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Egypt in Turmoil: Does Mubarak's Regime Have a Strategy?

Earlier on Friday, as Cairo plummeted into chaos, I saw a tank at the headquarters of Egypt's ruling party. It was a sign that the military had moved in, at the very least, to protect the property of the National Democratic Party. The police, as thuggish as they had been with clubs and tear gas canisters, were clearly not in full control and needed help from the Army. But the truly stunning news came shortly afterwards. The NDP headquarters was on fire. If the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled for 30 years, could not keep popular fury from turning his party's home into an inferno, what sort of control did it truly have?

Its forces were out in the street, beating, gassing, opening fire with rubber bullets and perhaps live ammo; but the curfew the government imposed at 6 p.m. was visibly and audibly being violated. From my vantage on an island in the middle of the Nile, I can still hear crowds shouting from the city proper and it is 9 p.m. And it is not just the NDP building on fire. Cairo itself is on fire. Flashes of light, perhaps explosions or maybe even tank blasts, can be seen from the direction of Tahrir Square, the focal point of the protests, now into their fourth day.

An hour before the curfew was imposed, I managed to make it into government's official press center to see if the regime had issued any statement, any indication of what it was going to declare in the face of this immense mutiny of a once cowed people. The center smelled of tear gas from all the attacks in the street. There was no official statement, no clue if there was a unified strategy that the ministries, the military and the NDP had put together to deal with the crisis. Indeed, in the walk-up to Friday, the Interior Ministry had declared that demonstrations would not be permitted and that protesters would be arrested. But then the secretary-general of the NDP then said that the youth of Egypt had a right to express themselves and to demonstrate.

There were other signs of internal contradiction in the regime as well. The Al-Arabiya news network reported that Mustafa al Fikki, the NDP's chief of foreign affairs as well as the head of security in Shura council (the upper house of parliament), condemned the government's response to the protests and has apparently called for the resignation of the government. A source close to the regime has indicated to TIME that there was some remorse in some official quarters about the police onslaught, though it was qualified by saying the cops had to respond to stone throwers. The image it presented was bad, the source said who then added reluctantly that responsibilty for handling the crisis should attach to the President.

As the curfew was imposed, word went out that Mubarak would be addressing the nation soon. But hours went by and no speech was delivered. In fact, observers wondered if there was anything the President could actually say that would make a difference. There has been so much anger directed toward his government that people on the street were willing to believe that stone-throwers and looters, who turned out in force after dark, were government plants, set into the street to cause havoc that could be blamed on peaceful demonstrators.

Mubarak's handling of the crisis may have contributed to Friday's massive opposition showdown with the regime. As I took refuge on a rooftop with a bunch of strangers who had escaped tear gas and batons in the streets below, one man, a surgeon, told me why he had attended Friday prayers and had brought his son with him to march in protest right after. A friend of his son had been picked up by the police on Thursday and the surgeon went to the detention center to try to get his release. "It was all kids," he said of the individuals the government had arrested. "It was all kids who had been kidnapped. I felt I had to do something." He had never been to a protest before in his life.

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