Washington, February 01: The US has sent its former ambassador to Egypt, Frank Wisner, to Cairo amid rising pressure on the North African country’s incumbent President Hosni Mubarak to step down.
State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley, said Wisner “has the opportunity to gain a perspective on what they’re thinking and what their ideas are in terms of process that we’ve clearly called for.”
Still walking cautiously on a diplomatic tightrope, the White House insisted that President Barack Obama was not calling on Mubarak to step down after a week of street protests against him and said it was up to the Egyptian people to decide their own future.
Obama has voiced concerns to aides that any US effort to insert itself into the situation could backfire.
Still, the United States has started to think about the long-term implications of the protests and scenarios for what might come next, according to an analyst who was present at a White House meeting on the subject.
Thousands of angry protesters have vowed to camp out in central Cairo until they had toppled Mubarak’s regime.
——–Agencies