A war of attrition

Obama’s announced troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, although a cosmetic climb-down affecting only the 33,000 ‘surge’ troops he threw at the country from December 2009, has restored the Afghan War as a modish topic on the Washington talk circuit.

At a policy briefing yesterday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in D.C. – ‘Afghanistan, Pakistan: Race for Success’ – Dr. Anthony Cordesman, recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan, sketched out what remains achievable for the U.S. and her allies as the bills keep climbing and the Taliban continues to land fresh recruits and firepower.

The laudably frank Dr. Cordesman, holder of the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS and a national security analyst on ABC News, uttered a truism of counter-insurgency warfare: ‘this is a war of attrition, not a tactical conflict.’

Herein lies the trouble. The Taliban have demonstrated a staying power that few predicted. They have been helped rather than hindered by their lack of a monolithic centralized power structure, and a seemingly bottomless supply of frustrated, unemployed, radicalised young men (‘talib’ after all means ‘student’) willing to expend themselves before superior American firepower: one of the many glum developments Cordesman noted was the understandable rise in Afghan sensitivity towards civilian casualties and military activity. But it is worth reflecting further on quite how amorphous this enemy is.

The Mullah Omars of the country may wield considerable authority in certain corners, but the ‘Taliban’ – an epithet which, much like ‘al-Qaeda’, denotes a multiplicity of militant Islamic groups with often tenuous links and conflicting interests (although all ranged against the presence of allied forces) – is not, as is often portrayed, an exclusively Pashtun collective with its heartlands in the country’s south (which allied troops have more or less brought under control), but a protean entity that spills across Afghanistan’s substantial ethnic and regional divides. The existence of the northerly Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is testament to this, alongside the more notable Haqqani network in the eastern regions which General Patraeus has identified as the new frontier of American operations, if money and troop levels allow. A regional divide and conquer strategy could never get off the ground.

Cordesman’s ‘attrition’ thesis, and the persistence and variety of the hydra-headed enemy, throws troubling light on Obama’s accelerated withdrawal timetable, with the surge troops set to leave within 15 months. This troop reduction is not comprehensive enough to address the mounting costs of the war, both human and financial – America will remain entrenched in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future – but it has enough symbolic clout to give confidence, not only to anti-war liberals and conservatives at home, but also to Taliban networks intent on holding out long enough to see America and her allies exhaust themselves (as has long been their aim). Obama, it seems, has landed the U.S. in the worst of both worlds.

One powerpoint slide in the policy briefing outlined what, in present circumstances, may constitute a victory for the allied forces. Tellingly, the word ‘winning’ was couched in nervous quotation marks, as if the very notion of ‘winning’ a war was a crass oversimplification of the complexities of contemporary warfare, fit only for the popular media. The notion that the allies are ‘losing’ would similarly be dismissed as a layman’s cheap fantasy, as would the possibility that this war is ultimately unwinnable.

The administration is happy to leave the war, and the costly institution-building deemed essential to Afghan stability, in an open-ended grey area where finality has become a semantic impossibility. The same drifting logic is at work in NATO’s war – sorry, ‘engagement’ – in Libya.

It’s about time somebody called Obama’s bluff.

I understand AV: a confession

A month or so ago I was at a society AGM, one of those grave gatherings where people stand up to make awkward speeches before leaving the room so people can vote for their friends. It was implemented under that excruciatingly complex game-changer, Alternative Vote. We were asked to rank the competing candidates, so people put their friends first, their vague acquaintances second, and the people who made good speeches third. It all turned out marvellously. The society ended up with a new committee, made up of members of the society, and democracy was nourished from the wellspring of a progressive voting rigmarole. Like Shakespeare’s Miranda, we were stood on the brink of a brave new world, full of people milling about voting for other people. The view was exquisite.

I have offered up this rare anecdote because it says something important about me. Having taken part in that heady instance of collective empowerment, I was conscripted into an Olympian clique, at a lofty remove from the lumpen citizenry: I was someone who understood the Alternative Vote. I hate to brag about this, and I am loathe to incite jealousy, but I must establish my authority before I proceed further.

I presume that you, the reader, do not understand AV. Why on earth would you? We can’t all attend AGMs for university societies. One would need to sit through hours upon hours of crudely narrated YouTube videos with spinning diagrams and all manner of complex numbered things. There’s even one involving cats (it really has come to this). Failing YouTube, you may have to read a condescending article by a ‘social democrat’ journalist in The Independent, but hopefully you will have stopped trying by that point. There are more important things to vex over, like Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. Was it too tame? I’m still can’t make up my mind; it troubles me still, mostly at night-time. A referendum may settle this.

