Egypt Strikes Back Against ISIS In Libya — At Least For Now

…
But the payoff may not be as strong as anticipated. A common joke among Washington’s Middle East insiders is that the Egyptian air force can’t fly at night — or in cloudy conditions.

David Schenker, a former Pentagon official who directs the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Program on Arab Politics, agrees that Egypt’s military can come up short of expectations. “They’d much rather build tanks they’re not going to use,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview, noting that with millions of dollars in annual American military aid, Egypt could have elected to strengthen its border with chaotic Libya years ago. Instead, Egypt has recognized that “in terms of popular perception, it’s important that they be seen as protecting their citizens,” so like Jordan before it, Egypt rushed to authorize airstrikes against ISIS targets.

But Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, points out several crucial differences between Jordan’s reaction to the immolation of pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh and Egypt’s response to the latest offense. Kasasbeh “was a military man representative of his government,” he told TheDCNF, “not a random foreign worker.” And while it was unclear whether Jordan would be intimidated or provoked by the attack, Gartenstein-Ross says that the beheadings in Libya were clearly “designed to provoke intervention,” and, by their own twisted logic, provided ISIS with 64 new “martyrs,” dying at the hands of secular-led Egypt, to use for recruitment purposes.
…
Read full article here.