By Shashank Joshi – Special to CNN

The root cause of Egypt’s violence is praetorian overreach. The Egyptian army, buoyed by its apparent role as savior of the revolution, judged that it could manipulate the democratic transition to keep its privileges intact. It was wrong.

Overt the last ten months, Egypt’s ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has re-imposed martial law, engaged in arbitrary detention and torture, and sharply curtailed rights of assembly and freedom of expression.

In November, these counter-revolutionary moves reached fever pitch. Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Ali al-Silmi, most likely with the approval of the high command, released a set of ‘supra-constitutional principles’ that would have imposed tight limits on the scope of Egypt’s new constitution.

Those principles accorded the military the status of ‘protector of constitutional legitimacy’, which was – quite reasonably – interpreted as a ‘right to launch coups’. SCAF was to be given the exclusive right to scrutinize its budget, the right to manage ‘all the affairs of the armed forces’ without accountability to elected legislators, and a veto over any laws relating to the army.

In short, SCAF, led by the increasingly mistrusted Field Marshal Tantawi, wishes to create a political model resembling the Turkey of the 1980s or Pakistan of today – an eviscerated democracy with no control over its national security policy, weighed down by a bloated and self-serving military-industrial apparatus.

To subdue the crowds, Tantawi offered a controversial referendum on the army’s role in the interim. He invoked a ‘silent majority’ of Egyptians who opposed the protests, desired stability, and were content with military stewardship of the transition – implying that a majority of Egyptians would ask SCAF to stick around until July.

To understand whether this will make a difference, it’s important to examine how these concessions relate to Egyptians’ grievances. The demands of Egyptian protesters, though difficult to pin down, might be simplified as fourfold: early presidential elections; an even earlier transition to civilian administration; a genuine transition, in which all powers are vested in civilian (and eventually elected) authority rather than an unelected army; and accountability for officials, particularly those in the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for violence against protesters.

The protests have secured a concession on the first of these, the timing of presidential elections. But it’s far from clear whether they can secure the other three.

The first problem is whether Tantawi is right on the issue of a ‘silent majority’. Whereas the military’s approval rating in the spring was 90 per cent, now 43 per cent now believe that the military is working to reverse the gains of the revolution. So the protests do have a popular base.

But anecdotal evidence also suggests that many outside Tahrir Square did not approve of further protests. Issandr El-Amrani, a Cairo-based journalist, last week described an ‘ambience of martyrdom’ in Tahrir Square, in which ‘the fighting is being sustained by the protestors, not by the police’.

This assertiveness may yet leave the crowds distant from mainstream opinion, or at least from the 57 per cent of polled Egyptians who do not perceive SCAF to be intentionally retarding the revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood is sitting out the violence in Tahrir Square, loath to do anything that would jeopardize next week’s elections in which it expects to do well.

Postponing elections carried great risks – it would deeply alienate Islamist groups, who would interpret any delay as an attempt at electoral exclusion. It would also be pointless unless a popular team of civilian rulers was waiting in the wings, which doesn’t seem to be the case. The election of a parliament might also create powerful new political force that would have been able to challenge the specifics of military rule more forcefully. But if elections are marred by violence, or liberal groups stay away, the situation might worsen.

More important than postponing elections is restoring faith in government. In all likelihood, this cannot be done with piecemeal concessions from SCAF. The optimal solution may be to delay elections by two weeks (but no more), and use the time to cobble together a unity government. More likely, SCAF will take a gamble by holding firm until elections, and then reiterating its offer of a referendum in the hope of isolating the protesters.

Meanwhile, the United States has demonstrated remarkable policy myopia in calling for ‘restraint on all sides’, as if blame for the present crisis can be apportioned to all parties equally. Washington is repeating its flawed diplomacy from January, when it consistently sought to prioritize ‘stability’ over reform, thereby getting neither, and falling far behind events in the eyes of ordinary Egyptians.

It should also be noted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have contributed significant amounts to Islamist groups, out of both ideology and in recognition of Egypt as a strategic bulwark against Iran. These states will also wield influence over Egypt’s future.

The experience of Pakistan, amongst others, shows that, as tempting as it is to deal directly with military authorities, the long-term political health of Egypt will require civilian control over the armed forces.

In very few countries can a powerful military establishment be dissolved overnight – in Turkey, for instance it has taken decades of strong and slow boring of hard boards. Egypt’s democrats should recognize that this is merely the second round in a very long fight.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Shashank Joshi.