I first came across AV in my entrance test for Mensa. It came after the rubix cube and the James Joyce close textual analysis. I was presented with indecent photographs of the wives of three successive British prime ministers, and had to rank them according to the criterion of ‘physical attractiveness and general pertness of form’. I wasted little time in ranking Samantha Cameron first – she was almost a crumpet in her turquoise dress on Kate and Wills’ big day – and if this were a First Past the Post affair, that would have been the end of it. But nay, I was stuck with the disheartening task of having to choose between Cherie Blair and Sarah Brown for second place. After scrutinising their nude forms for an agonising twenty minutes, my eyes alert for any latent trace of ‘pertness’, I tore up my test paper and stormed out of Mensa’s underground headquarters, loudly declaring to the surrounding geniuses that I didn’t want to be part their smug organisation anyway.

But all that was before I attended that society AGM. Since then, Mensa have been beating at my door daily, praying for me to become their Archbishop. Yet, not all can hope to be as fortunate as I. The Alternative Vote remains fundamentally inaccessible to the men and women on the street, who may never have elected a Treasurer or Social Rep in their lives. Therefore, the country truly made the right decision on Thursday in saying no to AV. In choosing to stick with the familiar, cosy institution of First Past the Post, they have chosen to keep elections within the limited orb of their understanding, from which politics escapes at its peril.

The political class must never put forward such an absurd idea again.

Libya: blueprint for an ethical foreign policy

Okay, firstly, let’s be honest about what we really want: Muammar Gaddafi’s melting head on a couscous platter. Oh yes we do. After all, he’s a dictator who enjoys his tyranny a little too much – just look at him with his forty high-kicking, lipsticked, virginal lady bodyguards – and what’s more he’s flanked by a semi-retarded son called Saif who keeps accusing his enemies of taking more drugs that he does. Seriously, what a dick. Let’s get him.

But rest easy, something is being done. First of all, we have branded ‘civilians’ the rag-tag rebels who started a civil war against him, disregarding the obvious fact that taking up arms automatically transforms someone from a ‘civilian’ into a ‘combatant’. Step one complete: militants subject to largely unknown influence and funding have been transformed into victims – and this is where we, the West, enter. It is, naturally, our moral obligation to step in on behalf of victims wherever they are being trod on.

And so we have the present military jaunt, where NATO and a handful of bellicose Arabs have been pounding Gaddafi’s hardware in the name of protecting ‘civilians’ from rough dictatorial treatment. So far it’s been a fine media show: austere, magisterial action shots of men in chequered neck-scarves running across barren desert-scapes cradling rusted Soviet assault rifles, screaming jihad to the indifferent wind, with the debris of exploded tanks littering the roadsides. The romance of the underdog gets widescreen treatment – Lawrence of Arabia with RPGs.

But unpleasant chatter will always arise at the point when one can no longer avoid the obvious. The obvious being that, far from this being a case of foursquare, right-on humanitarian intervention, we have merely picked sides in a civil war. Not that this should be cause for concern: these rebels are clearly the wholesome love-children of Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr., and intend to open gay clubs in Brega and weekend retreats for feminist book clubs in the desert.

The thing to do, then, is to ditch this effeminate ‘humanitarian’ cant and equip these immaculately organised, financially transparent freedom-fighters with the best sub-machine guns and grenade launchers that British taxpayer’s money can’t afford. Bang bang, win win, we all go home – the end. Because expensive weaponry is the way to get things done in this rough-and-tumble world of ours, and John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is a terrible, terrible song.

And so we’ll all have a party and get bladdered when Saif finally runs into the path of a cruise missile, and Muammar’s Swiss-cheesed corpse gets dragged through the dusty streets of Tripoli and pelted with raisins. In the meantime, we must make the world safe for democracy. But thankfully, our governments are doing the right thing.

How to lose votes and alienate citizens

The Tribe, St Andrews

It remains broadly true, in Britain as well as much of Western Europe, that while the Right won the economic war, the Left won the culture war. The latter victory is inscribed in national institutions like the BBC, whose representatives remain stoutly unfazed by accusations of anti-Toryism and left-liberal bias. But this victory was claimed at the cost of an insipid gentrification: with emasculated unions and an apathetic working class, leftism has become a middle-class affectation, a cosmopolitan fad, with all the ferocity of a university debating team.

