In his op-ed in Egypt Independent on Saturday, Bahey el-Din Hassan lays out a theory on how Scaf let the US-Egypt NGO funding row explode into a major diplomatic incident. The summary: they are unable to understand the meaning of the protests which ousted Mubarak a year ago. In their confusion, Fayza Aboul Naga’s suggestion that US civil society groups sparked the uprising sounds plausible.

I’m still not sure. The recurring question in post-revolutionary Egypt is this: are the military generals incompetent, overwhelmed or malicious? Which crises are sparked by incompetence, which by desperation, which by malice? As crisis upon crisis befalls them, it is hard to imagine a cabal of brilliant strategists behind their wall of secrecy. But can they really be stupid enough to still not understand the indigenous roots of the revolution?

Hassan moves beyond this question and that’s where his op-ed starts to get interesting.

But the most puzzling aspect arising from this NGO crackdown case is the ambiguity of the decision making process. In fact, if we are to follow this case, we’ll realize that there is a battle over decision-making that is taking place at the very top of Egypt’s high politics.

The NGO case has revealed that Scaf is no longer in control. Somewhere within the institutional labryinth that is the Egyptian government, they are going up against entrenched powers that do not answer to them. If we take Scaf’s statements of support to US officials at face value, the military may not even fully understand the powers they are up against.

Time and again, the generals have made promises that went unfulfilled and statements that expired the minute they were uttered. And when a Scaf decision goes untested, it disappears quietly behind a curtain from which no information emerges. This information blackout leads to rampant speculation, tales of hidden hands and secret alliances. But it seems equally plausible now that behind the curtain is a simple giant, fat on subsidies and a vast economic empire, but impotent in the machinations of public office.

If this is true — and it remains speculation precisely because of the information blackout from inside the palace (or barracks) — then Egypt faces a much greater crisis than any single political power can tackle alone.

In this context, the question is no longer whether the SCAF will turn over power in June, but rather who has the power to take this decisive step. Has the security apparatus—which has been fed hostility towards Islamists for decades, considering them the primary internal enemy—prepared itself for the day when Islamists come to power? Or for the day after, when Islamists undertake an ideological purge of the apparatus to eliminate members that are perceived as antagonistic to political Islam?

Beyond NGOs: the battle for Egypt, Bahey el-din Hassan

The Arabist has just published some reflections of mine on the changing space of Cairo’s street protests today and what it might mean for activists fighting military rule.

Read it here.

The New York Times has a lengthy piece by Robert Worth about Mohamed el-Beltagy, a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood. If you’re wondering about the Brotherhood and what they will mean for Egypt, read it. Beltagy may be a minority in the Brotherhood, but he does represent a promising vision of Islamist politics. Whether or not that is the Brotherhood that will emerge from Egypt’s parliamentary politics is still unclear.

I’ve had two lengthy interviews with Beltagy and, I have to admit, I like the guy as an interviewee. The Brotherhood are famous for being cautious, exasperating interviewees, and Beltagy is as cautious as any of them. But I always got the impression that he was doing his best to be honest within the confines of his caution. He was subtle, he would dodge a direct question, but he wouldn’t lie. And if I pressed him, I could eventually get to what seemed like the truth, even if he left me without a good quote to pin on him.

Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel has just put up my latest piece about how Cairo is becoming a hub for Syrian opposition activists managing the logistics of supplying protests within the country. It’s an interesting look at how, though Turkey remains the political center of the Syrian opposition, the effort to smuggle supplies into the country remains a region-wide effort.

To write the story, I visited a safe house in Cairo whose location remains a closely guarded secret (the photos above are from the apartment). I was brought to the house by the Abdel Dayem’s, a British-Syrian family that has come to act as a one-stop, family-run press office for Syrian dissidents that wash up in Cairo. In the last month, they’ve connected major media outlets to a Syrian MP, a top government auditor who told me the regime is reallocating up to 30% of funding from other ministries to the ministry of defense, and a former cameraman for a Syrian television channel, who described how they were asked to fabricate news reports.

They’ve worked with human rights groups and a British lawyer to try and document the Assad regime’s abuses. When Akram brought me to the safe house, his wife joined and their 21-year-old daughter translated. The revolution, for them, is a family affair, and they bring all the warmth and hospitality of an Arab family to the process.

