The nations of the Faith falling under the misty rubric of the Ummah - a swathe of territory stretching from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east - are suffering the most acutely from the problem of backbone. Subjected to all manner of insults they have yet to discover their voice or, between them, come up with a single idea to confront the situation they face.

The nations of the True Banner have faced hard times before. They have a history of being kicked around by imperial powers - the British, the French, and now the Americans - a state of affairs less a reflection on imperialism than on the supineness of its victims. Even so, the mute show being put on nowadays by Muslim potentates and rulers takes the prize for being more self-driven than externally-imposed. Not gunboats but a sound instinct of self-preservation lies behind this conspiracy of silence.

It is not as if anyone is expecting them to carry out revolutionary acts of defiance. That's not on the agenda of the Muslim world. The only thing remotely feasible is some form of sotto voce muttering, if only to tell the Americans that the blind support of Israel, and such flights of imagination as 'axis-of-evil' rhetoric, will come at the price of making the Muslim masses more bitter. But in the present climate of acquiescence and meekness even this has been too much to expect.

Only once in the modern era have Muslim countries acted in concert and that was in 1973 at the time of the Arab-Israeli war when they enforced the oil embargo against the West. What an effect that had: the quadrupling of oil prices and a severe blow to western economies.

It is worth remembering that Pakistan, so often out of step with Arab sentiments, was for once, under Bhutto's leadership, fully in tune with them. But then, whatever his detractors might say, that was Bhutto, a strong personality with a gift for speaking out. At the high table of Muslim self-assertion he supped as an equal with the likes of Faisal, Boumedienne, Qadhafy and Hafez Assad. Also capable of the grand gesture, it was he who sent PAF pilots to fly combat missions over the skies of Damascus against the Israeli air force.

Bhutto had his faults but this is not the place to enumerate them. Suffice it to say in the present context that Pakistan's strong ties to the Arab world, but ties that have sadly frayed with the passage of time, date from his time at the helm. But how brief that moment of unity and how soon overtaken by the politics of 'moderation' - the polite word for capitulation - which now rules the countries of Islam.

Today the Muslim countries present a dismal picture: internally trapped in despotism and unable to move to democracy, externally tied to America's coattails, Syria and Iran alone standing in the defiant camp, a camp whose numbers have been hit by a drought of the spirit. No wonder, far from being agents of change and dynamism, most Muslim countries stand mute sentinels at the gates of the status quo.

But not for the first time in history, out of the depths of despair has arisen a new hope. The fight abandoned by the Arab states, and also by the discredited Arafat, has been taken up by the people of occupied Palestine. This is no empty slogan.

In Gaza and the West Bank we are seeing a popular uprising, one, moreover, getting more sophisticated and effective by the day. The same tactics which enabled Hezbollah to drive the Israeli army from South Lebanon are being followed with increasing success by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other spearheads of the Palestinian resistance.

More importantly, the Palestinian resistance has conquered the fear of death. It is easy to talk of suicide bombings, less easy to fathom the courage behind this phenomenon. As the US discovered in Vietnam, when the spirit of a people is aroused mere force ("brute force bereft of reason", in Horace's words) is no answer to it. But not only in the occupied territories are things not running according to script. Disquieting news for the US military is emerging from Afghanistan where fighting in the country's east shows that far from being destroyed there is still fight left in the Taliban.

Are these the opening shots of a long drawn-out guerrilla campaign? Who can tell but a few facts may be noted. The bulk of the Taliban fighters were not destroyed by the Daisy-cutters. They evaporated into the Afghan mountains carrying their weapons with them. The writ of the Karzai government does not cover even the whole of Kabul.

Warlordism has made a comeback elsewhere in the country. The reconstruction of Afghanistan will remain a pipe dream without pacification. But for anything like full-scale pacification more ground troops will be needed. The more troops there are, the more hostages to fortune.

No one seems to have read the history of the First Afghan War - 1838-42 - or indeed the lessons of the Soviet occupation. Conquering the cities and installing a puppet figurehead (Shah Shuja in 1838, Babrak Karmal in 1979) was the easier part. Consolidating this conquest and reconciling the Afghan people to it was the harder part.

Is history about to repeat itself? It is too early to say but one thing is for sure: from beneath the rubble of the American bombing the first telltale signs of resistance are beginning to emerge. Did Mulla Omar really escape on a motorbike from Kandahar? The Daisy-cutter brigade in Pakistan which sang the praises of America's technological superiority had a hearty laugh at this image of the supreme Talliban leader taking to his heels. But who will have the last laugh?

The US says the next country on its hit-list is Iraq. It may be no small mercy for the rest of the world if indeed it is. There is no defeating American hubris, the right word to describe the post-Taliban mood in the White House, on its own terms. It can only be done if the US, not heeding the lessons of past empires, succumbs to the temptation of imperial over-stretch: embroiled in places it had no business getting into in the first place.

Israel mired in the Palestinian intifida, the US facing unrest and increasing resistance in Afghanistan, the US setting out on a chase for Saddam Hussein in Iraq: where will this hubris lead? Just such a mood got the US into Vietnam and although reminders of Vietnam or uncomfortable parallels with it are not the done thing in Washington, only a confirmed Blairite will say that the US has the future all wrapped up.

As for Pakistan, it is desperately sticking to the Blair option: saying yes to everything the Americans say in the hope that it will stay inside the American loop. Explaining Pakistan's new-found status, President Musharraf said in New York that Bush, Blair and Powell were just a phone call away. This is the extent of our importance. But then we have little reason to complain. If in the words of the Guardian writer Hugo Young, even Britain is being treated as a reliable American puppet, how much higher can Pakistan set its sights?

All the same, the arc of crisis running from Israel to India looks a lot more turbulent than it did when the champagne bottles were opened after the defeat of the Taliban. Even the superior look on India's face has disappeared in the aftermath of the Gujarat holocaust. Still, we have a long way to go. Afghanistan has to hot up some more and the US needs to carry out its strike on Iraq before we can truly say with Chairman Mao, "There is great disorder under the heavens and the situation is excellent."