The United States is trying to steer Egypt away from revolution towards evolution.

It is seeking a middle, managed course towards change.

It does not want simply to dump an ally of 30 years, one who has stood by the treaty with Israel which is of great importance to US Middle East policy.

But it is now signalling that President Hosni Mubarak's departure - if not now, then later - has to be part of that change.

You can see this in a shift of American language.

Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Egyptian government was "stable and looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people".

But by Sunday, she was calling for "an orderly transition to a democratic government".

The question is now not whether Mr Mubarak should go, but when. A presidential election is due in September this year, so that could be a face-saving date. But it is too far off to placate the protesters.

At the same time, the word has also been sent to the Egyptian military to show restraint. The US has considerable leverage there.

It provides more than $1bn (£630m) worth of military aid to Egypt every year. The Egyptian army absolutely relies on US technology.

The tanks on the streets of Cairo are American-designed M1A1 Abrams, assembled in Egypt.

In the meantime, Washington wants the process to start.

This is what Mrs Clinton also said on Sunday: "We want to see this peaceful uprising on the part of the Egyptian people to demand their rights to be responded to in a very clear, unambiguous way by the government, and then a process of national dialogue that will lead to the changes that the Egyptian people seek and that they deserve."

However, she added: "Now, that will take time. It is unlikely to be done overnight without very grave consequences for everyone involved."

Opposition's time
This means there should to be an interval during which an organised and broad-based opposition can emerge.

The last thing Washington wants is for the currently strongest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, to acquire a position of political power - which would be part of the "grave consequences" Mrs Clinton alluded to.

It will be interesting to see if the US quietly rallies support for Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN nuclear agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He is not charismatic, but he is available.

All this once again highlights the difficulties the US gets into with its autocratic allies.

In 1979, having backed the Shah of Iran for years, it urged reform and then forsook him.

He knew his time was up when the White House spokesman noted approvingly that the Shah had indicated he wanted to take a vacation. He never came back.

The Egyptian revolution has been quite different, more like the revolutions of Eastern Europe - which is why the US hopes it can be managed.

It was all so simple a year ago, when the people rose up and the dictator fell. Egyptians were euphoric. The world and the world's media were enthralled.

Now the situation is cloudy and confusing, and the world is less sure what to think.

But it could hardly have been otherwise. Revolutions are by their nature unpredictable. The transition was bound to be fraught.

Tunisia, by comparison, was lucky to avoid some of Egypt's missteps.

A fateful triangle
The struggle for power in Egypt is a three-cornered contest between the revolutionaries, the Islamists and the army.

Talk of a conspiracy between the army and the Islamists is wide of the mark. They are wary of one another, even if events have sometimes forced them into tactical accommodation
None of the three is united or homogeneous. All are being transformed, in uncomfortable ways, by the situation in which they find themselves.

The revolutionaries - the young activists who turned Tahrir Square into a carnival of freedom - are in constant danger of being marginalised.

Essentially anarchic and leaderless, they have been unable (and sometimes unwilling) to turn themselves into election-fighting machines.

Their strength is moral - they remain the conscience of the revolution. But in other respects they are significantly weaker than the other two players.

Brotherhood ascendant
Over the past year, the country's long-established Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, has shown time and again its unparalleled popular support.

Now parliamentary elections have assured it a leading role in the transition to civilian rule.

Long suppressed, the Islamists have emerged into the light of day. But if this is a moment of triumph, it is also a time of challenge.

Islamist leaders have accepted the need for consensus because they have no choice. They know they must reassure a wide range of people - secularists, Christians, women - who deeply distrust them.

And they are also constrained, most obviously, by the power of the army.

Generals' discomfort
A key element of the bargain will be the new constitution
Talk of a conspiracy between the army and the Islamists is wide of the mark.

The two are wary of one another, even if events have sometimes forced them into tactical accommodation.

As for the generals, they have been thrust unwillingly onto the political stage.

Contrary to what many suppose, they are anxious to leave the limelight - once their most important interests are safeguarded.

