To fight a civil war, regime opponents need the weapons, or the resources to acquire them. They need the expertise in how to fight, and sustain, an asymmetric campaign. The Muslim Brotherhood may well be able to acquire both over time, but any escalation to civil war would at best be gradual.
More likely, the situation would resemble an uneven race between the army and its opponents: one side trying to crush the other before it can build up necessary capabilities, the other to survive until it is more evenly matched.
But decades of repression and persecution did not destroy the Muslim Brotherhood, so in light of recent events it is possible to imagine small bands of guerrilla fighters being able to command sufficient popular support to maintain a low-level campaign of violent resistance.
Considering the wider network the Brotherhood has in the region and beyond, external support is likely to create opportunities in the form of resources, expertise – and fighters. Events in Egypt fit in very well with an al-Qaeda narrative of suppression of Islam by corrupt local governments supported by Western powers. Moreover, there is a significant danger that turmoil in Egypt will spread and further destabilise an already volatile region.
What the West Should Do
Yet opportunity cuts both ways, and in a double sense. On the one hand, opportunities for the Muslim Brotherhood to build up capabilities to fight an all-out civil war can be denied, or at least constrained, by controlling and intercepting flows of weapons, money and people, challenging though that might be.
Similarly, opportunities for the army to further escalate violence can, and must, also be constrained. What is needed is a much more clearly and publicly articulated policy by Egypt’s international partners in the West and in the Muslim world of what is unacceptable. This needs to be backed by credible threats of sanctions and offers of incentives if certain conditions are met.
Chief among these needs to be an immediate de-escalation of violence. Both the US and the EU are in a position to do so — the US because of its long-standing links with the Egyptian military, the EU because it has played an important, if so far unsuccessful, mediation role between the Brotherhood and the army.
Denying means and constraining opportunities for a full-blown civil war, however, are stop-gap measures. They can at best be effective for a period of time only and create a window of opportunity for cooler and more rational heads to prevail and prevent the currently extremely volatile situation in Egypt from spinning out of control.
The key challenge for the rival factions in Egypt is to learn the right lessons from its so-far disastrous post-Mubarak transition and find the courage to right the wrongs committed by both sides.
