Egypt Security Sector Report

This week’s dispatch includes an interview with Bob Springborg, as well as reports on Egypt and the war in Palestine, the Red Sea, security crackdowns, military business, torture center to be turned into a hotel, militarization of labor, capital punishment, and migration.

📁 “Egypt has lined up with Israel and the US in squeezing the Palestinians”

I interviewed Robert Springborg, one of the top Egypt pundits, about the Egyptian military reshuffle, relations with the US, and other current events.

Q: How do you characterize US-Egyptian relations after 7 October 2023? 

They have been strengthened as a result of Israel’s war on Gaza and Egypt’s response to it. By, in effect, condoning Israel’s closure of the Rafah crossing, Egypt has supported Israel’s effort to exterminate Hamas, an effort aided and abetted by the Biden Administration. Cairo also has not made a significant issue out of the substantial reduction of traffic through the Suez Canal resulting from Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping in retaliation against Israel’s War on Gaza. In sum, Egypt has lined up with Israel and the US in squeezing the Palestinians, which is a litmus test for both Washington and Jerusalem. Israel will, therefore, continue to support Egypt in Washington and ensure that aid continues to flow, and criticism of human rights abuse and authoritarianism, more generally, is, at most, muted.

Q: Will the Menendez scandal impact US-Egyptian relations in any way? Why or why not? 

It will have no impact. Senator Menendez is finished politically and will disappear from the public scene now that a guilty verdict has been handed down. There was no response by the Administration or even by its Congressional critics to the revelations in the trial of Egyptian violations of US law by bribing Menendez. Republican candidates, including Trump, have chosen not to speak about the issue. The only significant political backlash has been in Menendez’s home state of New Jersey, where the Democratic Party has moved to contain the issue by distancing itself from him and nominating a successor to him. Moreover, the military-industrial complex is 100% committed to continuing the supply of security assistance to Egypt and can be counted on to lobby in favor of it with either a Democratic or Republican Administration. The pro-Israeli lobby will do the same.

Q: Egypt has failed to stop Ethiopia from building the Great Renaissance Dam, stop Ethiopia from gaining access to the Red Sea, influence the outcome of the Sudanese revolution and the ensuing war, bring South Sudan in line regarding the Entebbe agreement, stop the war in Gaza, keep the Rafah Crossing open, support Haftar in fully controlling Libya... Is Cairo still a regional hegemon? If not, why is there a decline in regional clout?

Egypt is not a regional hegemon because it is a beggar state. It is financially dependent upon external assistance, so it does not dare to embark on adventurous foreign policies that might jeopardize the flow of support. Two additional factors aggravate this dependent passivity. One is the military’s limited capacities. It cannot afford an embarrassment in an external venture, lest its domestic position be eroded, as was the case in Greece and Argentina, where military defeats led to terminations of military rule. Despite having received record amounts of military hardware, Egypt’s military capacities have stagnated due to inadequate training, poor maintenance, inadequate attention to strategy, diversion of institutional focus into economic and political matters, etc. The other factor is the fixation on domestic control, necessitated by the very nature of military rule itself. It has become an inwardly focused military seeking to preserve its external sources of support and to prevent any domestic challengers from arising.

Q: Are the latest military senior brass reshuffles involving removing Zaki and Askar and bringing Saqr from retirement to lead the MOD ordinary? Or do they raise eyebrows in any way? 

The appointment of Lt. Gen. Abdel Maguid Saqr is unusual in that he has never held an operational command. His background has been in the Republican Guard, Military Police, the Ministry of Defence and as Governor of Suez. Insofar as I can recall, he is the first Minister of Defense to have no direct contact with the “teeth” of the military, as opposed to its “tail.” This suggests the overall concern of Sisi, which is not with projecting military power beyond Egypt’s borders but with coup-proofing the military and preventing civilian challenges from arising.
As for General Ahmad Khalifa replacing General Usama Askar as Chief of Staff, that appointment is also suggestive in that General Askar has been a key figure in managing the military’s involvement in the economy, a position which presumably he has used to generate and direct the flow of patronage within the officer corps. This would have made him a powerful figure within the officer corps, so a potential threat to Sisi if only because he would have engendered discontent among those officers who felt Askar had not treated them well.