Above all, they want to ensure that no future civilian government starts scrutinising their budget or questioning their perks and privileges.

That is a price civilian politicians will probably accept, at least for now.

Search for consensus
So a process of bargaining is under way to make sure the military relinquish power by June, as they have pledged.

A key element of the bargain will be a new constitution, whose drafting the new parliament must set in motion.

But this is no dry academic exercise.

The constitution will determine whether Egypt has a presidential or a prime ministerial system, how far it is governed by secular or Islamic law, and provide a framework for civil-military relations.

Consensus is not impossible. But it will be a bumpy road.

Roger Hardy is the author of The Muslim Revolt: A Journey through Political Islam, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Barack Obama looked supremely happy making his speech on the exit of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. It was not just that he could complete the one he had started prematurely yesterday. It was not just that, despite all the brickbats that have been thrown at the White House for clumsy handling of this crisis, the administration has got exactly what it has wanted for a couple of weeks: the exit of Mr Mubarak, the entry of the military as caretakers, the promise of democracy, and the absence of violence.

It is more personal, and more political than that. Maybe it is the old community organiser in him, maybe it is the admiring, almost envious, student of the great civil rights leaders, but something tells me few things light him up more than seeing ordinary people overcoming obstacles to seize their own future.

This triumph allowed Mr Obama to revert to the visionary candidate of the campaign, as he did in Tucson after a tragedy.

When he talks about the "moral arc of the universe" you know he is in his element. This is what he is best at. Weaving a selection of facts into a simple story that builds into a grand moral narrative that speaks to his greater vision. He instantly cast the Egyptian revolution as part of a pattern.

"While the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can't help but hear the echoes of history - echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice. As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, 'There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.' Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note."
The leader of a country and a capital deeply split on vicious partisan lines could talk of people coming together, despite their differences, in one cause:

"We saw people of faith praying together and chanting - "Muslims, Christians, We are one." And though we know that the strains between faiths still divide too many in this world and no single event will close that chasm immediately, these scenes remind us that we need not be defined by our differences. We can be defined by the common humanity that we share."
The commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the world has ever known could talk of the power of non-violence:

"Egyptians have inspired us, and they've done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of non-violence - not terrorism, not mindless killing - but non-violence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more."
This day of history brings many years of potential problems for this president and those beyond him. The army will probably embark on the sort of reforms people want, but that is not certain. In free and fair elections, the Egyptian people will not necessarily choose leaders who are friendly to the West or to Israel. Other Middle Eastern autocrats may not be delighted at the thought that Mr Obama might want to bend the moral arc of the universe in their direction.

But there is opportunity between these potential problems. Film stars can adopt foreign orphans, Mr Obama has adopted a foreign revolution, and with it a foreign policy narrative that allows him to restate his core manifesto of inspiration and unity.

Two weeks into the mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak, the fate of Egypt's revolution is still balanced on the tip of a bayonet.

Fears that the uprising might be drowned in blood have receded. But the role of the army remains highly ambiguous.

For nearly 60 years the military has been the heart of the Egyptian regime, and with its allies in the business and political oligarchy, it could find many ways to stifle "people power".

When I arrived in Egypt on 26 January, a day after the first mass demonstration against the government, the youthful protesters I met were calling one another on to the streets through Facebook and Twitter and hoping for what they regarded as a textbook revolution.

"The oppressed Egyptians are filled with anger for the last 30 years," Muhammad Abdel-Fatah, an idealistic English literature student from Alexandria said.

"They were just waiting for the spark."

That spark, he believed, was provided by middle class activists like himself.

But it was the whole 84m-strong nation, much of it weighed down by poverty and unemployment, which would catch light.

Two days later, as Egyptians of every description, men and women, rich and poor, religious and secular, marched together towards Cairo's central Tahrir Square, Muhammad's prediction seemed to be borne out.

The demonstrators were met with water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets. And yet, with the revolution barely begun, they appeared to prevail.

I watched as an enraged crowd on one broad flyover forced the riot police back and briefly even surrounded them.

By nightfall, extraordinarily, the police had vanished from the streets - too scared, protesters said, to keep up the fight.

