Several people have pointed out this article in the WaPo about the disillusionment of many formerly jihading muslims in Pakistan. This paragraph caught my eye particularly:

“Sufi Mohammad let down the people,” said Khisda Rahman, 35, in Chakdara. “He took all these guys and now they are dead or in prison. But he ran away and came back. People are asking why he didn’t sacrifice himself.”

When Sufi Mohammad organized the convoys that passed through Chakdara, “the whole town was celebrating,” Rahman said. “Now they are sad they did. They will never follow him again.”

Compare with these paragraphs from this web site:

Urban…promised them the Church’s blessing, the aid of God, and the certainly of being taking immediately into heaven for those who fell in the attempt.

The crowd was swept up in the call, and the cry of Deus vult! (“Gods wills it!”) spread far and wide. Almost all classes and nationalities of Europeans responded in a movement far greater and more varied than Urban may have expected. It is unlikely that anyone realized how well this call suited the needs and predisposition of the Europeans of the time.

It is ironic that so many Islamicists accuse the West of going on another crusade against them. The reality is that, just as Christianity went through its dark ages, so now is Islam (or at least some virulent sects of it) in their own. And the response is the same–a distraction of the peasants from their (government-imposed) peasantry with the excitement of a Holy War (in this case, Jihad or a Crescentade).

Fortunately, our communications and information transfer is much better now than it was in the European middle ages, so the lesson may be learned after a single dramatic failure, instead of having multiple Crescentades.