The New Labour dynasty – 1997 to 2010 – is the longest period of left wing rule in Britain’s history, but it coincided with the moment that leftist ideology ceased to exist as a mainstream force in British political life. The Labourite resistance to Thatcherite privatisation in the 1980s was fuelled by genuine anti-capitalism and class solidarity – perhaps only possible to sustain in opposition – and offered a genuine ideological alternative at a time when international socialism was still a competing force in global politics. But as defeat followed defeat, and Britain’s neoliberal makeover continued apace, for the New Labour of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson the penny finally dropped: electoral victory was only possible if they sold themselves to the middle classes, as a party that embraced bourgeois aspiration, private enterprise, and cappuccinos.

And so was born a political ethos (not quite a philosophy) which allegedly eschewed the grandstanding of both Left and Right, and instead steered Britain onto a fuzzy ‘third way’ gangplank. The state ballooned as means of ‘solving’ unemployment, while at the same time the banking empire inherited from Margaret Thatcher was coddled and left unregulated as a means of paying for the former through taxation. Naturally this settlement could last only as long as the money did – but never mind, Gordon Brown had announced the abolition of ‘boom and bust’. But run out the money did, despite sage-Gordon’s prophecies: the financial crash of 2008 spelled the cruel end of Britain’s social democratic romance. And so to the present mess we find ourselves in.

With the political status quo rendered all-to-suddenly defunct, its orthodoxies firmly in the ditch, both the Left and the Right have a golden opportunity to reinvent themselves; moreover, to reinvent politics itself, and bridge the ever-widening gap between a disengaged public and an aloof political class. But this is a pipe dream. The Conservatives, at last finding themselves in power (albeit as the majority party of a coalition), are pursuing an atavistic Thatcherite programme: Chancellor George Osbourne has banked everything on a grand renaissance in the private sector; but the big money-phoenix has yet to rise, and has shown only faltering signs of doing so.

For all the talk of radical reform and a political shake-up – the ‘New Politics’ heralded by David Cameron and Nick Clegg after their post-election settlement (a slogan mercifully ditched thereafter) – the current government is interested only in a return to business as usual, in which an energetic, internationally-orientated business community continues to fund a haggard, emaciated welfare state with a dubious record on social mobility. Britain has to change in order to stay the same, the thinking goes. Excepting Michael Gove’s utopian blueprint for a new schooling system, which has been received by state school teachers as enthusiastically as Nick Clegg at a student house party, there are few new ideas being sketched out in the offices of Whitehall.

For portents of a new political order, you have to turn to Europe. There it is the Right that has capitalised on the disintegration of social democracy. And the gains have been decisive: in left-liberal strongholds such as Holland and Denmark, to which the British Left previously looked with hushed reverence, far-right parties such as Geert Wilder’s Party for Freedom and Pia Kjærsgaard’s Danish People’s Party have been piling up votes on a platform of anti-immigration, cultural renewal, and a stricter policing of minorities that have failed to integrate.

The claim of these parties to be merely upholding ‘liberal values’, to which certain minorities apparently fail to aspire, doesn’t obscure their populist agenda, which feeds off a growing feeling among the working class white majority that their national identity and cultural patrimony are being sacrificed on the altar of an over-indulgent liberalism. This sentiment has either been ignored or mocked by the Left: these grumpy white folk are simply ignorant and bigoted; their demands can be ignored and their arguments needn’t even be grappled with – and that’s the end of it. While racism and ignorance are certainly at play here, the Left adopts this snotty attitude at the cost of its own obscurity. These ‘bigots’ have returned the favour, and the disengagement of the European Left from the people it claims to act for has rarely been more profound.

The Left have only themselves to blame for the right wing sweep in Europe. As dubious as much of their pack may be, it is this new Right that has been proactive in tapping into the frustrations of the European white majority, bringing new ideas to the table, however unsavoury they may be – and so they have outflanked the Left on almost every stage. The Left can no longer afford to rest on its sense of moral superiority and the support of ‘enlightened’ sections of society e.g. the universities, much of which are stuck in a Marxist timewarp, out of step with the rest of society, and exerting a negligible impact on it. It has grown too cosy in its middle class citadel, while the Right has been out there mucking in with the masses and feeding them their ideas.

There has been much talk of the immanence of a ‘New Left’ – not just a home-grown cottage rebellion but a proper flag-waving, chest-thumping, international coming-together of people of anti-capitalist conscience. Every time far-left intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek pop up on television or in YouTube videos, they opine at length on the necessity of this alliance of progressive cells, before going home and writing impenetrable tracts on deconstructionist theory. The twentieth century dreams of international socialism are simply renewing themselves, and it’s all starting to look pretty tired and moribund; many have understandably stopped listening. The golden opportunity of a socialist overhaul – the financial crash – has been and gone, and the existing order is being restored brick by brick. Unless fresh ideas are formulated, don’t expect anything from the Left any time soon.