But events were already taking a twist that was not in Muhammed Abdel-Fatah's textbook.

It was not just riot police who disappeared, but all police - and terror began to stalk the streets of Cairo.

Divided regime

Vigilantes armed with guns, clubs and machetes threatened any stranger as they sought to defend their neighbourhoods against looters, escaped prisoners and thugs they said were hired by the regime.

Were the authorities deliberately encouraging disorder to justify their continued rule? The government denied it, but it was clear already that the regime was divided.

"There was a miscalculation in implementation," a former senior police official told me, referring to the handling of the protests.

Soon afterwards, interior minister Habib al-Adli was sacked.

In place of the police, the army were patrolling the streets. The military made clear it would not fire on demonstrators. It even declared their demands legitimate.

Protesters swarmed round tanks and handed soldiers flowers. But some saw already that the elation might be premature. In the thick of a massive opposition rally on 1 February, Heba Mourayef of Human Rights Watch said: "There may be divisions within the army that could lead to a chaotic situation that could spiral out of control."

The following morning, her fears already seemed realised as the regime began its fight-back.

Opposition rallies

Tens of thousands of Mubarak supporters streamed into central Cairo.

"He's not going," they chanted. They insisted they were satisfied with his promise of the night before to stand down at the next presidential elections in September, and they argued that until then Egypt needed the stability of a smooth transition.

"Young people's requests have been met. The extremist elements should not be permitted to take over," the instigator of the counter-demonstration, the president's close friend and adviser Dr Ibrahim Kamal told me.

But it appeared there were extremist elements among the supporters of the government, as many, accompanied by galloping horses and camels, marched to Tahrir Square to hurl paving stones at the opposition.

Throughout the two days of pitched battles that followed, the army failed to intervene. But eventually it threw a security cordon around the square, apparently to protect the protesters.

'Desire for order'

When the defence minister and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, 75-year-old Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi himself ventured onto the square, he was greeted warmly by many.

But he did not say what was really on his mind.

And now, when Egypt's new vice-president, General Omar Suleiman, himself a life-long military man, warns of a possible coup d'etat if the current turmoil continues, no-one can be sure if he is thinking of a coup in defence of President Mubarak - or against him.

What is certain though, is that however much Egypt's leaders care about the president, they care much more about the military, and the police-dominated system that has put down deep roots since the monarchy was overthrown in 1952.

It has enabled some top officials to acquire substantial fortunes, but at the cost of many human rights. It has also maintained a stability that millions of ordinary Egyptians prize.

The regime's calculation is that it can use that desire for order, buttressed by further economic concessions such as the new pay rise for government workers, and by an offer of dialogue with the opposition, to maintain most of the existing system in place.

Egypt, General Omar Suleiman said yesterday, is not ready for democracy.

The protesters on Tahrir Square, even in their hundreds of thousands, still face an uphill task to prove him wrong.

Following the recent days of unrest in Egypt, the BBC's Middle East bureau chief Paul Danahar, who has been following the protests in Cairo day by day, reflects on what he has witnessed.

I sat on a smashed up truck used by the anti-government protesters as an observation post.

In front, where the previous day's rocks and stones whistled around me, the army had created a no-man's land.

The entrance to Tahrir, or Liberation, Square was lined with rows of razor wire and troops. A tank was parked on the flyover. A helicopter circled overhead.

The pro-Mubarak groups, who many people here suspect are nothing more than government security officials in civilian clothes, were nowhere to be seen.

There is now a stalemate between an old man whose regime was spawned in the Cold War and the young people who have only ever lived under his rule.

There is no doubt there is jostling going on behind the scenes for a role in a transitional government, but during a week of demonstrations, I haven't heard anyone chant the name of any other politician but President Hosni Mubarak, and that was "Mubarak Go Now".

This is a leaderless revolution, so the usual government tactics don't work. There is nobody to buy off, lock up, or scare away.

So no-one, not the people in the square, not the generals, not the White House, not even the last pharaoh himself, Hosni Mubarak, knows how this will end.