They, like the activists I met in the safe house, are feeling confident about their uprising. Some say a matter of weeks, some a matter of months, but they all think Assad will fall. If he doesn’t leave peacefully, they’ll take him down by force. With so many videos emerging from Syria, it’s easy to get the feeling that we know what is going on. But very little of the kind of information we need to assess the stability of Assad’s regime is available. How fragile is the regime? How effective can the Free Syrian Army be in the face of a real civil war? These are difficult questions, but it looks like the country is going to find out.

And the activists on the outside, in places like Turkey, London and Cairo, will play an important role in fueling that battle.

Despite calling a press conference to announce election results last night, Egypt’s High Electoral Commission still hasn’t released the full results for either list or independent votes.

Still, there are a lot of preliminary numbers being leaked to media in Egypt. Anonymous sources in Egyptian media should be taken with a grain of salt, but they at least agree across the board on a few things: the Muslim Brotherhood is doing great as expected and the Salafist Al-Nour party has far exceeded anyone’s expectations. Together they could take as much as 65% of the seats.

Twitter user @melhoshy (Mostafa El-Hoshy) has taken the data available and created a number of useful charts: party list vote percentages; Islamic vs secular votes; and a look at how much of the Islamist vote went to ultra-conservative Salafists.

I should stress these numbers are preliminary, and they only speak to the first of three rounds of elections. Still, they paint a pretty convincing picture. They would have to be way off to counteract the impression that Islamists have won, and won big, in Egypt’s elections; and that liberals failed to attract much support at all. Perhaps most disappointed are the parties set up and led by Tahrir activists. Even a coalition of these parties that banded together got no more than two per cent.

Mostafa El-Hoshy, @melhoshy, has been kind of enough to also share the spreadsheet he used to generate the graphs for those interested.

The Times’ Middle East Correspondent, James Hider, flew in Thursday to cover the protests, leaving me more time to wander aimlessly and take it in. Today was, I think, a day of divisions, however many people there were down at Tahrir square. The Muslim Brotherhood leadership was out at Al-Azhar holding a demonstration that reportedly fizzled pretty quick. Thousands rallied to support the military at a second site in the city and the numbers showed Scaf still had sizeable support, even if it was dwarfed by the numbers in Tahrir.

Will the protesters in Tahrir square be able to keep the momentum — and the numbers — they need to keep up the pressure? I think it depends on whether or not they get caught up in the most divisive issues: who will be in the next government and whether or not elections should be postponed. Both problems pit the country’s most powerful trends against each other and neither problem, if resolved, can guarantee the military generals will hand over power.

I, perhaps naively, hoped that Friday would provide some sort of clue about which direction the country would go. But in many ways I’m only more baffled. It is not at all clear to me who will win or what might be won now. Elections are going to take place. Probably. But they may end up taking place in a kind of bubble, as if the country weren’t in the midst of an extroardinary crisis. Egyptians will have to take the vote seriously even while they know the results might well end up lacking credibility and being cast aside in favor of a do-over.

A truce that was negotiated in the early hours of Thursday morning has held all day. It was strengthened when the military brought in a crane, which erected a barrier of large cement blocks on the street where the fiercest clashes have broken out. The real question, of course, is why the military waited five days before implementing this very simple solution.

When I went to have a look for myself, I was prevented from entering the street by a thick rank of men who had linked arms to keep people from filling the street. I eventually made my way in through a side street after showing my press ID. I was amazed to see the street had been swept clean. The night before it was strewn with concrete chunks, metal barricades and the detritus of shop shutters and wires. The first image above, a Reuters shot, will give you a small sense of how cluttered it was. The second image is from this morning, when I made my way in. After volunteers had swept the street clean, Mohamed Mahmoud street was probably the cleanest street in Cairo.

I got to the barricade in time to see soldiers standing on top. Several protesters had joined them and the mood was friendly. One minute, a chant of “Leave, Leave” went out. The next minute, they were chanting “One hand, One hand.” Everyone there understood perfectly that the first chant was directed at the country’s top generals; the second at the soldiers stationed on the street.