On compassion

This Lent, I’ve given up celery. I kid you not.

Have you tried celery? Tastes pretty rubbish, doesn’t it? Both watery and overly crunchy. Gets stuck in the teeth, too. It also, apparently, uses up more of your energy in the eating of it than it gifts you in return – an entirely vampiric vegetable. Now, I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but, regardless, there’s no smoke without fire; I’m not giving celery the benefit of the doubt. It can, however, taste okay in a salad, as long as there’s lots of other stuff chopped up with it (preferably nuts). But being passable in a salad is no true badge of worth (Mark 1:21).

No, I am confident that, like last year, and the year before that, and so on back to the first twitchings of the embryo, I can make it through this Lent without a single wedge of celery – not in a curry, not in a casserole, not even in a salad; not anywhere. Watch me.

But then, I’m missing the point, aren’t I? I’m supposed to give up something good, something whose absence will condemn me to long evenings of spiritual torpor and slow-burning psychosis. A crap watery vegetable doesn’t quite cut it, somehow.

I’ve mulled over alternatives: cheese perhaps, or white bread, or maybe oven chips (I eat a lot of oven chips, sadly). But why this preoccupation with food? Even if you do believe in the Last Judgement, it’s unlikely the big man’s going to haul out your accumulated Tesco receipts for divine scrutiny, before sending you downstairs for an overabundance of cheddar. No, the powers above probably don’t much care about what’s in your fridge. So I got thinking of other fields of possibility: the immaterial, the transcendent, the non-digestible, that sort of thing. I landed upon some strange, one might say eerie, thoughts. Dare I share them?

For instance, compassion – the empathic glue which pastes humanity together, and manifests itself chiefly in the emotion of ‘pity’. Despite its benign disposition and general eagerness to please, pity is not as innocent as it seems; it is very much worth giving up for Lent. I shall quote Graham Greene, the filthiest Catholic around, for a sober view on the matter: ‘Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling around.’

Pity, compassion, however you wish to term it, is too often considered the handmaiden of moral action. But is there anything more dehumanising, demoralising, cruel even? No one wishes to be the object of pity; better by far to be hated, envied, even ignored – anything but pitied. Knocking down the spindly crutches of dignity, its value travels in reverse of its intention: it is the spectator, the giver of pity, who benefits. Their conscience is assuaged, their intolerable burden of feeling is lightened. The object of pity is robbed to satisfy the moral feeling of the spectator. Pity is moral exploitation.

So: compassion = cruelty = something to consider giving up for Lent. I’m glad Graham was at hand to clear this up for me. (He’s always been there for me, Graham.) It can destroy others, but it can also be self-destructive. Take Friedrich Nietzsche: pity drove that German philosopher insane. His mental breakdown was heralded, in Turin in January 1889, by a desperate gesture of animal compassion. On witnessing a horse being beaten by a coachman in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, he lunged forwards and embraced the horse, weeping and gibbering till he was dragged away. He spent the next eleven years of his life in a shadow realm, half dead to the world. To conclude, our sanity depends upon not giving a shit about a whole lot of things. Think about it.

In our present day society, the medium of compassion is the reproduced image; it is the very currency of our media culture. All across our newspapers and magazines are little pictorial fishhooks, poised to ensnare our compassion. Dead babies, crying women, the burning shells of houses – such are the archetypes ceaselessly regurgitated, lest news stories lose their empathetic force. But compassion, like any other form of capital, is a finite stock; once depleted, banality rushes in to fill the void.

Susan Sontag has these wise words to offer: ‘The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.’ There are simply too many fishhooks.

Today, compassion is abused, whored-out and emaciated, like a bulimic teenage model at Milan Fashion Week. Now and again it needs a rest – enter Lent, a period of convalescence, sanctioned by the world’s most popular religion. Come Easter, I’ll be a new man, ready to cry at every dead baby I see in newsprint. A bloodied seal cub may even elicit my pity.

But then, that would be inconvenient in the extreme. Say what you like about our postmodern condition of resigned cynicism and overindulged lethargy, but at least it respects our nerves and sense of composure. The life of a sheep is, after all, an enviable one.