Lost control
Egypt and its capital, Cairo, have always seethed frustration. It is a virtual police state.

Hundreds of thousands of people are employed to snoop, harass, intimidate and torment this nation of 85 million people.

But exactly a week ago, during the "Day of Rage", the police lost control of the city. They have not got it back since.

By that evening, I was being pushed and shoved around by a mixture of looters and protesters as I watched the ruling National Democratic Party headquarters being consumed by flames.

As it burned, young men ran in and out of the building, stealing chairs, tables, filing cabinets, anything that was not nailed down.

The police, who hours earlier had been fighting pitched battles on the streets, had been told to go home, just as somebody was making it rather easy for all the prisoners from the city's four largest jails to escape. All at the same time.

Walking around the city during curfew now means being stopped every 50 paces at vigilante checkpoints staffed by educated middle-class people, warming themselves from the winter chill by chopping up and burning the local police post
The main roads into town were littered with their discarded uniforms. Some of them were undoubtedly here grabbing what they could.

Suburban raids
But many more were beginning to prey on the middle-class suburbs that dot the city.

Throughout the night, they ransacked homes, terrifying and sometimes attacking their middle-class owners.

It could have torn the society apart; instead it built a more formidable force of opposition against President Mubarak.

The fear recreated local communities in a city where people had adopted the Western urban trait of not having met the family living next door.

Walking around the city during curfew now means being stopped every 50 paces at vigilante checkpoints staffed by educated middle-class people, warming themselves from the winter chill by chopping up and burning the local police post.

One weary housewife, who was spending her nights in the street outside her home armed with her best kitchen carving knife, told me: "Someone, who if you saw them in the street you wouldn't know, you are now trusting to secure your family while you are protesting. This is amazing."

And so their confidence came flooding back and they poured it into the defining moment of this struggle - Tuesday's "million-man march".

Young person's revolution

This was a secular protest; it was not driven by the Muslim Brotherhood, much as the government might have hoped the outside world would think.

When the call for midday prayers began that day, barely a quarter of the crowd knelt to pray.

"It's a young person's revolution," a woman told me.

"You would see in the demonstrations people with the hippy look, the men with a little bit of long hair and think: 'What are they going to do, you sissy generation?' You cannot tell the men from the women, but then, look what they did."

The "sissy generation" were already celebrating what they thought was their inevitable victory.

The most popular slogan was "Game over Mubarak", something that could only have come from a generation weaned on video games and the internet.

Youssef, an engineer, was grinning from ear to ear: "We live like Third-World people, but we are First-World people, we want to be able to show that we have all the capabilities to be First-World people.

"We have been here for 7,000 years, but people in Europe, you think that I have a camel in front of my house, and I'm living beside the pyramid. Even the poor people here are civilised. The people [in the square] are even cleaning the streets."

Political chasm
And by the end of the day, they had won their concessions.

President Mubarak went on national TV to declare he would not stand again for this year's presidential elections.

He promised constitutional reform. It was just what the intellectuals had been demanding for years. They would have taken it in flash just a week ago. But they thought they had him on the ropes, they wanted more.

Driven by the infectious optimism of the youths that surrounded them, they shouted that "No! He must go now".

But when you corner an old military man, chances are he will come out fighting and that is just what happened.

The area of ground separating the pro- and anti-Mubarak groups as they rained rocks and stones down on each other this week has often been just a few hundred feet.

But the political divide that has now opened up between them may be impossible to bridge.

Tahrir Square, one of Cairo's most famous landmarks, looks like a war zone.

Barricades of burned-out trucks and cars lie on their sides along the thoroughfare. Tanks stand where hawkers used to sell postcards to passing tourists.

The pavement has been broken up and lies in orderly piles of rubble as ammunition for the next street fight.

The city that gave the world one of its great civilisations this week lurched towards barbarity.

The first time the army stepped into this conflict, it was to save the treasures of the National Museum from rioting and looters.

Fortunately, they managed to preserve this country's glorious past.

Now something needs to be done to protect its increasingly fragile future.

