For over a week now, millions of Egyptians have peacefully protested the rule of their 82-year-old president, Hosni Mubarak. As non-uniformed, pro-government forces attacked protestors with rocks in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square on Wednesday afternoon, the White House came under stronger pressure to get in line with the protesters and call for Mubarak to step down. The media has alleged that the Obama administration may fear a hostile takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, or that the fall of Mubarak would bring an end to the US-Egypt strategic relationship. Yet the administration’s top priority is likely salvaging its relationship with the Egyptian military.
The Egyptian Armed Forces should not be conflated with Mubarak himself or the reviled Central Security Forces and Ministry of the Interior. As a professional force of about 468,000 people, the Egyptian military is a respected institution in Egyptian society that seeks regional leadership, economic security, and the integrity of its own institution. It is probably the only force that is logistically capable of restoring domestic stability. It also provides a number of geopolitical services to the United States: preferential passage of US warships through the Suez Canal, intermediation with the Islamist party Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and intelligence cooperation in the “War on Terror.”
However, the military does not yet seem to have decided if continued support for Mr. Mubarak serves its best interests.
On the one hand, the military has stabilized large sections of Cairo and interacted with protesters peacefully since it was deployed last Friday, and Minister of Defense Mohammed Tantawi has even appeared with protesters in Tahrir Square. For years there have been rumors that the top Egyptian brass is not content with Mr. Mubarak’s rule, which has seen record poverty and corruption within the regime and a small number of private businessmen. On the other hand, Mr. Mubarak and both of his predecessors were military men; the intelligence chief-cum-Vice President, Omar Suleiman, is a military man; and new Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq, is the former commander of the Air Force. Most importantly, a future democratic regime would place sovereignty over the Egyptian state in the hands of the Egyptian people—and it’s not clear how “institutionalized uncertainty” in the political sphere would affect the military’s highly valued political and economic autonomy.
My best guess is that if the military feels the protests can be quelled with minimal concessions and no effective regime change, it will side with Mubarak and his designated successor. If it feels that the protests are insurmountable, it is likely to play a crucial role in negotiating a transition. The trouble is that there is no precedent for what is happening in Egypt right now, and neither the military nor anybody else has the means to predict whether or not the protests will be effective.
The root causes of the protests, economics, and repression, have afflicted Egypt for decades. Although the country was ranked the World Bank’s Top Economic Reformer for several years in a row, boasts moderate GDP growth, and reasonably weathered the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the living standards of most Egyptians have been eroded by more open trade, the retrenchment of subsidies, and inflation. Low-level protests in Cairo and Mahalla, a textiles manufacturing center in the Nile Delta, have been going on since 2005, and more recently Egyptian workers have started to establish independent unions. Protests have also been organized around the notorious brutality of Egyptian police, which according to videos and recently released U.S. diplomatic cables, routinely engage in the torture of prisoners. In the past seven months, many protesters have carried images of the busted and bloodied face of Khaled Said, an Alexandrian man who was beaten to death by Egyptian police over the summer.
Although the problems that motivate them are acute, Egyptian protests have historically been anticlimactic—I have attended a few of them myself over the past couple of years. The first April 6 “General Strike,” organized on Facebook in 2008, saw Central Security Forces and curious foreigners outnumber Egyptians in Tahrir Square. The turnout at protests this past summer seemed stronger, but riot police and plainclothes thugs (“baltagiya,” identified by their button-down shirts and matching shoes) still neatly divided crowds of protesters, pushing them into alleyways and arresting those who could not out-run them. I, like most onlookers, thought that most people were either (1) too afraid or (2) too co-opted by state patronage to ever produce an effective protest movement in Egypt. I was wrong.
Everything about the most recent protests took experts by surprise, both in terms of academic theory and practical experience. Revolutions require popular participation, but also a high degree of organization and leadership. This is not the nature of opposition protesters in Egypt right now. Although all of them demand democracy, their inspiration is a mix of political and economic grievances that seem to have been ignited not by a common leader but by witnessing the popular deposal of Zein Al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. Similarly, their collective action is provided not by a central organization but by small, simple, and inexpensive technologies like Facebook and Twitter.
Egyptian protesters are intimidating in their numbers, therefore, but it’s not clear how potent their “movement” is. To be truly successful the opposition must first and foremost remain mobilized, something that seems increasingly unlikely if pro-regime forces continue to crack down upon peaceful protesters, endangering the lives of women and children. Then the opposition must not only topple Mubarak himself, but also resolve disputes among themselves about what kind of government should replace the old regime. Further, given the size of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and others who were plugged into the regime’s massive patronage apparatus, the new government would also have to ensure that “spoilers” do not upset the new democratic system.
These are all highly uncertain questions that the Egyptian military is no doubt considering, and which, by extension the Obama administration is likely considering too. If the administration tries to force the Egyptian military to take sides before it is ready, either through conditioning military aid or verbal condemnation, it risks antagonizing an ally that could withstand a change in government. Yet if the protesters are successful in negotiating democratic transition, speaking too late may antagonize Egypt’s new political leadership. This is a real catch-22, but it’s certainly not a function of the administration’s alleged concern for Islamist takeover or supporting dictatorship.
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