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For all the French triumphalism, everyone knows that the hardest part of the Malian intervention is about to begin
François Hollande was received like a liberator in Sevare, Timbuktu and Bamako at the weekend. In the three weeks since France launched air strikes, there has been little combat and only one French fatality. Instead, the militants have melted away into the desert and the mountains. Inevitably, the French involvement has grown from an operation that was supposed to last only weeks to a commitment to remain as long as it takes. In a phrase that could have come only from a French military source, they are now going to winkle out the militants "with a snail fork" if necessary. For all the weekend's triumphalism, they know that the hard part is just about to begin. Within hours of the presidential visit, the air strikes resumed.
Enter David Cameron, hot on the tail of last week's mission to replicate in Mali the international response that appears to be working in Somalia. Did he know what he was taking on? It is far from clear that he did. Received on Thursday in Tripoli with shouts of "God is great", Mr Cameron flew in from Algiers to conscript two very different north African regimes into the same fight. Had anyone in Algeria shouted "God is great" in front of a visiting dignitary, they would have been whisked off, never to be seen again.
Washington was initially cautious about the threat posed by the militants in northern Mali. As late as June last year, when a splinter group of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was ousting a rival separatist group formed from Tuaregs returning from Libya, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Johnnie Carson, told Congress that "AQIM has not demonstrated the capability to threaten US interests outside of west or north Africa and it has not threatened to attack the US homeland".
The policy at the time was simply of containing the militants. It was tempered by suspicions that a proposed African-led intervention could be counterproductive. Training the Malian army up is not a new project either. US special forces attempted to train Mali's motley 5,000-strong army before training was suspended by the army coup. Did they succeed in fashioning a proper fighting force? When the rebels pushed down from the north, as many as 1,600 of the Malians, many of them Pentagon-trained officers, stripped off their uniforms and defected. All Mr Carson's initial doubts about an intervention – which have been overruled by the French and the Pentagon – will now be tested. Until the Malian army can stand on its own feet, his doubts are as valid now as when he expressed them.
The geographical scale of the regional security problem is daunting. To keep militants from exploiting the vast terrain of ungoverned space in the Sahel and north Africa requires not only an effective Africa-led support mission in Mali of over 3,300 troops, which is still months away. It also requires security co-operation between Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia – three of whom are in the chaotic, crisis-strewn throes of revolution. The region is already struggling with the blowback in both people and arms from Libya to Mali. With over 1,000 armed groups, Libya is hard put to govern its own territory, let alone help in the fight across its borders. Indeed, after recent events in Benghazi, the safest place for a British resident in Tripoli would have been in the entourage of the prime minister.
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt created deep divisions among former partners. Regional interest in their outcome is intense, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates struggling with opposition movements of their own. Mr Cameron bestrides the regional tumult in north Africa with increasing difficulty, as Britain is at once a military supplier to the Gulf states and a supporter of the fledging Islamist rulers of the Arab spring.
There is no issue of legitimacy at stake in the Mali intervention, which was requested by the Malians and backed by two United Nations resolutions. But doubt must remain, as fears of reprisals grow in the liberated towns about whether the cure will outlast the disease.