Better, in Mali

This is a remarkable story. In early February of this year, French President Hollande, strolling through the streets of Timbuktu with Mali's President, was celebrating his quick "victory". (He needed such a victory, given the state of the French economy, and his deteriorating political standing at home.) Some 4,000 French troops had, in barely a month, and with only little help from a disintegrated Malian army, managed to force out an inevitably temporary alliance of Islamist extremists and local Tuareg separatists (a quick primer: Tuaregs are a nomadic people who have been fighting for independence in northern Mali since the colonial French left in 1960) from establishing their own state in the north of the country. To completely secure the area, and to ensure that Mali remained whole, Hollande recognized, speaking in Timbuktu in February, that perhaps "a few more weeks" of French troop involvement would be needed.

A few weeks turned into a few months, but positively for the French. The Tuaregs broke with the militant Islamists, whom they had come to hate, and backed efforts to oust them. Then, in late June, they signed a peace accord with the Malian government in Bamako (the capital city, far to the south-west of the country), accepting a peace deal based on winning a degree of autonomy for their desert region. This was sufficient to allow Mali to lift, just last week, a country-wide state of emergency. The Northern Malian campaign persists, now with a 12,600-strong UN peace-keeping force (the third-largest in Africa) of French and West African troops, focusing especially along the mountainous border with Algeria, and that with Niger to the east. (More on Niger in a subsequent blog.)

The Islamist extremists have not gone away in Mali, and may emerge again in force if Mali does not, first, get a legitimate, national government in elections, tentatively scheduled for the end of July. And a real government in Bamako may produce an effective army. Even if all this happens, the jihadists in the north will simply shift elsewhere in the Sahel, into Niger, or northern Nigeria, perhaps back into Algeria to the north, into Chad to the east, or into the Darfur region of western Sudan. These are among the world's least defended borders. Even Ghana, the region's one successful state, is watching: its President, John Mahama, is worried about Islamist militancy, saying, "If we allow that foothold to consolidate, then it could affect the stability of the entire region".

.....as if Northern Africa, and Middle East, unrest and violence weren't enough.