Egypt could start looking more like Pakistan

Egypt’s Deep State Dilemma

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

With political frustration running high during the holy month of Ramadan, the situation in Egypt still looks more like a gathering storm than any kind of transition to democracy. Muslim Brotherhood politicians are again being accused by the army of deliberately inciting violence, and there are reports that members of Egypt’s Christian minority, many of whom vocally supported the ouster of Morsi, are being attacked and lynched by enraged Islamist mobs. A very potent and poisonous brew is simmering on the banks of the Nile.

Yet an article in today’s NY Times seems to suggest that, despite it all, a kind of normalcy is returning to Egypt:

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role—intentionally or not—in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration.

The Egyptian deep state was certainly working to undermine Morsi, and it will now try to make the new system work. We’ve actually written about this kind of sabotage in the past, and anyone thinking about Egypt’s future has to take these kinds of forces well into account. But the bigger question not explored in the Times piece is whether the passions unleashed over the past few months can be controlled by the army and the deep state, especially given that the lack of growth and the danger that instability will keep investment and tourists at bay.

The long term outlook is not pretty. The divisions between the Brotherhood and the rest of society will probably deepen, and Egyptian Islamism will curdle and sour while the army and its allies continue to make things work well enough to keep the peace…for a while. Polarization and authoritarianism, a “managed democracy”, Mubarakism without Mubarak—it’s what the army wanted all along. And the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates seem ready to grease the wheels with money for a while. They are rightly worried about what an Egyptian meltdown would do to the region.

However, it’s very important to remember that the old system that the deep staters want to restore was and is a profoundly dysfunctional one. It was crony capitalism for the rich and the high ranking, with large subsidies to keep the poor quiet and complacent—and thuggish torturers in jail for those who didn’t shut up. Public services were shambolic, the educational system was a disaster, and poorly paid make-work government jobs offered a pale imitation of middle class life for those lucky enough or connected enough to get them. For decades, this system hasn’t been able to prepare Egypt for anything better, and Egypt’s youth bulge has exacerbated all of these trends past the breaking point.

The danger facing the Egyptian deep state isn’t the kind of liberal revolution that the short sighted and uninformed once thought they spotted in Tahrir square. That’s the good kind of revolution, where a more advanced and developed society emerges from authoritarian rule like a butterfly hatching out of a cocoon. That’s Spain after Franco, Chile after Pinochet, Poland after Communism. That’s the crocuses bursting through the snowbanks as winter ends and spring begins. That’s not, by and large, what the Egyptian Revolution was about.

Egypt doesn’t face a Singapore-style tradeoff between a successful authoritarian order and the risks of democracy. (Would that it did.) Egypt must choose between an ineffective democracy and a dysfunctional authoritarianism. Probably right now most Egyptians prefer dysfunctional order to dysfunctional chaos, so the deep state has public opinion on its side. But unlike in Singapore or China, where an authoritarian regime is presiding over a period of massive growth, development, and rising living standards offering hope of profound social transformation for the better, Egyptian authoritarianism can at best promise to keep the lid on the mess for a while longer.

The military seems to be the only player that has gotten what it wanted out of the Egyptian Revolution so far: it wanted Mubarak gone, and it wanted military supremacy over civilian politicians reaffirmed. Check and check. Better still, the military top echelons probably think, some of the younger officers who used to sympathize with the Brotherhood have recognized the error of their ways. Those who don’t recoil from the Brotherhood will likely find promotions and plum assignments mysteriously delayed.

People worry whether Egypt will become another Algeria, with a long and bitter civil war between the military and the Islamists driven out of the political system. That’s conceivable but unlikely; the Brotherhood does not at this point seem to have what it takes to mount a national insurgency. Also, the Saudis are pumping money into an Islamist rival of the Brotherhood that will divide Egyptian Islamism and make it harder for a powerful armed resistance to emerge. Occasional acts of violence can’t be ruled out, but Egypt doesn’t seem headed for an Algerian style civil conflict, with 100,000 or more dead.

But in another sense, Egypt is already Algeria. In both countries the army is not just a powerful political force; it is a leading economic actor with tentacles extending throughout society. These are military republics, not to be confused with democratic ones. Turkey used to be a military republic; Pakistan still is one. They used to be common in Latin America.

In Iraq and Syria, military republics fell when a single individual mastered the state and transformed the military republic into a personal (and in the Syrian case, dynastic) dictatorship. That is what Mubarak tried and failed to do, and why the military allowed popular unrest to drive him from power. The Turkish military republic fell when a charismatic politician at the head of a majoritarian political movement was able to break its power. This is what Egyptian President Morsi thought he was doing until the guards ushered him out of his office.

The Egyptian military republic is stronger and better run than Pakistan’s, but it has never been as successful in modernizing Egypt as Atatürk and his successors were in Turkey. Without the oil that lubricates military rule in Algeria, Egypt’s rulers face stark social and economic problems, and the ossified, pharaonic bureaucracy that is Egypt’s curse and government today has no hope of solving these, ever.

What Egypt’s deep state has to worry about is what Pakistan’s deep state has to worry about: the progressive meltdown of the authoritarian structures on which the system depends. In Pakistan, society’s infrastructure is rusting away as society gradually degrades and order progressively gets less orderly—a social implosion rather than social explosion is what we see there.

The question is whether Egypt will slither down that slippery slope. Egypt’s government structures are probably more bureaucratic and less competently staffed than many offices in Pakistan, but Pakistan’s ethnic, religious and regional differences make it a harder country to govern minimally well. Also, one must note that Egypt’s military has succeeded at one big thing that the Pakistani army hasn’t done: Egypt made peace with Israel on a basis that satisfied its territorial claims; Pakistan hasn’t made peace with India on any terms and is far from resolving its claims.

Nevertheless, Egypt could start looking more like Pakistan. Unfortunately, Egypt gets harder to govern as its population grows and becomes more demanding. Implosion more than explosion is what we should worry about in the largest country in the Arab world. The danger is real, and it is growing.