LONDONâ€"When a mysterious explosion rocked the northern Mali city of Gao early on Monday, the reverberations echoed in Paris, raising anew the question of whether the French troops who claimed initial successes in evicting Islamist militants from the desert region would be able to meet their government’s deadline to withdraw in March.
Ever since France intervened in its former colony in early January to repulse Islamists advancing southward, the deployment has shown every sign of mission creep.
French leaders initially promised that the maximum number of soldiers would be 2,500. Now the figure is put at 4,000. And while the initial French military action seemed to claim dramatic successes, enabling Malian forces to retake the key northern cities, a resurgence of fighting in Gao on Sunday, followed by Monday’s explosion, deepened suspicions that the rebels were far from beaten.
As I discuss in mylatest column on Page Two of The International Herald Tribune, France’s role in its former African colonies has long been founded on a combination of political and economic interests and readiness to take muscular action to defend them.
But, as former Prime Minister Alain Juppé said on a French radio station on Sunday, “it is not yet the time for triumph†in Mali.
“We have to fight, terrorism, propaganda, trafficking. But the terrorists are not annihilated. They fled and may well reorganize,†he said.
And a big issue, he said, is “how we are going to bring this mission to a close†- a question that bedeviled Western interventions from Afghanistan to Iraq.
