Our interest in the area is primarily focused on security, and we see Mali as playing a potentially pivotal role in the region (speaking from a US perspective here). Mali is traditionally a fairly laid back, relatively inclusive place, and until the coup they had what was seen as a fairly strong democracy. But Mali also lies at the crossroads of a lot of tricky business.
Islamicists are always looking for places to set up shop, and Mali is as good a place as any. If they control Mali, they are right in the heart of a region that is really difficult for outside forces to deal with geographically. The borders are porous, security is lax, the neighbors are restless, the people are poor, and we worry that it’s a ripe place for terrorism to take hold as it did in Afghanistan. If it is in more reasonable hands, however, it can serve as a geographic and cultural road block to terrorist movements. A friendly Mali can slow unpleasant cultural exchanges between North Africa, West Africa, and the Horn.
Likewise, we are generally more comfortable when countries are working towards something like peaceful democracy-ish situations. Up until now, that progress has been fairly good across pretty good chunks of Africa. But Mali’s neighbors, despite their progress, have some pretty nasty history, and history shows that these things cross border very easily. Chaos in Mali can quickly spill over and cause all kinds of havoc across West and even Central Africa. If Mali turns into a train wreck, we can expect more wars nearby and potentially the end of a decade of progress of in the region. This has immediate consequences, and will no doubt create future problems we can’t even begin to imagine. We’d rather that Mali just gets back on track and the rest of the region keep doing what it’s doing.
Finally, there are other concerns with the region. Niger is all tied up in this, and they have uranium mines. Taurag separatists are everywhere in the Sahel, and nobody has any idea what to do with them, but we know we’d rather not deal with that all right now. The drug and human trafficking trade is HUGE across the Sahara, and that can cause all kinds of problems. We’d rather not see more narco-Islamicists and the like. And, of course, in some deep part of our hearts we were pretty happy that one of the poorest countries on Earth managed to put together a democracy, we are caught off guard when it didn’t work out, and we do want the people of Mali to have some hope at some point of not being among the most impoverished on the planet.
In the end, I believe this really is France’s problem. Francophone African countries have for the most part barely achieved independence in any real way, and France has been all up in the business of everyone in the region since Colonial times. But France has a different approach than us, and we’ve had a pretty strong security presence in Mali for at least the last decade, so we are starting to shoulder some of it. i really don’t see anything of value for us in intervening- I think we’ll just be doing our own recruiting for the next generation of terrorists by giving the nice people of Mali all kinds of memories of drones and bombs. But I doubt we’ll let that kind of common sense stop us.
