It is hardly a month since the French government secured a UN Security Council resolution to support the government of Mali against Al-Qaeda linked rebels who have seized the north of the country, an area the size of Spain. Yet already French warplanes are in action against insurgent targets and elite French ground forces appear to be spearheading a drive by Mali's ill-equipped and trained army to retake territory that has recently been lost. When France first announced its intention to help its former colony, it seemed to be talking very much about training, re-equipping and mentoring the Malian armed forces which have proved themselves better at mounting coups than protecting their borders. There was talk of at least six months before the government would be ready to launch an offensive against the rebels. It may be that Paris felt it needed to act because of the steady advance being made by the insurgents. Thus fighter bombers from a French airbase in Chad have been in operation for the last four days. However, the speed of this response suggests that the assault on the rebels has long been planned, well before December when the French took their intervention plan to the Security Council. This may have been why president Francois Hollande's administration felt that it could announce that the French involvement would only be a matter of a few weeks. Hollande may come to regret that prediction. Already things are going wrong. The town of Diabaly, some 400 km from the capital Bamako, which the rebels had abandoned and which had then been reoccupied by government forces, fell to a rebel counterattack yesterday. This first setback for the French-supervised foreign intervention occurred at almost the same moment as a serious disaster for French arms on the other side of Africa. A special forces unit had been sent by President Hollande to rescue a French intelligence agent held by Somali Al-Shabab militiamen since 2009. The operation turned out to be a disaster, possibly because the kidnappers knew that the French were coming. Two members of the special forces were killed, as was, according to French sources, the hostage himself. The militia promised to display the corpses of the soldiers. Such an exhibition will not play well in France, where Hollande's about-face on so many of the economic promises that won him the election has rapidly earned him low popularity ratings. Should the same horrors happen in Mali, Hollande would be under considerable pressure to abandon or radically scale down military support for the Malian government. Meanwhile, the puzzle is what the British are doing flying two Hercules transport planes to help the French transport equipment to Mali. The French air force has 65 heavy lift transport aircraft of its own, compared with just 45 for the UK's Royal Air Force. On the assumption that the majority of these French transport planes is serviceable, it would seem that they are planning to move a very great deal of equipment and soldiers into Mali, if they need to borrow two more transport planes from the smaller air force of a neighbor. France's Mali action still seems fraught with dangers, the biggest of which is not that the French will meet with humiliating failure, but rather that this intervention, even though UN sanctioned, will actually make matters worse by allowing the Al-Qaeda linked rebels to declare another jihad.
