Egypt and Pakistan Are Co-Producing Weapons. Read the Fine Print. |
Egypt’s military establishment does not make moves casually, and its deepening defense industrial partnership with Pakistan deserves more scrutiny than it has received. What looks on the surface like a routine bilateral agreement between two large Muslim-majority armies is in fact a signal of something broader: Egypt is systematically reducing its dependence on Western-controlled arms pipelines, and it is doing so by cultivating partnerships that carry embedded strategic complications the United States has yet to seriously address.
The immediate news is straightforward enough. Egypt’s Minister of War Production, Salah Jumblat, met last week with Pakistan’s ambassador to Cairo to discuss joint defense manufacturing, technology transfer, and industrial partnerships between Egyptian and Pakistani defense companies. The meeting followed a joint military exercise called “Ra’ad 2” conducted roughly a month ago, which brought together Egyptian paratroopers and Pakistani special forces on Pakistani training grounds. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has now met with two successive Pakistani military chiefs in Cairo, in July and October of last year, each time with explicit emphasis on deepening security and military cooperation. This is not a relationship being assembled ad hoc. It is being constructed deliberately.
The model Egypt........