But the truce almost collapsed in one spasm of violence which was a reminder of how tenous calm is in an agitated crowd. As the crane lifted another concrete block onto the barrier, one of the protesters standing atop it began to push the block away, sending it swinging around. Immediately the crowd began yelling at them to stop and get down, but soldiers began to panic and push people off of the barrier. Angered by this, a few people began throwing stones, sticks and whatever was around at the soldiers as the crowd began to scatter.

The truce could very easily have collapsed at that moment. The soldiers fell back behind the wall of concrete blocks and I waited for what I expected to be an inevitable round of tear gas. Stones continued to fly over the barrier. But then a few protesters climbed back up onto the concrete blocks and yelled at the crowd to stop throwing, even as debris was being chucked inches over their heads. Others joined them atop the barrier and soon the scuffle had calmed.

Within a few minutes, a phalanx of doctors had mounted the barrier and were calling on people to go back to Tahrir square. Over the next hour, a chaotic and stormy contest was waged between those who wanted to mount the barrier and press their attack and those who wanted to preserve the calm. Imams from al-Azhar staged a series of marches back to the square, each time bringing a wave of people with them, away from the hostility.

I saw at least three mid- to high-ranking military officers appear on the wall (one is pictured above), talking with the protesters and asking them to move away so that their soldiers could return to the barrier. Someone I was standing next to assured me that the older, higher-ranking officer I saw was a member of Scaf, but he was at the opposite end of the barrier, out of range of my phone’s camera. I am skeptical that any of them would appear on the street at that moment. But he was certainly old and dressed in the olive uniform.

As the everyone-calm-down crowd gained the upper hand, young men began to set up human chains, keeping protesters from getting within 20-30 feet of the barrier. The human chains developed, from one line to two, then three. Someone found a series of metal bars that were used to prevent people from pushing their way between two people in the chain. When the bars proved successful, more were found and brought to other human chains on the side streets, where ranks of young men had been keeping out nearly a hundred people trying to shove their way in. A few people refused to leave, but within an hour the area had cleared out substantially. Doctors continued to man the barrier.

It was a fascinating bit of crowdsourcing 1.0. Nothing more than people, all together, all disagreeing, all arguing, finding a way through it by yelling, shoving, thinking and then acting — sometimes together, sometimes against each other. Ahmed Samer, 27, stood by me the whole time, practicing his English as I practiced my Arabic, making sure I knew what was being said. It was a powerful demonstration of why Egyptians are so proud of their revolution and, like the human corridors set up in the last days to rush casualties to hospitals, an example of what can be accomplished by people eager to pitch in and willing to take risks quickly in moments of sudden chaos.

There are bitter accusations being thrown around now that the Muslim Brotherhood has “infiltrated” the demonstrations and are trying to keep people out of Mohamed Mahmoud street as part of a ploy to somehow undermine the protests. There is no doubt that many of the doctors who manned the army’s barrier sported the typical “Islamic” beard. But in this country that means little. I have found myself talking to what I assume to be a young, educated, westernized youth, only to find he supports the Salafist al-Nour party. Likewise, I have talked to traditionalist and conservative Muslims who want religion out of politics.

It seems more likely that what I saw in front of the barrier today was ordinary protesters working through the confusion caused by the latest round of violence. For now, those calling for a peaceful protest have won. Everyone there wanted the SCAF out, without hesitation. But many people were ready to extend an olive branch to the ordinary soldiers, whose appearance helped stop the endless stream of casualties that emerged from this little street over the last five days.

Protesters have been fighting battles with police forces near Tahrir square for more than 100 hours. These are not sporadic clashes that break out from time to time. The battle is a constant flow of people and munitions. Demonstrators surge forward, throw rocks and molotov cocktails, and police clear out the square with half a dozen rounds of tear gas. This has happened every ten minutes for the last 100 hours. There was a truce for one hour today before the fighting erupted again. If there is an average of eight rounds of tear gas per volley and six volleys per hour, that is nearly 5,000 rounds of tear gas landing on one small street.

