Bruce Reidel has an interesting (and frightening) article in today's Daily Beast on the possible emergence of "Al Qa'ida in the Sinai Peninsula." Reidel is correct to note that al-Qa'ida is "not about to take over the Sinai, and the group's Shura Council may never give its formal sanction to the network operating in the peninsula," but that "Even a relatively small number of terrorists hiding in the remote mountains of the central Sinai would be a dangerous threat to the stability of the region."
He goes on to list a number of potential threats (i.e. to the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline, to tourists at Sharm al-Sheikh, to U.S. and other peacekeepers), but I think the major risk is that these jihadists will somehow provoke an Israeli-Egyptian clash of arms, similar to last Thursday's, but on a much larger scale. The value of the Camp David Accords is that by securing Israel's western flank, it made a region-wide conflagration nearly impossible. Post-Mubarak, this cold peace is not guaranteed, and it doesn't take a leap of imagination to realize how damaging a new round of Arab-Israeli wars would be to the Western economies that are already likely to be facing a period of instability for the near future.
This is an unlikely scenario, to be sure, as Egypt has strong incentives to target any al-Qa'ida affiliate within its borders, and should be able to develop a modus vivendi with Israel to counter this threat. (For example, the Lebanese Armed Forces, impotent as they are against Hezbollah, are effective at targeting al-Qa'ida activities in Palestinian refugee camps in that country). But the potential downsides of this development are still enough to give one pause.
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