So I decided to stick with celery. No celery for forty days. I am frankly above celery.

recessional

dawn bleeds by degrees
into my thoroughly modern bedroom
I wake up to wet socks
on the radiator, hissing
a ghost of cheap deodorant
keeps watch overhead

Sunday mornings are shit and I hate them

I kick my dream where it sits
stuck before its end
a jammed cassette tape, unspooling
its sand sifting south
to the space beneath my mattress
layering a rank sediment

my eternal soul made it through winter, just

blinking, I unknot myself
elbow a path, yawning
through over-crowded Purgatory
where fresh souls sit slumped
on plastic benches, watching
pulsing screens, ticker tape omens

Hell has been cancelled due to lack of enthusiasm

We are not amused

‘I just don’t care about the Royal wedding’ is the standard dinner party line of early 2011. Expressing a contemptuous, or at least weary, indifference towards the upcoming wedding of Prince William to his uni girlfriend Kate Middleton has become an article faith among enlightened British society. In neat conversational shorthand, the speaker establishes his or her liberal, cosmopolitan, freedom-loving credentials, lest it be doubted by their liberal, cosmopolitan, freedom-loving friends. Above all, it lays down the gaping intellectual chasm that separates them from the Daily Mail-reading ‘plebs’ who find meaning and emotional sustenance in the expensive marriage of a hereditary toff to a presumably vapid brunette.

At times like these, the liberal elite is given the chance to demonstrate its superiority over the ignorant, bigoted, unclean masses who rush out to buy Wills’n’Kate tea-towels – and they seize on it greedily. A similar rhetorical stunt is at work among those who, in the summer of 2010, declared their heroic lack of interest in the football World Cup, and among those who profess to be mystified by the appeal of Top Gear. They, you see, are not like ‘them’ down below on the social ladder; their thoughts are set on an altogether higher plane, and they would much sooner be practicing the piano or reading an Ian McEwen novel than poring over Hello photo-spreads of the newly engaged couple.

This pseudo-cheeky iconoclasm, itself a modern secular orthodoxy set against a make-believe Royalist consensus, is at play in the commentary pages of Britain’s broadsheet newspapers. ‘I’m afraid I just can’t get excited about the royal wedding but, unfortunately, if [the] media frenzy is anything to go by, it seems I am in the minority,’ writes journalist Molly Lynch. In the Guardian Tanya Gold pipes in, ‘I am going to be tried for saying this, but a Royal wedding will make idiots of us Brits.’ Quite who this embattled minority of far-sighted opinion-makers is going to be ‘tried’ by is not altogether clear. But never mind: the liberal commentariat could not care less about the big Royal do, and they are ever so keen for us to know this. They intend to ignore the coming wedding, and so write endless column inches on the necessity of ignoring it (the irony having blissfully escaped them).

Yet this trendy republicanism is not as embedded as one might think – something attested to by the formidable commercial and critical success of The King’s Speech, which was showered with gongs in the recent Bafta awards ceremony, and received favourable reviews in the very same papers that declared their noble disdain for the Royal wedding. This handsomely made film is so staunchly and persuasively monarchist, you’d be forgiven for expecting to discover Prince Philip among its executive producers. Not only is the shy, impenetrable historical figure of King George VI successfully ‘humanised’, but his role as a pillar of historical continuity and a repository of national sentiment, given a fresh lease with the advent of World War Two, is not left in doubt.

The film's defence of the Royal office is made partially through a simplified, although narratively satisfying, division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Royals. Edward VIII, or ‘David’, as played by the Australian Guy Pearce, is a ‘bad’ Royal. His irresponsible playboy lifestyle, and churlish insistence on wedding the American divorcee harpy Wallace Simpson, precipitates his early abdication – a travesty of the kingly virtues of duty and self-sacrifice which George VI, or ‘Bertie’, as played by the ever-sympathetic Colin Firth, comes to embody as he masters his stammer and delivers a rousing speech to the nation on the eve of world war. Bertie is the very archetype of the ‘good’ Royal.

This good/bad distinction – analogous to the similarly vapid distinction between ‘good’ (moderate) and ‘bad’ (extreme) Islam insisted on in debates over multiculturalism – nonetheless neatly captures the schizophrenic attitude of the chattering classes towards the monarchy, the half-baked radicalism which can never quite rouse itself into a genuine political movement. Our Queen Elizabeth, for instance, is unanimously deemed a ‘good’ Royal, carrying out her ‘job’ as head of state with a dignity and sense of duty she is said to have inherited from her dad, the protagonist of The King’s Speech. Even the shoutiest republicans find it impossible to work up an appropriate rage about the dear old lady. How could anyone?

The Crown Prince Charles, however, generally sits on the ‘bad’ half of the divide. He is considered fair sport by journalists on both the left and right, who find bottomless good copy in his publicly vented opinions on modern architecture, environmentalism, and the evils of foie gras. Veteran political commentator Christopher Hitchens, for instance, known for his appetite for taking on the big issues – contemporary warfare, international diplomacy, God – threw himself into a baffling rage over ‘the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts [becoming] head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England.'

