Ambitious men in uniform. Is Pakistan the Model for the "New" Egypt??

The generals who deposed the Muslim Brotherhood are keener on power than they let on. Will Egypt return to military rule?

A GOOD PIECE, WELL WORTH READING

The Economist

"ONCE reluctant to appear in the media, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s top general (pictured), is now very much seeking the limelight, perhaps because he would like to run for president. A recent video of him addressing army officers appeared to be shot for public consumption and duly went viral. His spokesman has said that although the general was not yet standing for office there was nothing to prevent him from so doing if he retired from the army.

Egypt’s press has started comparing Mr Sisi to Gamal Abdul Nasser, the hero-general who eventually became president after deposing the country’s last monarch in 1952. Protesters who helped the army to end the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood last month have plastered the streets with posters of the army chief. Many see him as a font of the dignity and security which they feel Egypt has lacked since Nasser’s time. “It is very clear he is entertaining the idea of the presidency,” says Robert Springborg, an expert in the Egyptian armed forces at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California......

Mr Sisi’s image is tainted by the uproar he caused in 2012 when he was the military spy chief and publicly defended members of the army who had subjected female protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to virginity tests “to protect the girls from rape as well as to protect the soldiers and officers from rape accusations”.

At the war college in America, Mr Sisi expressed a belief that the army must be above politics.......

Looking east

For inspiration the generals seem to look to Pakistan, where officers feed off a vast business empire and pay lip service to Islam and helping the poor—while in reality they line their own pockets and rule from behind a protective shield with the help of pliable civilian leaders. And if the civilians get uppity, the army simply resets the political clock....."