Condition aid to Egypt on its instituting civil liberties

The perception of Egypt as a strategic U.S. ally is appropriately changing.

Last month, the House Appropriations Committee moved to withhold $200 million in military financing - 15 percent of what Egypt receives annually - until the Egyptian government reforms its judiciary, curbs police abuses, and destroys weapons-smuggling networks to Gaza.

While this measure held Egypt accountable for its passive role in Hamas' recent coup, which undermined the international push for Israeli-Palestinian peace, it missed the boat on properly ensuring another strategic interest: the political access of Egypt's long-repressed liberal dissidents.

To be sure, Egypt's rubber-stamp judiciary and brutal policing methods are some of the tools by which Egyptian liberals are repressed. Yet reforming these structures will not address the far more damaging absence of civil liberties. Without freedoms of association, assembly, speech and the press firmly instituted, an independent judiciary and more sensitive police force would lack the means to alter Egypt's authoritarianism.

Indeed, previous attempts to institute structural changes - without accompanying protections of rights - have failed to promote liberalism. When the Egyptian government complied with U.S. demands for multiparty elections in September 2005, longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak took 88.6 percent of the vote as charges of ballot-stuffing, vote-buying and intimidation abounded. Shortly thereafter, liberal runner-up Ayman Nour, who captured 7 percent of the vote, was sentenced to five years in prison on trumped-up charges.

Then, in the November 2005 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood finished second to the ruling National Democratic Party with 20 percent of the vote as liberals were trounced.

The outcome of the parliamentary elections should have surprised no one. Politics in Egypt has long been characterized by competition between the ruling secular authoritarian regime and its Islamist opponents. The former derives its power from control of state institutions, while the latter uses mosques as sanctuaries for organizing and protest. In such a political climate, liberals are denied representation as they are repressed on the streets, censored from the press, and unwelcome in the mosques.

As the Bush administration painfully learned in 2005, it cannot shake these dynamics immediately. Washington's new strategy should therefore leverage its annual military aid to Egypt, opening Egypt's political field to the meaningful participation of Egyptian liberals. By pushing for the institution of civil liberties, it would empower liberals to compete with Egypt's present political heavyweights and gradually build a third political stream that could ultimately affect internal reform.

Without these protections, Egypt's liberals are ripe for repression. Consider the story of a friend who, in March, was protesting a referendum on constitutional amendments that restricted political candidacy. Along with seven fellow activists, he was arrested, placed in the back of a police van, and driven out to the desert, where the group was held for 24 hours until the polls had closed the following day. During this time, they were given three liters of water to share, while each was fed a small container of macaroni; when they had to use the bathroom, they urinated in the empty containers.

After a brief period of unemployment on account of his activism, my friend is now teaching high school again. To protect his livelihood, he has vowed to steer clear of politics for the foreseeable future.

The brutal dissuasion of young, liberal Egyptians from politics severely hampers the United States' strategic interest in promoting progressive governance in the Middle East. While a push for civil liberties in Egypt will meet resistance from the Mubarak government - Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit declared the House's bill "unacceptable" meddling - the United States must remind Cairo that the $1.3 billion it receives in foreign military funding is not an entitlement. Egypt's failure to secure its border with Gaza has cast doubt on its usefulness as a strategic regional ally. If it maintains its repression of domestic liberal dissidents while Islamism is ascendant, policymakers must seriously question whether the United States is getting any bang for its buck at all.

If the United States is sincere about progressively reforming Egypt's ossified political structures, it will ensure that long-repressed liberal dissidents have a seat at the table. When the Senate Appropriations Committee convenes, it must condition future military aid to Egypt on the institution of civil liberties.