By Shashank Joshi – Special to CNN

If you watch one of Anwar al-Awlaki’s hundreds of YouTube videos, the first thing that strikes you is the American accent in which he delivers his exhortations to jihad, a residue of his childhood in New Mexico and education at Colorado State. But it’s misleading. Awlaki spent his teens, and his final and most influential years, in Yemen. And that’s where the aftershocks will be felt most strongly, just one week after President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned from medical treatment in Saudi Arabia. In life, as it may prove in death, Awlaki was probably more important to the Saleh’s political life than he was to the global jihadi movement.

The rise of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) presented a strange opportunity for the Yemeni government. AQAP coalesced in 2009, formed from the merger of al Qaeda in Yemen and the withering al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. The group’s head, Nasir al-Wihayshi, was bin Laden’s personal secretary for nearly four years until the famed Battle of Tora Bora in late 2001.

Over the next several years al Qaeda in Yemen was decapitated and degraded, but Wihayshi built it up again to the point where it dominated American thinking about global terrorism. In early 2011, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), told the Senate that AQAP was “probably the most significant threat to the U.S. homeland”. AQAP’ ability to threaten the U.S. homeland – as with the underpants bomber of 2009, and last year’s cartridge bomb plot – meant that the U.S. saw Yemen was seen almost exclusively through the lens of the war on terror.

Awlaki, rightly or wrongly, was seen as the vanguard of AQAP. The U.S. government has claimed that he had both an operational role – encouraging particular attacks and facilitating training camps – and a potentially more dangerous inspirational role, in which his English-language skills and experience in the West made him especially effective at recruiting. President Obama went as far as to label him, posthumously, “the leader of external operations” for the group. For all these reasons, Awlaki and AQAP became, in the U.S. at least, the most prominent and feared embodiments of international terrorism after bin Laden.

Yemenis saw things rather differently. Most did not know who Awlaki was, or why his aerial assassination was acceptable. And President Saleh, for years, has had his own calculations. He was far more concerned by Shia Houthi rebels in the north and secessionists in the south than he was by AQAP. Although Saleh sought to avoid looking like a Western puppet, he quickly realized that this was an opportunity to siphon off millions of dollars in U.S. aid ($200 million for counterterrorism in 2011 alone), and get training for his security forces.

That’s why the death of Yemen’s bête noire, sometimes called the ‘bin Laden of the internet’, has such curious timing. If Saleh’s strategy for milking the U.S. sounds familiar, it’s because it combines a series of tricks employed by Amerian allies around the world. Mubarak always claimed that he was a bulwark against a rising tide of violent extremism. And Pakistan, if you recall, has perfected a technique whereby Taliban and al Qaeda leaders are arrested or killed days before a U.S. Senator is due to visit. It’s a safety valve to relieve accumulated U.S. pressure and keep the aid money flowing.

Has Saleh lifted this trick? The situation today is simple enough. Yemen is disintegrating at least in part because the president, through his sons and nephews, is refusing to give up power. There’s every chance that the intelligence leading to Awlaki’s assassination by U.S. drones was supplied as a last ditch attempt at political survival – Saleh’s way of telling the wary Americans that he was the only man who could be trusted to dismantle a dangerous terrorist group.

It wouldn’t be the first time he sent that message. Under pressure from popular protests in March, Saleh simply withdrew his elite units from the al Qaeda blighted province of Abyan to give Western leaders a taste of what might follow his ouster. If Awlaki was a victim of Yemen’s faltering revolution, has Saleh therefore killed the goose that laid the golden eggs? Last year, the president famously told a U.S. diplomat that the Americans were “hot-blooded and hasty when you need us”, but “cold-blooded and British when we need you”. Now, Saleh is desperately trying to ensure that the Americans stay at least warm-blooded, by pointing to the drone strike as evidence of his crucial importance. Is the U.S.so gullible that it will buy this? History suggests it may well be.

But even if Saleh is pushed out – and he is trying the patience of even allies like Saudi Arabia – his successors needn’t worry about being abandoned. The U.S. has been rapidly escalating (frequently counterproductive) drone strikes in Yemen over past months, partly out of concern that AQAP is building links to Somalia’s main insurgent group, al-Shabab. The evidence for this is mixed and flimsy, but it’s a new foreign policy meme in Washington that is only growing in influence. Perhaps the greatest danger now is that Saleh succeeds in persuading his outside backers that he is indeed their man in Sana’a but, by clinging on, tears Yemen apart. The resulting opportunities for al Qaeda could make Awlaki pale into insignificance.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Shashank Joshi.

