The clapped-out Egyptian regime must be held to account after three bombings in Sinai in 18 months.
Lightning, they say, never strikes twice in the same place, but in Sinai it has struck three times within 18 months, each time in a tourist resort and each time to coincide with a public holiday.
Every time this happens, the news agencies are full of condemnations from world leaders. God knows why; we never imagined they would approve.
Tony Blair was in full flood yesterday, expressing "our total support and solidarity to the Egyptian authorities" and assuring them that "the whole world stands united against the terrorists that want to kill innocent people and prevent countries like Egypt making the progress they and their peoples want to see."
Instead of making fatuous statements like this, Mr Blair and the leaders of other countries should be demanding explanations from the clapped-out Mubarak regime.
There is obviously some kind of militant organisation operating in Sinai, but if you want to know who was mostly responsible for Monday's outrage in Dahab, look no further than General Habib el Adly, the Egyptian interior minister. Even after rounding up thousands of local residents for questioning in the wake of the earlier Taba bombings, and holding many of them incommunicado for weeks, General Adly seems no nearer to cracking the problem.
To be fair the interior minister, of course, he has had many other important matters to attend to while the bombings have been taking place - such as assaulting peaceful demonstrators, driving opposition voters away from polling stations, massacring Sudanese refugees and routinely torturing prisoners.
There is also the formidable task of looking after his own security. "I lived near the honourable minister in Mohandiseen for a while," a reader writes. "The security around his building is phenomenal and the roads on his run home from the office get shut off every evening during his commute."
It is true that new "security" measures have been adopted in Sinai and other parts of Egypt since the attacks began but they are mainly for show, to reassure visiting tourists. Often, they fail to do even that. Here is one visitor's comment, posted on the BBC website:
I have just returned from Luxor and Hurghada .Security was pathetic. Police appear more interested in chatting to children than watching for trouble. The armed escort to Hurghada speeds off, leaving the convoy behind, desperately trying to keep up and constantly overtaking each other. Our bags were X-rayed at Luxor airport on the way home but nobody was watching the monitor! I have no confidence at all in any security measures that may or may not be in place to protect tourists.
In a similar vein, more discussion of Egyptian security can be found here. One of the comments says:
I, too, remember being very unhappy with security in Egypt when I visited last year. Armed policemen with big guns were everywhere, but this made me feel less rather than more secure. It didn't help that none of them ever bothered to send people through the ubiquitous metal detectors. Or that the X-ray machine for carry-on luggage in Cairo airport was unmanned. When our bus convoy had an escort, this basically consisted of one police jeep riding in front of it. One wonders how useful this would even have been were there to be a serious attack on it. Although we didn't even have sniffer dogs or other security; if someone had brought a bomb on board, they could have blown us up and caused the buses behind us to crash into us. Yet, the security at Alexandria airport wanted to see my passport to allow me to use the bathroom. Great use of state resources all around. Everything looked like it was there for show. Damn police states.
This tallies very closely with my own experience on numerous visits to Egypt.
An article on the 'Aqoul blog explains in more detail "why Egypt's anti-terrorism strategy just doesn't work". One of the more telling points is where it talks about police with no shoelaces in their worn-out combat boots. "This seems trivial," the writer says, "but anyone familiar with how police forces or armies work knows that good equipment and the discipline to maintain it is the very basis of an effective force. The Egyptian policemen and soldiers are badly trained, badly equipped, badly paid, badly treated, badly motivated and thus have no incentive to do a good job."
Beside this, there are two other endemic problems. One is the antiquated policing methods, which include mass arrests and routine torture (see the reports from Human Rights Watch and the US state department). This must be a boon for the militants, since repressive measures of this kind always help their recruitment. Torture is also a thoroughly unreliable way of establishing facts. (And while we're on the subject, there are a couple of video clips circulating on the internet here and here which allegedly show gentlemen "helping" the police with their inquiries. They were apparently filmed with a mobile phone at the notorious Imbaba police station in Cairo. Though not particularly horrific examples, they seem to be the first time anyone in Egypt has managed to capture this sort of activity on camera.)
The other endemic problem is that the security forces in Egypt, along with almost all the other arms of government, are riddled with corruption. That completely undermines whatever security measures are in place. It doesn't matter how many checkpoints you have if policemen can be bribed to look the other way - and since they're so badly paid, the going rate for bribes is usually quite reasonable.
If the Egyptian authorities were really serious about tackling the Sinai problem, their first step would be a thorough purge of their security apparatus from top to bottom, but starting at the top with his excellency General Habib el Adly.
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