This contempt is shared by many in Britain today. The ascension of a ‘bad’ Royal to the head of the nation will likely overturn the British public’s affection and tolerance towards hereditary ‘rule’, bound up as all ceremonial posts are with personality. The sudden appearance of Charles’ ‘bat-eared and chinless’ visage on our pennies and five pound notes could prove the point where festering republican angst develops into an organized campaign with mass support.

The monarchy, politically impotent as it is, rests on the mercy of public opinion, and it is hard to see how it could withstand any kind of popular, coordinated opposition. With an elderly Queen, we might well be within the twilight years of the British monarchy. It’s abolition in the next decade cannot be ruled out, ushering in a slew of name changes among our public services and forces (the Royal Mail, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Royal Air Force, to name but a few), and the installation of a presidency, or something like it. Remember, it’s happened before.

Reflections on the revolution in Egypt

I was in Egypt during the revolution. 23rd January till 4th February – just a couple of weeks spent seeing ancient temples, photographing mosques, traversing the Nile and eating kebabs: so we thought to ourselves before embarking on our early morning Easy Jet flight to Sharm-el-Shark-Attack.

We left Sharm with its teeming Russians immediately, arriving in Dahab that evening in order to see Mount Sinai (of Ten Commandment and Burning Bush fame) and St Katherine’s Monastery (the world’s oldest inhabited Christian monastery, thereby rather holy) the next day. Both were well worth the slog into the interior, especially the views from the Mount: the vast emptiness of the Sinai desert stretched out under beating sunlight. At the top we were met with a mean brick chapel, a teenage Bedouin flogging tea and tepid Coca Cola, and a tour group of middle aged Koreans conducting a Mass, their faces turned to the sunset, drinking in the UV light of Jesus. For our part, the climb earned us heaps of religious merit, which would serve us well for arrival in Cairo the next day, the 25th: National Police Day – coinciding, auspiciously enough, with Burns Night, that ebullient Scottish vigil to boiled offal.

‘Tahir Square, let’s go there,’ we told ourselves after depositing our bags in Amin Hotel – a multi-storey dive festooned with sawdust, cracked paint, and a lift poised on the grassy verge of death. First we had a round of Stella beer – an Egyptian brand, over a hundred years old; not the famous Belgian wife-disciplining nectar – in Hurrea, a thirties-era bar with a large open floor plan, decked with smudged mirrors and limp stationary fans. A piece of drunken theatre played itself out: a Russian traveller, from a group of three with a mess of half-drunken bottles on their table, stood up and began to chug on a 500ml Stella bottle, much to the delight of the chubby bearded waiter who cheered him on. Half of it coursed over the Russian’s beard, but the bottle was emptied. After slamming it on the table he teetered a moment, then crumpled sideways onto the sticky floor – out cold. A few slaps from his friends were enough to rouse him; he sat back down and re-commenced drinking. That, boys, is how it is done: the message was clear.

Refreshed, if a tad unnerved, we proceeded onwards to Tahir Square, the city’s heart-chamber, from which wide colonial roads radiate out into downtown Cairo. Large green-painted trucks filled the kerb-sides, and all along the pavements lolled riot police with helmets, shields and batons. Their numbers thickened as we reached the square – a staggering show of force, outnumbering the protesters which we now glimpsed in the centre, waving signboards and chanting feverishly. Much of them were of student age; word had it there was some grievance about rising tuition fees, of all things.

In unison they derided the elderly despot who for the last thirty years had presided over a military dictatorship in Egypt: Hosni Mubarak, who keeps his grey hairs at bay with liberal coatings of black hair dye, just as he was known to keep his political opponents down with energetic campaigns of violent intimidation, electoral fraud, and torture, among other displays of manly virility becoming of an Arab dictator in the tradition of the still-revered Gamal Abdel Nasser (who was known to suspend political prisoners upside-down and dip them in boiling excrement, which betrays a certain ingenuity and willingness to experiment). Inspired by the recent revolution in Tunisia, many were prepared to brave overnight stays in the police ‘special room’ in a concerted demonstration of popular will – unprecedented in a country where protests are illegal, owing to ‘emergency laws’ that have been in place ever since the assassination of the former president, Anwar El Sadat, in 1981.

The scene was an exciting one that first night in Cairo. Over the streets and squares hung a mood of collective purpose, and collective promise. The crowds in Tahir Square were awed at the force of their own numbers: the din they were capable of making, the gravitational pull they were exerting on thousands of their fellow Cairenes, and the unholy numbers of riot police that began to amass conspicuously around them. But violence was just as conspicuously absent (even if, in a fit of democratic exuberance, a stuffed effigy of Mubarak had been hung from a lamppost in the centre of the square).