By Shashank Joshi – Special to CNN

In Syria, the Assad dynasty is teetering. Protests have breached the two largest cities, around 2,200 citizens have been killed, and oil and gas sanctions will soon cripple the public purse. Civil war isn’t guaranteed – there’s a slim chance that loyalists dump President Assad and cede a little power to widen their base – but, as Hussein Ibish writes in The Atlantic, ‘with the Libya model presenting itself … as an alternative stratagem, the drift towards conflict is starting to feel palpable’.

So palpable, in fact, that some – like Michael O’Hanlon on this site – have begun surveying the West’s military options. That is why it is important to be clear about why Syria differs from Libya in important ways.

For a start, the UN Security Council would be unlikely to pass a resolution authorising force. Russia, a veto-wielding member of the council, enjoys access to a Mediterranean naval base in the Syrian city of Tartus and is a major supplier of arms to the country. Russia has already lost $4 arms billion in foregone sales to Libya – no wonder Moscow is loath to see another customer vanish. Chinese arms sales to Syria have been equally buoyant, tripling between 2006 and 2009.

More broadly, Syria lies at the heart of the Arab world. Although protests and regime violence have already destabilised the country and sent refugees northward to Turkey, outside intervention would have unpredictable consequences for neighbours Israel, Iraq, and Lebanon. Although Saudi Arabia has criticised Assad and withdrawn its ambassador, it’s unlikely that the Arab League would repeat its endorsement of a no-fly zone.

It’s not inconceivable that these legal and diplomatic hurdles would be overcome. Barriers to intervention in Libya looked insurmountable until the last moment.

But Syria is an altogether different target in military terms, too.

First, it’s simply more powerful. Syria’s armed forces are four times the size of Libya’s, and its personnel per capita and total military spending are both one-third higher. President Assad can draw on thousands more tanks than could Colonel Gaddafi (including twice as many advanced T-72s) and a thousand more artillery pieces.

Although Syrian air defences are only slightly better than those of Libya, the country does probably have several hundred more portable, and hence elusive, shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapons. NATO is technically capable of destroying fixed air defence sites, but how resource-intensive would that be? A single Tomahawk cruise missile costs around $1 million, meaning that the (largely American) effort to destroy Libya’s SAM sites cost up to a quarter of a billion dollars. That is a miniscule proportion of the US defense budget ($685 billion for 2010) but, in a time of shrinking European military spending, this and associate costs could make NATO’s second-tier members think twice about another humanitarian campaign within a year.

These calculations should also factor in retaliatory capacity. Whereas Colonel Gaddafi was forced to ineffectually lob Scud missiles at empty desert near the rebels, Syrian forces could hit out at Israel both with their own missiles and through the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Libya was unable or unwilling to mount terrorist attacks abroad, but Syria could be less reticent.

A second problem is that the Syrian opposition, despite its formation of a National Transitional Council along Libyan lines, remains deeply divided. This is a political problem because uncommitted Syrians and ambivalent regional powers (like Turkey) see little viable alternative to Assad.

But this is also a military problem.

Libyan rebels were divided by tribe, region, ideology and ethnicity. But Syria’s rebels are even more fractured. Lebanon’s prolonged civil war – in which the US, Syria and Israel all intervened – is a cautionary tale: backing one party to a multifaceted conflict is more complex, and possibly counterproductive, than working with a rebel alliance like Libya’s which is at least loosely held together by a political structure and lacking sectarian divisions.

In Libya, Benghazi served as a secure rear area for rebels and a base of operations for Western military and intelligence officers. Syria has no such safe havens, and its centers of protest span the entire country from north to south. Hama, a city that has comparable resilience to government assaults, is the site of daily killings and located far from accessible international borders or the coast.

Finally, it is worth thinking through the implications of a loyal army. Syria’s elite units and officer corps are dominated by the Alawi sect, to which the Assad dynasty belongs. They have neither disintegrated nor turned on Assad. In Libya, a very large portion of the army, particularly in the east, melted away at the beginning of the conflict. In Syria, defections are much more sporadic, and that’s despite months of severe violence against unarmed protesters. That means any armed rebellion would face far worse odds of success, and intervention in support of such a rebellion would involve a longer and more serious commitment.

None of this is guaranteed to avert war. If refugee flows reached unacceptable proportions, or a civil war began to seep outside the country, the US might judge that strategic – rather than simply humanitarian – interests were at stake. But we should be under no illusions that a war in Syria would look identical to the one being wrapped up in North Africa.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Shashank Joshi.

