Abstract:
The term Egyptianization describes a documented sequence rather than a resemblance. In Egypt it ran as follows: an elected president removed by the military, a protest camp cleared with at least 817 killed in a single day under a plan Human Rights Watch found had envisioned several thousand deaths, the president later dead in a courtroom, tens of thousands imprisoned, the judiciary absorbed, the media nationalized, the massacre site renamed after the prosecutor who authorized the killing, and a government committee that recommended charges against nobody. Pakistan is running a recognizable version: an elected prime minister imprisoned, the courts restructured by constitutional amendment, all three services unified under one unelected officer holding rank for life and immunity from prosecution, sitting members of parliament dragged into police vans on terrorism charges, and coverage of dissent censored across national media. This article documents both sequences and argues that the decisive variable is neither Egyptian nor Pakistani. It is the response of the international system. Egypt demonstrated the price of the sequence. The price was ten Apache attack helicopters in 2014, twelve F-16s and 125 tank kits in 2015, and a Strategic Dialogue in Cairo.
Main Article:
A template is not a resemblance. It is a sequence of steps that has been executed once, produced a known result, and can therefore be repeated by anyone who studies the outcome. The value of naming a template is that it converts a moral objection into a prediction.
Egypt executed the template. Pakistan is executing it now. And the reason the second is happening is contained entirely in what the world did about the first.
Begin with the sequence as Egypt ran it, because every step is documented and the documentation is the argument.
On July 3, 2013, the Egyptian military under Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed Mohamed Morsi, the first freely elected civilian president in the history of the country, following mass protests against his rule. Supporters of the deposed president occupied two squares in Cairo, at Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda, and remained for six weeks demanding his reinstatement. [1]
On August 14, 2013, security forces cleared them. Human Rights Watch conducted a year-long investigation and published a 188-page report. Its findings are the spine of everything that follows. In the Rabaa dispersal alone, security forces killed a minimum of 817 people and more likely at least 1,000. Across six demonstrations between July 5 and August 17, the systematic and widespread killing of at least 1,150 demonstrators probably amounted to crimes against humanity. The killings followed a plan that envisioned several thousand deaths. [2]
The intent was not inferred. It was stated by the men who executed it. In a meeting with local human rights groups on August 5, nine days before, an Interior Ministry official said the ministry expected a death toll of up to 3,500 people. Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim said in a televised interview that the ministry had expected losses of ten percent of the people in Rabaa, acknowledging the sit-in involved more than 20,000. Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawy told Al-Masry al-Youm that the number killed was close to 1,000, and added: we expected much more than what actually happened on the ground. The final outcome was less than what we expected. The day after, Ibrahim said the dispersal plan succeeded 100 percent. [2]
Human Rights Watch identified more than a dozen of the most senior figures in the chain of command who should be investigated, and named Sisi among them. [2]
Then came the part that matters most for the argument, which is what happened afterward.
The Egyptian government established a fact-finding committee in December 2013. It released an executive summary in November 2014 that recommended charges against no government official and no member of the security forces. The full report has never been released. The Prosecutor General has announced no charges. In July 2015, the cabinet of Sisi approved renaming Rabaa square after Hisham Barakat, the prosecutor general who had given legal approval to the dispersal. [3] The square where at least 817 people were killed now carries the name of the man who authorized the killing. That is not an oversight. It is a method.
Michael Page of Human Rights Watch stated the objective in one sentence to Al Jazeera: President el-Sisi and the Egyptian military want everyone to forget the mass killings they oversaw during Rabaa massacre. [4] Twelve years on, Egypt holds roughly 60,000 political prisoners, the media has been effectively nationalized, and Mohamed Morsi died after collapsing in a Cairo courtroom in June 2019, with the United Nations calling for an independent inquiry into his death. [5]
Now the international response, which is the actual subject of this article.