The riot police for their part appeared relaxed, even bored, presiding over the protest like a patient mother keeping watch over the boisterous birthday party of her five year old son, to make sure no one gets hit with Lego. Many were nonchalantly tucking into crisp packets. Yet what struck me most was their youth; some looked scarcely over sixteen. There was a grim irony in witnessing these boy-police, drawn largely from the ranks of the urban poor, being ranged against a crowd whose centre was comprised of middle-class, well-educated student activists, presumably fighting in the former’s best interests. But such is the way with oversized, unwieldy governments in search of legitimacy – buying out the masses with schemes of mass employment in the civilian and military forces.

We soon left Tahir Square, for food and further bottles of cheap Egyptian beer. During our meal in a brightly lit ‘family’ restaurant, we were approached by a young Egyptian man in international student costume: grubby jeans, Converse trainers, and a t-shirt with writing on it. In graceful tones and immaculate English, he regaled us with the efforts of his comrades at the nearby protest, ‘fighting against the police because they oppress us’. And would we three Britishers like to join them in this noble cause, in a demonstration of international student solidarity? ‘If white people are present, the police won’t be violent; they don’t want a fuss,’ he claimed as the indispensible contribution we would make to this nascent revolution. We nodded a great deal and stated our enthusiasm and sympathy towards their cause. But we declined the opportunity to be human shields, doubting that the niceties of international diplomacy would be foremost in the minds of teenage riot police during a stampede. The young man thanked us for our time and returned to his table, there to talk with his friends about the moral cowardice of the imperialist races, or the motif of the voyeur in the films of David Lynch.

We returned to the protest to find it bigger and louder. The police had grown visibly edgy, and were no longer munching on multi-flavoured crisps. They had begun to restrict numbers entering the square, and officers with over-sized coats were strutting around shouting orders. Something was about to happen; we braced ourselves and readied our cameras, like the shallow tourists we were. Soon enough trails of smoke fell in smooth arcs over the crowd; their ranks collapsed immediately, and protesters ran screaming and flailing into the outer streets. A tear-gas barrage was underway. The square was now a swirling, foggy chaos. Suddenly a line of riot police surged into the square, in a stampede to oust those that remained. Frightened protesters continued to pour past us as we stood on the square’s edge, pondering our proximity to numerous guttering tear-gas shells.

The boy-police had reclaimed Tahir Square, but the protesters regrouped and began to march the wide pavements of central Cairo, chanting anti-Mubarak slogans and waving whatever signboards remained legible. They still had the rest of the city to play with. The police fell into phalanx formations, in the manner of ancient Pharaonic warriors, and began stamping and chanting and heaving – a psychological training exercise, it appeared, aimed at bracing themselves for violence and intimidating others, which immediately brought to mind the fearsome ‘haka’ dance performed by the New Zealand All Blacks before rugby games. But thankfully they refrained from going all Spartan on the protestors with their batons and shields, and instead fell to blocking off certain roads. With remarkable composure they faced down the jeering and gesticulating of protestors who brushed up against them. (The police weren’t quite the ‘violent brutes’ described in Western broadsheet news stories.) We witnessed one elderly man with a white moustache and grey suit, shrieking heated invective and flapping his arms at a line of riot police hiding meekly behind their shields. He was clearly having the time of his life.

We retired eventually to our dingy room with its leaking tap, and stationed ourselves on the balcony with glasses of the gin we had bought on the Easy Jet flight (ten quid for a litre; back of the net) mixed with Sprite. A thick line of protesters continued to coil itself around the main arteries of downtown, and lines of riot police stood in ghostly, watchful lines across junctions and roads, keeping their silent vigil well into the night. Cairo wouldn’t burn just yet, so we took to sleep.

Over the following two days we remained in Cairo, and saw the sights untroubled: the exquisite mosques and madrassas of Islamic Cairo, dizzyingly plentiful in what was once known as ‘the city of a thousand minarets’; the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, an obscure collection of monuments you probably haven’t heard of; and the churches of the Coptic quarter, the oldest existing part of Cairo – a testament to Egypt’s pre-Islamic Christian heritage and sizeable Christian minority (between fifteen and twenty percent at present), which in recent months has come under attack from Islamic terrorism, in a spate of bomb attacks on Christian sites (a reminder to any of those well-meaning commentators who insist that Islamist groups are ‘not a problem’ in Egypt but merely a ‘convenient distraction’ for anti-democrats).