By Shashank Joshi – Special to CNN’s Global Public Square

There is some way to go in Libya – but Tripoli has all but fallen, and only a few major centers of resistance remain standing. Why did the Libyan war get here, rather than withering into just one more of the abortive coups and rebellions that have flecked Colonel Gadhafi’s forty-two years in power? After all, the same British special forces now hunting the deposed leader were, scarcely a few years ago, training his elite troops. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. government authorized $71 million in arms sales to Libya.

In understanding how the fall of Tripoli will create its own ripples, we have to understand why Libya was affected in the first place. Longstanding political economy grievances were certainly present, but these had not suddenly worsened. And despite widespread accounts of the Twitter revolution, the answer is not social media. Only 5.5 percent of Libya enjoys Internet access and a pitiful 0.96 percent is on Twitter.

Rather, much older media — satellite television — was more important. Since the middle of the 1990s, stations like Al Jazeera shattered the old state monopoly on information and supported what came to be called a new, vibrant and self-critical “Arab public sphere”. Images of mass mobilization and brutal repression echoed around that public sphere. Few in Cairo could ignore Tunis’ jubilation, and the shelling of Hama was felt in Amman — even if differences of religion, ethnicity and nationalism remain.

This is one of the crucial reasons that regime change in Libya will resonate far outside the country and the Maghreb. The sense of shared Arab concerns, and perhaps even a common fate, has sharpened over the past six months. Take Yemen: its uprising has stalled after the flight of President Ali Abdullah Saleh to Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s state has nearly disintegrated, and it is al Qaida, not young revolutionaries, that have filled the vacuum in the south. But despite these setbacks, events in Tripoli prompted huge celebrations in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, as well as in other provinces across the country. They marked the occasion by shouting “congratulations to the Libyan people” and compared President Saleh’s son to Colonel Gadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. The same solidarity was evident in Syria too, where one crowd explicitly warned: “Gadhafi is gone, now it’s your turn, Bashar!”

This transnational inspiration is familiar to those who remember the collapse of the Soviet Union’s empire. On that occasion there was a common wellspring of repression: Moscow. In today’s Middle East, each autocrat is repressive in their own way — foreign troops in Bahrain, urban assaults in Syria, civilian-clothed thugs in Egypt — but a common strand of resistance has nonetheless emerged.

None of this means either Syria or Yemen will fall. The former’s army remains unified and obedient, and the latter may well collapse rather than democratize. And NATO, whose intervention was nothing short of decisive in propelling Libya’s revolutionaries into the capital, will stay on the sidelines in Syria. But we cannot ignore these pan-Arab currents without missing an important part of the Arab Spring. Protests in Georgia in 2004, Ukraine in 2005 and Iran in 2009 did not set off the Arab world. Tunisia, in 2011, did.

In the longer-term, there may be other demonstration effects at work. Turkey’s flawed but maturing democracy, led by the enormously popular Islamist AK party, already functions as a valuable example of how Islam and democracy might fit together. When Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, visited Benghazi’s Tahrir Square (named after the famous square in Egypt), the crowd chanted “Erdogan, Turkey, Muslim.”  Davutoglu, an architect of Turkey’s intense engagement with the Arab world, observed, “We have a common future and a history.” In time, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya may themselves offer lessons — both positive and cautionary — to co-Arabs.

An important part of that process will be how non-Arabs fit into the story. In Libya, the Berbers (or Amazigh), who are the indigenous people of North Africa, played an instrumental role in the fighting. When Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC) drafted an interim constitution, it pointedly dropped the word “Arab” from the document altogether, something that was a central part of the 1969 constitution. Morocco, trying to stave off protest in June, even recognized Amazigh as an official language. In Egypt, Copts (Egyptian Christians) constitute a tenth of the population. In Syria, Kurds are the same proportion. As notionally-Arab democracies develops over the coming years and decades, it may have to contend with popular prejudices towards these and other minorities.

In the 1960s, Pan-Arabism was one of the region’s dominant ideologies. It held that the Arab people were one nation, and therefore ought therefore to become a single political entity. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq even made a couple of ill-fated attempts at unifying. Those projects fell apart in the 1970s, and Arab politics congealed into the pattern of stagnancy and national authoritarianism that persisted into this year. Tunisia’s revolution was a political earthquake, and the aftershocks toppled two more leaders. As we reflect on the demise of the Arab world’s longest serving ruler, it is important to remember that Libya is part of a region whose organic connections are the most expansive and vibrant they have been for a half-century.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Shashank Joshi.