United States officials refrained from characterizing the removal of Morsi as a coup. This was not a semantic preference. American law would have required the immediate halt of military aid had the word been used. The word was therefore not used, and the aid continued. In October 2013, after the killings, the United States suspended delivery of four major weapons systems. In August 2014, it lifted that suspension and delivered ten Apache attack helicopters. In March 2015, it lifted all suspensions, allowing delivery of twelve F-16 fighter jets and up to 125 M1A1 tank kits. In August 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry went to Cairo to lead the first Strategic Dialogue with Egypt since 2009. European governments, particularly France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, embraced the government of Sisi. [3]
Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch summarized it precisely: Washington and Europe have gone back to business with a government that celebrates rather than investigates what may have been the worst single-day killing of protesters in modern history. [3]
Read that sequence as a general would read it. A military overthrows an elected president. Its forces kill at least 817 people in a single day under a plan that anticipated several thousand. Its own ministers state on the record that they expected higher casualties and found the operation successful. No one is charged. And within twenty-four months the state receives attack helicopters, fighter jets, tank kits, and a Strategic Dialogue with the Secretary of State of the United States.
The lesson is not ambiguous. The price of the template is nothing. It is less than nothing, because the aid resumed at a higher level of intimacy than before.
Which brings the analysis to Pakistan, and to why the word Egyptianization is precise rather than rhetorical.
The Pakistani sequence, on the documented record, tracks the same template through its recognizable stages. An elected prime minister, Imran Khan, is imprisoned. The judiciary was restructured through the 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments, which the Supreme Court Observer assessed as strengthening the hold of the military over the political process while clipping the wings of a recalcitrant judiciary, and which created a parallel Federal Constitutional Court whose chief justice outranks the Supreme Court in tenure. [6] The 27th Amendment, signed into law on November 13, 2025, after the opposition boycotted the debate, gave Field Marshal Asim Munir command of the navy and air force alongside the army, field marshal rank and uniform for life, expanded authority over the nuclear command structure, and lifetime immunity from arrest and prosecution mirroring the protection the Constitution grants the President. The co-chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Munizae Jahangir, stated the finding: there is no balance between the military and the civilians. [7]
The treatment of dissent tracks it too, and here the record is specific. Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar, both sitting members of the National Assembly elected by Pashtun constituencies, were arrested and charged with terrorism and murder after security forces opened fire on a crowd of Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement members at Khar Qamar in North Waziristan in May 2019, killing at least three people. The two men said they had been there to investigate human rights abuses during security raids. They were held for three months and released on bail for lack of evidence. [8] Manzoor Pashteen, who founded the movement, has been arrested repeatedly on charges of sedition, condemning the creation of the country, promoting enmity between groups, criminal conspiracy, and criminal intimidation. [9] In December 2023 he was arrested in Chaman, moved to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and taken away by unidentified men. Dawar stated publicly that Pashteen had not been produced in any court, that he remained forcibly disappeared, and that the state was violating the law openly and brazenly. He was produced before an anti-terrorism court three days later. [10]
The movement itself is the evidence, and this is the point that the absence of a total cannot erase. The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement did not appear from nowhere. It emerged in 2017 and 2018 out of the extrajudicial killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud by a police officer in Karachi, and organized around a single demand: accountability for enforced disappearances. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has recorded 1,532 individuals still missing across four provinces, with the numbers concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [9] A movement of tens of thousands does not form around a grievance that does not exist. The Baloch movements have the same origin and the same demand. The existence of the movements is the record of the practice, and the imprisonment of the parliamentarians those movements elected is the record of the response.
And here is where the Egyptian comparison produces its most uncomfortable finding, one that runs in a direction the numbers alone would obscure.
Rabaa has a figure of 817 because Human Rights Watch spent a year counting the dead, interviewing witnesses, and reviewing footage, and published 188 pages. Pakistan has no comparable figure for its own crackdowns, and the reason is not that fewer people were harmed. Al Jazeera reported that coverage of PTM rallies and of Pashteen statements is regularly censored across Pakistani news media. [8] The domestic press is not in a position to count. The international press has not come to do it. The absence of a Pakistani Rabaa number is not evidence of a Pakistani restraint. It is evidence of a Pakistani information environment functioning exactly as designed, and of an international attention that never arrived.
This is the completion of the template that Egypt could not achieve, because in 2013 Egypt still had journalists and foreign bureaus present at the square. The lesson a later general takes from Rabaa is not that the killing was wrong. It is that the killing was counted. The refinement is not to kill fewer people. It is to ensure no one is present to count, and to secure in advance the constitutional immunity that makes counting irrelevant.
Which returns to the international system, and the question of who made this available.
