Cairo’s new war of attrition

Arriving in Cairo is a strange experience. The tanks and troops on the streets are a strange mixture of reassuring and alarming. Now they’ve been told to help journalists the soldiers are friendly – it is the plain clothes officers, or political thugs that are scary at the checkpoints. And if you look up from time to time you see billboards for the Arabs’ Got Talent tv show. The contrasts are constantly weird. When you arrive at the hotel they start by refusing you a room – the government is hoping we will all go away so some hotels have apparently been told not to make it easy for us to stay. But within a few hours that changes, after the Prime Minister says reporters are free to do their jobs. But it is an unpredictable situation that has changed from day to day, so who knows what is coming next.

Mubarak is clinging on by his fingernails – now making his son and various party chiefs resign while he stays President. It is what his Tunisian counterpart attempted unsuccessfully. But he has clearly decided he wants to get Egypt back on its feet. Businesses will start going back to work Sunday, and although the stock market stays shut until tuesday some banks will open for a while too. I spent this afternoon with some of Cairo’s affluent families – the ones who run the banks and big businesses – in one of the top leisure clubs nearby. Although they mostly wanted Mubarak out, and resented his regime, they also were saying they wanted to go back to work. They feared the damage to Egypt if the protests go on, and seemed happy to accept Mubarak’s promises of reform.

The pro-democracy protesters are now effectively contained in a ring of steel consisting of tanks and troops. It protects them from the pro-Mubarak thugs, but it also keeps them under control. And I saw people being prevented from taking food into the protest zone – so this is a war of attrition, and the state has more weapons in its favour.

And what of the Americas? The State Department is now distancing itself from the comments of the US Envoy to Egypt Frank Wisner that Mubarak should stay to see through the transition and build a national consensus. They are at odds with what Obama has been saying – but less at odds with the Secretary of State Clinton’s view expressed today that challenging things take a little time. So one suspects Wisner wasn’t speaking entirely for the US government, but may well have revealed what they really think but perhaps feel unable to say.