The attack by terrorists on February 16, 2014 on a tour bus in Taba, Sinai, killing three and wounding 17 South Koreans is a mirror incident. Tragic as it is, it sums up the contours of Egypt's war on terror in the post-Morsi period.
Is that war winnable, and why?
It definitely is winnable, and here is why: Since 1952, Egypt, under military rule until the Revolutions of January 25, 2011, and June 30, 2013, has become a highly security State. Calling it a security State is not to praise it, but to describe it. The security apparatus, during the Arab Spring in Egypt, was not dismantled. It simply became invisible.
When the Muslim Brotherhood became ascendant, its one-year in power was denied the cooperation of that deeply rooted apparatus. The security forces (police, intelligence, special forces, and the army) saw in the Morsi regime the face of an old adversary wearing a transparent Islamist veil.
So when that regime denied the secularists their fair share of the power pie, both the army and the police knew exactly where to go to kick the Brotherhood out from the presidential palace. They appealed to the masses, and the response to that appeal on June 30, 2013 was massive. Egypt was not going to be a turbaned theocracy.
As the old security apparatus once again finds its footing in the Egypt of interim President Adly Mansour, it is coming back to the front lines of the battle for a historic and secular Egypt.
Let us have a quick look into the nature of Egypt as a State. Dr. Gamal Hamdan has published a 4-volume book in Arabic entitled The Personality of Egypt. In the last volume, he points out the Egyptians inner pride in what the author describes as "the genius of location" in these words: "Since long time ago, Egypt has given the Arabs their first city of one million inhabitants." (p.664).
Pride in demography as well as in location and history, has caused the national flag in Tahrir to be raised on January 25, 2011, with the inscription "I love Egypt." No Islamist flags, with their two raised swords, and definitely no black flags of Al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates like Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (Friends of Jerusalem) were to be seen at that time.
Now Ansar has been claiming responsibility for its terror in Sinai. Aside from the daily mopping up by the army and the police of these groups, Egypt, in a bold challenge to terrorism, is putting Morsi and 35 other Brotherhood leaders on trial. The charges of espionage and conspiracy with foreign powers (i.e. Hamas, Qatar, etc.) carry the death penalty.
On the media front, foreign journalists saw in the Taba attacks on the South Korean tourists "worrying new evidence that militants...were broadening their campaign against civilians." In a worthy rebuttal, Counsellor Adly Mansour, Egypt's President, called it "a despicable act of cowardice directed at innocent tourists." The South Korean were in Sinai visiting the Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine.
In its own way, the terrorist attack on tourism in Egypt, an industry which provides millions of jobs and a big chunk of badly-needed foreign currency, has sharpened the lines of battle on terrorism in Egypt. In a meaningful lament, Egypt's Tourism Minister, Hisham Zaazou, said, "I am very sorry this happened."
Gone by the wind any residual sympathy in Egypt for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood; so has any limits on the use of power within national territory against terrorist acts; so has the humanitarian practice of easy admission into Egypt of refugees from whatever Arab origin.
So has any softening of security measures against dissent; so has any receptive ears for various human rights groups a strict application of the standards of civil society during civil strife. The outlook in Cairo today is that the country is at war with an elusive enemy which national security requires its pursuit to the bitter end.
Consequently, Egyptian chauvinism is definitely on the rise; the diversity of Egyptian public opinion on the eve of presidential elections is behind ever-tougher measures against any hint of sympathy for terroristic Islamism; a land slide for Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi as the next president of Egypt is now a near certainty.
The old call by former President Nasser that "security trumps development" is once again in vogue. Egypt's Prime Minister Al-Biblawi called on all tourists "to evacuate Sinai;" His Minister of Tourism, on his way to visit the injured South Korean passengers in Sinai declared: "This will not recur." The Egyptian security empire is getting ready to strike back in full force!!
David Cole, in an article in the New York Review of Books dated November 7, 2013, asked the perennial question: "The End of the War on Terror?" He answered his own question by saying, "Some have suggested that this is a permanent state of affairs, and we might as well get used to it!!"
I wager that Egypt's response shall be quite different. For it is not fighting terror beyond its frontiers. Its forces are not over-extended. Egypt has boots on the ground, an inflamed public opinion, thousands of agents who can blend, alliances within Sinai bedouin structures, and a determination to see its internal war on terror winnable.
In his speech on the subject of fighting terrorism at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013, President Obama quoted President James Madison's warning to the newly created United States of America: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Well, in today's Egypt, this may be read in a different arrangement: "Continual warfare (against terrorism) might by the price of preserving Egypt's freedom."
No compromise is attainable with the agents of death and destruction.
That is especially so with Ansar (The Friends of Jerusalem), an affiliate of Al-Qaeda in Sinai, which is fighting the wrong war, with the wrong tools, for the wrong cause, in the wrong place, with a contrived adversary, with a predictable result -publicized conflict for fundraising with no hope for an Ansar victory.
It is time for Egypt to try to puncture this balloon of vaunted anti-Islamic myth which goes falsely by the name of "jihad." Theirs is a nihilistic ideology which reached the zenith of idiocy when it glorified Osama Bin Laden, a world class faithless fanatic, by calling him "Sheikh Bin Laden," "a martyr," and a source of religious Islamic opinions called "Fatwas."
There is nothing on record that indicates that Bin Laden had ever sat for a class on Sharia or Islamic jurisprudence. His issuance of Fatwas was nothing more and nothing less than a means for the usurpation of power. And his ideological descendants, whether in Sinai or elsewhere, do not possess the capacity to comprehend that ultimately they are doomed, because terrorism is a dead-end street.
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