Why?

Fighting rages on tonight in Tahrir Square. Tear gas, birdshot, live ammunition. Protesters have hurled a steady stream of stones and molotov cocktails at lines of police officers for almost four days in a row. Protests and skirmishes between police and protesters have erupted in Alexandria and other cities and towns throughout the country. Field Marshal Tantawi, leader of the ruling military council, went on television tonight and delivered a Mubarak-esque speech expressing sympathy for the martyrs' families while at the same time calling for protesters to end the violence immediately. He also accepted the resignation of the current transitional government (almost every Egyptian I've talked has no trust in the government, so the resignation is essentially a moot point).

Protesters want the military council out; that much is clear. The post-revolution elation and optimism about the military's potential to responsibly guide the country through the current transitional period is gone. It gradually dissipated throughout a spring, summer, and fall that saw a flurry of military trials for civilians, a ratcheting up of media censorship, and generally incompetent leadership on all fronts.

What is still unclear, however, is why the protesters and police continue to fight. The fighting has been concentrated for several days now on Mostafa Mahmoud Street - one of the streets that leads to Tahrir Square - and the battle lines have scarcely moved.

One possibility is that the protesters are trying to break through the police barricades and reach the Ministry of the Interior (MoI). The MoI was and still is one of the hated state institutions, and one of the central demands of the January revolution was that it be completely reformed. That reform hasn't yet happened. But do the protesters really think that they can break through a police line, huge barbed-wire fences, and then several more phalanxes of police and soldiers protecting the building? Even if protesters were able to break through, the death toll would be horrific, and they would be no closer to actually achieving their goal of reforming the ministry.

Another possibility is that the police are trying to fight through the line of protesters in an effort to reach Tahrir Square and drive out its occupants. But why would the police concentrate all of their resources on just one street? Clearly, if they wanted to remove protesters from the square by force they would launch a multi-pronged assault (that happened on Saturday, by the way, but the police then withdrew from the square and protesters reoccupied it).

Despite the absolute lack of logic, the fight continues. Ambulances make runs to and from the front lines, field hospitals in the square are jammed with people suffering from head wounds and excessive tear gas inhalation. Everyone screams slogans against the military council and the police, but no one stops to think about whether thousands of Egyptians continuing to throw rocks at hundreds of police officers is actually achieving anything.

The situation defies logic, but that might be the point. We may have arrived at the point where Egyptians are fighting just for the sake of fighting. To the protesters on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the police are the representatives of a dictatorial system that still hasn't died. They are expressing their frustration and anger with every rock that they throw. That may be why.

But what does the future hold for this country? No one knows.