US, Egypt restart joint war games
Trump overturns Obama policy
IN THE latest sign the administration of US President Donald Trump is looking to overturn Obama-era policy at home and abroad, the US military is preparing to restart a long-running military exercise with Egypt after former US president Barack Obama cancelled it in 2013 to protest against the killing of hundreds of protesters in Cairo.
The restart next month of the biannual Bright Star exercise, a bilateral effort now focused on counter terrorism operations, comes as Egypt seeks to contain a insurgency on the Sinai peninsula. Though Egypt may invite other countries such as Sudan as observers, only US and Egyptian forces will take the field, US defence officials said.
The renewal comes just months after Trump welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the White House in April, showering him with praise for fighting extremists.
The Obama administration struggled to craft a coherent policy toward Egypt after the 2011 uprising there, abandoning long-time US support for ousted president Hosni Mubarak, then warily embracing the democratically elected Islamist leader Mohammed Mursi, then growing distant from al-Sisi after the military reasserted control in 2013.
Unlike in past years, however, Bright Star will feature a smaller US military footprint, a US official with knowledge of the planning said, with “several hundred” personnel taking part, as opposed to the thousands deployed from the early 1980s until it was called off.
In previous years, hundreds of US airborne troops dropped into the Egyptian desert and Marines stormed the beaches.
The largest Bright Star took place in 1999 and included about 70 000 troops from 11 nations.
But there’s little need for that kind of show this time around, said David Schenker, director of the Programme on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute.
Cairo has no real peer threat in the region, but its borders with Libya and Sudan are increasingly causes for concern. The exercise next month will be focused primarily on counter terrorism, detecting and eliminating roadside bombs and border security operations.
A years-long insurgency in the Sinai has seen an influx of Islamic State fighters and funding over the past two years. The largest group in the Sinai, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, is responsible for dozens of roadside bombs and other attacks, and pledged allegiance to IS in late 2014. The group currently controls large swathes of the peninsula.
“The Egyptian military has been fighting and losing an insurgency in the Sinai for the past several years,” Schenker said, and has shown little interest in restructuring its large and lumbering military to fight an entrenched insurgency.
“A smaller exercise focused on these highly technical things is the best thing that Egypt could get.”
The exercise was last held in 2009, as Cairo called off the 2011 event due to the Egyptian revolution that eventually ousted Mubarak, and president Obama halted the follow-on event in 2013 after Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of civilian protesters.
Obama is widely seen as having given al-Sisi the cold shoulder. But he’d started to roll back some of the penalties imposed on Egypt well before Trump took office.
In March 2015 he ended the freeze on $1.3 billion in US military aid, resuming the shipment of F-16 fighter planes, Abrams tanks and Harpoon missiles, and other equipment.