The Working Group on Egypt (WGE), a nonpartisan US-based group of scholars and experts on Egypt co-chaired by Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, has issued a letter to President Barack Obama warning him against pursuing policies toward Egypt that will “exacerbate persistent instability” in that country.

The letter described what the group saw as frightening repression and concluded that such instability would make it impossible for Egypt to be a reliable security ally for the United States or peace partner for Israel (never mind that Israelis themselves think differently, but what do they know about their own security?). The letter demanded that the president instruct Secretary of State John Kerry not to certify that Egypt has met congressionally mandated conditions on democracy, and to keep aid programs to Egypt suspended as the best way to serve American interests.

The letter, despite citing several facts and many a valid criticism of the interim Egyptian government, fails to see these things in the larger context. If the group looks at the region’s map it will notice that west of Egypt is Libya, where Islamist groups, armed by NATO weapons, are taking over the country and turning it into a militia-state — another Afghanistan — while shipping arms east to their comrades hoping they will destabilize the Egyptian government and cause the state to collapse. In fact, that has been the Muslim Brotherhood’s hope since July 3, and especially during their attempt to divide Cairo through the Rabia al-Adawiya encampment, which turned into an expanding occupation cutting the capital into zones controlled by different factions resembling Beirut in the civil war.

In fact, the Brotherhood had taken measures to bring back, arm and organize thousands of “mujahedeen” and release convicted terrorists from prison throughout the previous months, to use them exactly for this purpose should the Brotherhood fail to control the Egyptian state. On the same map to the east, terrorists were granted a safe haven in Sinai by the Brotherhood during their year of ruling the country, using it as a base to attack military and police targets with full blessing from the organization. More to the east is Hamas, an admitted part of the Muslim Brotherhood and decidedly identified by the United States as a terrorist organization, which had control over some 1,200 illegal tunnels under the Palestinian-Egyptian borders used to sneak in arms, fuel and various goods with custom duties going directly into Hamas leaders’ pockets. Farther east (and to the north) still is Syria, where the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups are declaring their own Islamist emirates, Afghan style.