent evidence of a long trend in Islamic military circles—a