U.S. worries Egypt military not doing enough

The Obama administration is concerned that the Egyptian military’s plans to reshape the country’s government may fall short of producing its promised democratic overhaul, and are privately urging the new leaders to live up to pledges they made as the Mubarak regime fell.

U.S. officials are worried by the failure of the military leadership that took control of the government Friday to lift Egypt’s longstanding emergency law, which allows authorities to arrest people without charge and restrict the right to free speech and assembly.

The U.S. also has noted that numerous civilian officials from toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s government remain in place, even though the military has declared it intends to dismiss the old Cabinet. And officials worry that the military’s condensed schedule for producing constitutional amendments and holding elections may not provide enough time for the country’s nascent democracy movement to organize political parties and build a strong civilian government.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has said it intends a swift transition to civilian rule. It has dissolved parliament and ordered a committee to draft limited amendments to the constitution in less than two weeks.

It also announced plans for a referendum on those changes in two months, with elections planned within six months.

Egypt’s protest movement seems largely worried by the army’s increased authority. Activists and a number of opposition figures said the military’s actions fulfilled the wishes of the protest movement that ousted Mubarak.

“We do have open lines with them,” youth activist Shady Ghazali said. “They said, ‘You can call any time.’ But after this week we’ll see if they’re actually willing to listen to our demands or are just sitting down with us as a formality.”

The army is respected in Egypt as one of the few institutions that safeguards stability and the public trust. It is not ideologically driven and is more inclined toward the status quo and protecting its commercial interests.

In recent days, military officers have shown impatience with labor strikes, telling workers in text messages to return to their jobs or risk further damaging the nation’s economy.

But Washington is reaching out to Egyptian leaders through diplomatic and military contacts to apply what is described as friendly but steady pressure to ensure the transition to greater political freedom does not lose momentum, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the conversations.

The goal must be “to make these changes irreversible,” said one administration official, echoing language that President Obama used just after the military took power.

A priority for the administration is an end to the 3-decade-old emergency law, which had been among the demands of the protest movement. Egyptian military leaders promised to lift the law once the protests subsided and the country was stable.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview Monday that the protesters’ insistence on the lifting of the law was a demand “which we have supported for a long time. There has been an announcement that it will be done, and we hope it will be.”

It also remains unclear when the military intends to dismiss the old Cabinet, and whether all members will be pushed out. Several officials from the old order were reinstalled as regional security officials by the Interior Minister.

U.S. officials said they still needed to see that the military council intends to begin dealing with all the diverse groups in the opposition, the administration official said. “This process won’t get done right if everybody isn’t brought in at the beginning,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the matter.

The U.S. campaign to press Cairo’s leaders to live up to their pledges mirrors the tone set by Obama in the hours after Mubarak resigned. In a speech that day, Obama praised the military for its restraint during the uprising, but made it clear that he would be watching closely to see that the military followed through on its commitments. He laid out what was essentially a series of benchmarks.

Obama said that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day,” which means “protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution, and other laws to make this irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are free and fair.” He said that “above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table.”

But some advisors to the White House said troubling signs have arisen. Stephen McInerney, who is executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy and has ties to Egyptian groups, said veteran human rights activists and nongovernmental groups are more cautious about the military’s intentions.

“Groups that have been skeptical are becoming a little bit more skeptical,” said McInerney, who has been an informal advisor to the White House during the crisis.

McInerney said administration officials are “clearly pleased with some steps, and want to be supportive publicly. But they do have concerns.”

Publicly, Obama and other administration officials have continued to praise the Egyptian military, with Obama saying Wednesday that “obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done in Egypt itself, but what we’ve seen so far is positive.”

“They don’t want to call out the Egyptian military when it’s moving on this,” said Joel Rubin, a former Egypt desk officer at the State Department who is now with the National Security Network research organization. “But behind the scenes, they’re trying to make sure that the goals the military set out are being met.”

paul.richter@latimes.com

Jeffrey Fleishman in The Times’ Cairo bureau contributed to this report.