The Egyptianization of Pakistan is not occurring despite the international order. It is occurring because Egypt ran the experiment and published the result. A state can remove an elected president, kill at least 817 of its own citizens in one day under a plan that anticipated thousands, refuse to charge anyone, rename the crime scene after the man who authorized it, imprison 60,000 people, and receive in return Apache helicopters, F-16s, tank kits, and a Strategic Dialogue with the American Secretary of State, while France, Germany and Britain embrace it. Every general in every capital watched that transaction clear.
The Fikr assessment of Pakistan has not changed and does not change here. The mediation Pakistan performed in the Iran war was real and valuable, and the Islamabad Memorandum halted the most dangerous war in the region in decades. That achievement stands. But the arithmetic of that same war is what makes this article urgent rather than merely critical. Iran absorbed the most intensive American air campaign in two decades and retained ninety percent of its underground missile facilities, under four decades of sanctions, while internally divided to the point of having killed thousands of its own protesters. What it did not do was fracture into open insurgency while the bombs fell.
Egypt, twelve years into the completed template, has 60,000 political prisoners and a population that has been taught that the state is the thing that arrests them. Pakistan is fighting insurgencies in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, imprisons the parliamentarians its own periphery elected, and holds its elected prime minister in a cell, without anyone bombing it.
Coercion buys compliance and spends legitimacy. Legitimacy is the reserve a state draws on when the missiles arrive, and it is the only reserve that cannot be replenished under fire. Egypt spent it and was rewarded with helicopters. Pakistan is spending it now and expects the same. Both are correct about the reward. Neither has asked what remains in the account on the day the reward is not enough.
References:
1. Human Rights Watch. "Egypt: Rab'a Killings Likely Crimes against Humanity." August 12, 2014. Also Al Jazeera, "Rabaa Massacre: Calls for Justice Remain Six Years On," August 14, 2019, on the ouster of Morsi and the six-week sit-ins.
2. Human Rights Watch. "All According to Plan: The Rab'a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt." August 2014, 188 pages, based on a year-long investigation. Citing the minimum of 817 killed, the figure of at least 1,150 across July and August 2013, the plan envisioning several thousand deaths, the statements of Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim and Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawy, and the naming of Sisi among those who should be investigated.
3. Human Rights Watch. "Egypt: Establish International Inquiry Into Rab'a Massacre." August 14, 2015. Citing the June 30 Fact-Finding Committee, the renaming of the square after Hisham Barakat, the American refusal to use the word coup, the Apache delivery of August 2014, the F-16 and tank kit deliveries of March 2015, the Kerry Strategic Dialogue, the European embrace, and the statement of Joe Stork.
4. Al Jazeera. "Rabaa Massacre: Calls for Justice Remain Six Years On." August 14, 2019. Citing Michael Page of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on at least 900 killed and more than 1,000 wounded.
5. Democracy Now. "Rabaa Massacre: A Decade After Egypt Slaughtered 900+ Protesters, No One Has Been Held to Account." August 17, 2023. Citing Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights on the 60,000 political prisoners and the nationalization of the media. Also Al Jazeera, August 14, 2019, on the death of Morsi in court and the UN call for an inquiry.
6. Khan, Maryam S. "Pakistan: New Court, Old Elite." Supreme Court Observer, February 27, 2026.
7. BBC News. "The Army of Pakistan Has Always Been Influential, Now Its Chief Has New Powers." November 2025.
8. Al Jazeera. "Prominent Pakistani Rights Activist Manzoor Pashteen Arrested." January 27, 2020. Citing the Khar Qamar shooting, the arrests of Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar, and the censorship of PTM coverage in Pakistani media.
9. Peoples Dispatch. "Prominent Pashtun Activist Manzoor Pashteen Arrested in Pakistan." January 29, 2020. Citing the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan figure of 1,532 missing and the origins of the movement in the killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud. Also FIDH, "Pakistan: Arbitrary Detention of Mr. Manzoor Pashteen and 23 Other HRDs," on the charges and the detention of 23 further defenders.
10. Al Jazeera. "Prominent Pashtun Activist Critical of Pakistan Army Allegedly Abducted." December 5, 2023. Citing the Chaman arrest and the statement of Mohsin Dawar.