It is 08:00 and dozens of battered buses, pick-up trucks and tuk-tuks are clattering along a narrow dirt road.

They are all heading towards Giza Spinning & Weaving Company to drop off the 5,000 workers at a factory on the outskirts of Cairo.

The buses toot their horns as they drive into the factory courtyard. The workers then dodge the other buses pulling in and make their way on to the factory floor.

Five minutes later, the courtyard is silent. Workers are taking up their places at their sewing machines or work tables.

Then the cutting, stitching and labelling of material begins. The workers' handiwork will then be shipped on to retailers across the world.

For a country whose economy has been brought to a near standstill since its revolution a year ago, the din on the factory floor is a welcome noise.

What better evidence that people here are back to work?

Runaway inflation
It has not been an easy year for the business. Emboldened by the revolution, workers across Egypt have gone on strike for political and economic demands, and people at this factory are no different.

I'm a believer in the revolution, I just don't believe that this is the right way to approach it
Mohamed Ashour, Production manager, Giza Spinning & Weaving
Giza Spinning & Weaving has seen several strikes in the past year.

As a result, the company has raised salaries by an average of 30%. But production manager Adel al-Gafary says that is still not enough for workers here. Inflation in Egypt is soaring and raising salaries is not enough.

"We do what we can to make the situation better for the workers but within limits of what's going on in the country," says Mr Gafary.

"The economic climate in the country is restrictive - workers are complaining, there's constant inflation and it's true - even though the owner's increasing salaries, it's all sucked up in price increases."

To make matters worse, while salaries have risen at the factory, business has fallen by about 40%. But raising salaries is a cost that the company's chairman Mohamed Marzouk is willing to bear, if only to keep the factory running.

"It's not a matter of profit right now, it's about how to get through the problem," says Mr Marzouk. "We are looking for stabilisation and to capture back our markets which we lost."

According to Mr Marzouk, his customers from the US and Europe have looked to other suppliers, amid concern that he would fail to deliver on his contracts or shipments because of the unrest.

"The major problem is trust," he says. "Once we get that back, things will get better."

Idle hands

But in order for things to really improve, Egypt's economy needs to strengthen too.

In the past year, revenue from tourism - one of Egypt's big foreign earners - has fallen by about a third. And about one in four people under the age of 25 is still jobless - a worrying statistic, given that unemployment was one of the major causes of the revolution.

Egypt's economic crisis is clearly worrying those at the top too.

Initially the government said it would do without any international assistance in the way of loans, but in the past few weeks, Egypt has reopened talks with the International Monetary Fund for an estimated $3.2bn to help plug a growing budget deficit.

While the country faces funding problems, the problem is even more acute for Egypt's small businesses.

In the affluent Cairo suburb of Maadi, small cafes and restaurants line the streets. Maybe Two, which sells frozen yoghurts, is one of the newest additions to the neighbourhood.

Founded by 28-year-old Mohamed Ashour and three of his friends, they launched their business just a few weeks before the revolution. When protests started, everything changed.

"We thought it was going to be OK, then two days later we had to literally shut down the store because the country was in a mess and people were stealing," Mohamed says.

"It really did affect our cash flow as a start-up business, we never expected that to happen so we had to really reconsider what we should be doing."

Scarce capital

But Hoda Selim from the Economic Research Forum in Cairo says businesses like Mr Ashour's are crucial for Egypt.

"Most of these businesses lack access to finance, they face huge costs in terms of starting up their own businesses, dealing with red tape," she says.

"This sector has huge potential and can actually contribute much more to the economy."

Mr Ashour and his partners are still hopeful. They have three branches across Cairo now and they are planning further expansion.

A lack of funds from investors slowed things down and Mr Ashour says he was lucky because their friends clubbed together with funds to help grow the business in the absence of institutional investors.

This year has been a learning curve for them all but Mr Ashour is sure about one thing.

"I'm a believer in the revolution, I just don't believe that this is the right way to approach it," he says.

"Going on strikes and leaving your job and ruining the economy wouldn't get you any closer to where you want."