It’s extroardinary to think about the persistence of this violence, which many people still find baffling. Some protesters think that if they don’t press the police down Mohamed Mahmoud, the side-street which leads from Tahrir to the Ministry of Interior, then security forces will attack the square again. But it seems more likely that the clashes are feeding on themselves at this point, an endless series of retaliations with no particular vision of the next step. No one I have spoken to has expressed a desire to storm the Ministry of Interior, the building police forces are meant to be protecting.

A doctor working at the KFC medical station had nothing to say about the protests, the military or the country’s political situation. “I’m confused about the whole country,” he said. He only came to the square to help the wounded.

Many who came out to support the demonstration’s demands were not comfortable with the clashes going on a few hundred meters away. They were furious at the police for shooting protesters and the military for doing nothing to stop them. But they couldn’t explain why protesters kept attacking the police. When a group of men rushed forward with a crate of molotov cocktails yesterday, the crowd shouted at them not to throw them. A cordon set up to prevent people from entering the street where clashes were occurring was unable to prevent determined young men from making their way forward.

But the question remains: would demonstrators in Tahrir have drawn the enormous numbers that came out during and after Tantawi’s speech on Tuesday night without the added sense of crisis that comes from a constant flow of casualties? The chaos of a street littered with smashed chunks of cement, cars burnt to their rusting shells and a constant flow of casualties rushed in ambulances, motorcycles and shoulders to overflowing medical stations made it seem like the country was on the brink of collapse. If there is one thing that unites the demonstrators in a polity that is bitterly divided over almost everything else, it is the sense of anger over the military’s inability to stop the most pointless and absurd excesses of the country’s police forces.

“Who is in charge of the Tahrir clashes?” said Mahmoud Hamdy, a retired army officer. “For four days we have been dying and nobody calmed the situation.”

This, in the end, was Scaf’s real mistake. They have survived spasms of violence in the past, most notably when military vehicles were caught on camera deliberately running down protesters outside of the state television building in October. And their reputation survived bouts of bad publicity over increasingly draconian emergency laws.

But now, five days into an unexpected outbreak of violence that could have been calmed by a swift and apologetic response, the generals have finally proven to a growing number of people that they can not manage the country’s simplest problems. If support for the military continues amongst a large segment of the population — even enough to pass a referendum calling on them to stay in power — it will still not be enough to preserve the illusion that the country is governed in any meaningful sense of the word.

The Scaf is accustomed to crisis. It responds to nothing else. This time, they may have provoked a crisis that will finally consume them.

Today I saw protesters standing their ground again and again for the first time since I arrived in July. There’s real determination on the streets today. It’s not demonstration-as-political-maneuver. It’s real anger, unguided by strategy.

If protesters can hold the square, this thing could have serious momentum. Nobody really knows where it is going, but people are stuck in a bind: fearful of a future under military rule, terrified of taking on the military in a street battle.

The last couple days we got a taste of what a battle with the military might really look like. It was not pretty. But who will step back, and at what cost? Should Egyptians cancel elections and throw away nine months of tedious, tortured planning, however incompetent? It seems crazy at this stage, and everyone I spoke to insisted on holding elections on schedule. But if we have a few more days of this — and we could, if momentum holds overnight — will Egyptians go out to the polls next week?

It’s a real mess. As Issandr mentioned at The Arabist, Egypt is now in need of leadership, something, someone, or someones that can cut through the gordian knot of Islamist-secular antipathy, the military’s paranoia, and the people’s apathy. But time is running out. And it’s not at all clear to me that there is space in Egyptian politics for this kind of leadership to function. Unless the military steps back — a move it has not even once suggested it is considering — the people will still be no more than children playing in the generals’ garden.

Egyptians have attempted to postpone the consequences that stem from the central problem of their revolution — that it was their military’s, not their own. The last two days have been the clearest sign yet that they may not make it through elections before this contradiction collapses in on them. But if they do, they’ll have an elected government — however weak, divided, self-interested, unbalanced — that could take the reins of public opinion off the streets, and provide a real challenge to the generals’ decisions.

November 28, already a day loaded with anticipation, is now even more crucial.

Jadaliyya.com has put up a number of excellent bios on prominent figures in the Egyptian electoral landscape. Worth reading for those following the elections closely.

Edit – Just noticed they also detail parties and movements, and electoral laws.