In the evenings the crowds re-gathered in Tahir Square, and the shouting and signboard-waving continued afresh. The only disruption caused was the closure of Tahir’s metro station; otherwise Cairo continued as normal: shops stayed open, the traffic remained dreadful, and old men still sat in shisha bars grumbling to each other. We left on Thursday evening, the 27th, taking an overnight bus ride to Luxor in Upper (southern) Egypt, which proved a bitter trial indeed. A posse of Egyptian ‘lads’ played hideous Arab pop music from their 3G phones – much as a tracksuited chav would on a British train – while an over-head TV with burnt-out speakers beamed out primary-colour Egyptian TV programmes throughout the night.

Despite the dire rigours of the journey, we had left Cairo at a good time. According to a know-it-all American student we met in the same Hurrea bar, ‘the shit’s really going down on Friday; people are pouring into Cairo from elsewhere; the activists are planning something huge.’ The smart-arse yank proved correct. From Luxor we caught snatches of Arabic news reports on TVs in cafes, in which footage of tanks patrolling the streets of Cairo neatly summarised the breakdown of police discipline and the handover to the army. We heard that thousands of tourists were mobbing Cairo airport, trying to leave the country. This was sobering news to hear just five days into a two week trip, but there was no question of our forsaking our travels. Besides, we felt relatively safe in Upper Egypt. There were only small-scale protests in Luxor and Aswan: mostly a bit of shouting and signboard-waving in central locations, although we did witness another tear-gas barrage and a spot of arson in Luxor. Civilisation as we knew it appeared to have the upper hand.

The real problem turned out to be, not the protests themselves, but the repressive response of the (clearly terrified) Egyptian government. On Friday the 28th, the internet was shut down, and remained so until the penultimate day of our trip. It was hard to know precisely what was going on; all we had to go by were occasional glimpses of news reports in Arabic, and rather over-heated predictions from friendly Egyptians we met: for instance that, ‘tomorrow we will be free and everything will be okay, promise’ – heard repeatedly throughout the trip from various different people. We had little idea that Egypt was front page news around the world for the duration of our time there.

What was worse, all banks were closed from the 30th, after a bank was looted in central Cairo. The mist of panic descended: we had run out of money, we had no means of getting any more, and we very far away indeed from Sharm-el-Sheikh, our point of departure. We were saved only by the apparition of a Barclays ATM in Aswan, the first we’d seen in Egypt (the government couldn’t close down international banking outlets, of which there were precious few). A bloody good thing we had climbed Mount Sinai and communed with the Bush in the monastery, then.

The train network was shut down soon after the banks, to prevent futher protesters travelling to Cairo or other major cities. We had planned originally to travel from Aswan to Alexandria by train, and then onto Sinai for our flight home – but that proved impossible. After much pacing about and Hamlet-like soliloquies about the cruel hand fate had dealt us, we decided with the grimmest reluctance to try for the bus from Luxor – which we returned to, by bus, after our three days in Aswan, witnessing a couple of burning police stations on the way – all the way to Sharm-el-Sheikh.

We had heard of such a bus – which took a truly gross journey of some 1,500 kilometres, from the Nile Valley up the Red Sea coast till Suez and down through Sinai – but we were sceptical of its existence; surely it was just a figment of some backpacker’s lurid nightmare? But it proved to be all too real, and made the ten hour ride from Cairo to Luxor seem like a wistful Sunday ramble in Kensington Gardens. The Luxor-Sharm journey would normally have taken 16 hours. What with the relentless military check points, where AK-47-sporting soldiers stepped on board and demanded to see our passports and sometimes the contents of our luggage, it took 21 hours. This, for us, was the greatest hurt the Egyptian ‘emergency’ inflicted on our trip. I still haven’t fully recovered. Occasionally I wake up in a cold sweat with the ghost of an Egyptian service station before my eyes.

We took our scheduled flight back to London, surrounded by half the rabble of Moscow. We reflected that, aside from Alexandria and a second visit to Cairo on the way back to Sinai, we had done pretty much everything we had intended to do. We had seen Mount Sinai, Islamic Cairo, the Pyramids at Giza, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings and the Theban Necropolis, Philae, a good length of stunning Nile scenery, and more besides. Furthermore, we had demolished about eighty pints of Egyptian Stella and a litre of Gordon’s Gin; not at all bad in a predominantly Muslim country. And, if anything, the ‘emergency’ added an extra level of excitement and interest to our trip. We had many fascinating conversations with Egyptians, who were keen to communicate their frustration with the 30-year-old ruling regime, and some not-so-enlightening but still enjoyable instances when random men (it was invariably men) pulled us aside and bellowed ‘Mubarak no!’, lest we should think fondly of the dear old man. We left Egypt content that we had witnessed a turning point in world history.