Analysis: Egypt sees another war on terror



by Shaun Waterman



Cairo (UPI) Nov 9, 2007



The leaders of Egypt, one of the key U.S. allies in its war on terrorism, see that conflict in a very different way than U.S. policymakers do.

U.S. officials have repeatedly talked about a historic ideological struggle, lasting a generation or more; a "war of ideas," pitting the supporters of freedom against its enemies -- violent extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam.

Egyptian officials, speaking this week at a forum for foreign observers attending the convention of the country's ruling National Democratic Party, see the conflict very differently.

One of the NDP's leaders, Gamal Mubarak, the son of and possible successor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, said the "root cause" of the region's problems with violent Islamic extremists was the Palestinian issue.

"You cannot just belittle the main cause," he said, "the deep feelings of injustice and humiliation (among Arabs) caused by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians."

If you neglect that, he said "no matter what you're doing, you're basically feeding the extremists."

Mubarak charged the United States had made a "strategic mistake" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York and Washington.

"They jumped to the single-minded conclusion" that promoting democracy by toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq was the way to defeat the extremists, he said.

He praised the recent U.S. push to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as "going back to basics, to the root causes," but questioned whether, after what he called seven "wasted" years, it had come too late.

"At the beginning of next year, the American political system will go off-track with campaigning (for congressional and presidential elections) and so on," he said.

The deep-seated conviction that the unresolved Palestinian issue fuels Islamic extremism in the Arab world is not the only way that Cairo's view of the problem differs from Washington's.

"This is a two-tier battle," said Egyptian Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali. "There is an ideological dimension. �� But the more important one is at the level of economics. �� Poverty tends to push people towards extremism."

The Egyptian government, he said, approached the issue as "essentially an economic one," and the solution was "to empower the sectors of society that are most vulnerable" to recruitment by extremists, who "offer comforting �� simplistic solutions."

"At the root" of the problem was "a sentiment of alienation, a sentiment of marginalization" among people who "feel they have no future" because of their exclusion from the benefits of the globalized world economy.

In turning the focus on the large numbers of Egyptians who have failed to benefit from the country's recent 7 percent growth rate, Boutros Ghali was echoing one of the party's convention talking points.

Official after official called for a continuation of the halting economic liberalization the party has embarked upon, with the prime minister launching a debate about doing away with the country's subsidy program for bread, baby milk and other basic products.

But strong growth and spiraling foreign investment have not improved the daily lot of most Egyptians, many of whom have lost out as stagnating public sector wages fall behind the rising cost of living.

It is the rising unrest about this situation -- expressed over the summer in a wave of strikes and protests -- that officials fear extremists might be able to exploit.

"Perhaps it's because I'm an economist," Boutros Ghali acknowledged. "I tend to see everything in economic terms."

Terrorism experts in the United States tend to dismiss suggestions that Islamic terrorism is driven by economics, pointing out that -- outside the so-called insurgency theaters, like Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya -- most Islamic terror attacks have been carried out by educated individuals from relatively comfortable middle-class backgrounds.

In part, the different ways the issue is seen in Cairo and Washington reflect divergent perceptions of the threat.

U.S. policymakers fret about small numbers of dedicated individuals, such as al-Qaida cells, bent on staging mass-casualty terror attacks. Given the spread of the skills required to build, for instance, big truck bombs, and the inherent difficulty of preventing determined suicide attackers, some U.S. counter-terrorism specialists have concluded that the only way to defeat such groups is to de-legitimize them; to isolate them from their neighbors and co-religionists.

For its part, the Egyptian government sees itself facing a very different kind of challenge -- one from a politicized Islamic movement called the Muslim Brotherhood.

Illegal for more than half a century, the brotherhood nevertheless remains one of the most widely supported opposition groups in Egypt. Members are subject to arrest and detention without trial under Egypt's 26-year-old state of emergency, in which human-rights groups say torture is endemic. Local news reports this week cited a brotherhood spokesman as saying that 79 members were currently under such detention.

But the government has walked a fine line with the movement. Banned from standing in elections by a constitutional prohibition on political parties that organize on a religious basis, the brotherhood still controls about a fifth of the seats in Egypt's Parliament, won in recent elections by nominally independent candidates, universally understood to be associated with the movement.

Critics say the grip on power the National Democratic Party has maintained over the years has strengthened the hand of the brotherhood, because Islamic institutions -- unlike unions of other parties -- could not be closed down or taken over.

"We have an absence of political freedom in Egypt that has pushed people into the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood," said veteran observer Ahmed Abushadi, a former diplomat and member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.

He said more liberal and secular Egyptians distrust the brotherhood, a group that eschews violence but advocates the establishment of an Islamic state, ruled by Shariah law.

But he said the brotherhood were not extremists.

Nevertheless, Egyptian officials maintain the specter of political Islam is "very dangerous," in the words of Trade Minister Mohamed Rasheed Mohamed.

"We cannot allow political parties to start differentiating (between Egyptians) on the basis of belief," he said. "We have seen the results of that" elsewhere in the region.

Other disagree. "The problem is not Islamism, it is lack of democracy," said Osama el-Razali Harb, the vice president of one of Egypt's small liberal parties.