Q: Deep class divisions between the senior and junior ranks have long characterized the Egyptian military. With the institution's unprecedented privileges today, are these perks trickling down to the junior ranks, or do such divisions still exist?

These divisions result from four factors and will persist until those factors change. The first is class divisions within Egyptian society, which have widened dramatically under Sisi.
The second is the virtual impossibility of military personnel in the ranks of non-commissioned officers or below having the opportunity to rise to the level of a commissioned officer, that status depending almost exclusively on having graduated from the Military Academy. The lower classes have next to no access to the Military Academy.
Third, the overly large Egyptian military has almost half a million members, of whom more than a third are conscripts. Increasingly, those conscripts are drawn from the poorest sections of society, typically uneducated rural residents of Upper Egypt. Better-off Egyptian males are able to evade conscription, most recently by paying a $5,000 fee if they can claim some type of foreign residency status. Conscripts receive very little training and can be thought of more as a reserve force than active-duty personnel. They provide almost no military added value. They are conscripted in part to reduce the level of unemployment in the politically crucial age bracket of 18-25. Recently published interviews with conscripts serving in the Sinai or the Canal Zone provides some insight into the general condition of conscripts. One interviewee stated: “The thousands of conscripts you see … on TV in military parades, they are not the ones who are going to fight. There are thousands of soldiers who do not know how to shoot. . .(they) are trained for only 45 days in base camp and carry weapons that have been stored since the time of the Soviet Union.” He added that his “superiors are abusive and corrupt.”
The final factor is suggested by this last statement and by your question. It is that the officer corps has become a privileged caste appropriating the wealth of the nation for personal use. Officers are all too often contemptuous of those below them and of civilians in general. Those officers who are not and who bemoan the lack of proper training and resent promotion based on loyalty rather than on performance, are systematically isolated according to accounts provided by American personnel involved in their training.

Q: The US, IMF, and EU have rushed to bail out the Sisi regime with more than $57 billion in the past few months, muting criticism of its human rights record. Egypt is regarded as “too big to fail.” Do you see this Western policy firing back at any point in the future? 

There is stress on this instrumental relationship, or Faustian bargain, at both ends. The donors are being blackmailed by Egypt and resent it. The EU is tired of being manipulated by the threat that the doors of illegal migration will be thrown wide open. So, the EU is now taking steps to be able on its own to interdict illegal migration, thus reducing the leverage of Egypt and other North African countries on this issue.
The US is not vulnerable to illegal migration from Egypt and is not as dependent upon oil and gas passing through the Suez Canal as Europe is. For the US, Egypt is important as a bridge for its military to the Gulf and as a de facto ally of Israel. These vital concerns are likely to diminish over time, both as a result of changes in military technology and because of a reduction of US engagement in the region.
The Gulf states have demonstrated that their approach to Egypt now and into the future will be to use petrodollars both to maintain Egypt’s subordinate status and to gain benefits, whether through control of land and ports, such as the Sanafir and Tiran Islands or Ras al Hikma, or through profits resulting from ownership of part or all of the profitable Egyptian enterprises. They are, in a word, predators, profiting at Egypt’s national expense. While they do not want Egypt to collapse, they actually prefer it being impoverished and weak. 
As for the Egyptian side, its financial needs are bound to continue to expand. Its growing population is ever more impoverished and deprived of basic health and educational services. The corrupt military government has amassed massive debt, the servicing of which is consuming more than half the annual budget. So, instead of being too big to fail, Egypt is increasingly too big to support, especially since its supporters will steadily be losing interest in doing so.

Q: If there is a spontaneous social explosion in Egypt today due to economic or political conditions, do you see the military responding differently than it did during the 18 days of 2011?  

Yes, because the military will be the target of any such explosion. As the government itself, rather than hiding behind Mubarak as it did then, it is clearly directly responsible for the state of affairs that an uprising will want to change. The slogan “the military and the people are one hand” may become something like the “hand of the people will remove the military from power.” And the military internally is weaker than in 2011 precisely because of the huge gap between the officer corps and enlisted personnel. It was that gap that Khomeinists exploited in the 1979 Iranian revolution, turning non-commissioned officers into revolutionaries to lead their soldiers against the Shah’s officers. So, the officer corps will have to be brutal when and if confronted with an uprising. That very brutality will drive a wedge between it and the rest of the military, which may indeed then really be one hand with the people.