Joyous villagers in Ansongo, south of Gao, celebrate their liberation by French and Malian troops after 10 months of occupation by Islamic militants. France hopes to hand over the mission to an African-led contingent soon, but analysts say the West will have to provide logistical and intelligence support for years if the militants are to be denied a foothold in North Africa. (Kambou Sia / AFP/Getty Images / ) 
 
 French troops backing a Mali government campaign to retake the northern half of the country from Islamic militants have been cheered as liberators since their convoys rolled into historic Timbuktu this week and hundreds of paratroopers dropped from the sky to block the occupiers' escape. 
 
 As villagers celebrated with dance, song and cigarettes -- all banned by the fundamentalist invaders over the last 10 months -- French President Francois Hollande proclaimed his troops’ intervention a success and hinted that the task of sweeping out the last of the Al Qaeda-aligned militants would soon be handed over to African forces. 
 
 The international community is now scrambling to bolster the French-Malian battle to deny the militants a foothold in North Africa from which they could plot and carry out terrorist attacks: Western nations on Tuesday pledged more than $450 million in financing for a planned African-led contingent. Japan agreed to pitch in $120 million for refugee relief. Germany has promised more help transporting French troops to the battlefields, and Britain announced that it would send 240 troops to train and assist the regional fighters, including Mali’s beleaguered army. 
 
 But lessons learned in the Western intervention in Libya less than two years ago caution against a premature retreat by the French and their arm's-length U.S. and European allies, warn experts on the restive sub-Saharan Sahel region, which spans the breadth of the continent. 
 
 While the United Nations has endorsed the plans to deploy 3,300 troops from the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, those fighters lack training and familiarity with the challenging desert conditions that the veteran militants of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb navigate with confidence. 
 
 As the former colonial power in Mali and much of North Africa, France runs the risk of stirring resentment if it stays too long or appears to be reasserting its authority in the region. On the other hand, the experts say, Paris and its allies shouldn’t leave the newly liberated towns vulnerable to recurring waves of invasion and takeover by militants who are only scattered, not defeated. 
 
 “They are going to have to leave some kind of residual advisory effort after the bulk of their combat forces are withdrawn,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. While it would be prudent for France to power down once Malian government control has been restored, he said, trainers and logistical coordinators will be needed to guard against any return of regrouped fighters. 
 
 Wehrey said the militants cannot be defeated country-by-country. The region’s porous borders give them free range throughout the Sahel's archipelago of unstable states, and aggrieved minority tribes provide willing collaborators in their mission of mayhem. 
 
 Long-marginalized Tuareg nomads, flush with weapons from Libya, took advantage of a military coup against the government in Bamako last March to seize control of the desolate northern half of Mali. They were then elbowed aside by other, more militant Islamist forces that filtered into Mali after the collapse of Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi and setbacks in fighting against forces in Algeria, Nigeria and Somalia. 
 
 As the militants retreat to the remote desert reaches or escape over unguarded borders, the West has to plan for a “cat and mouse" game of tracking the would-be terrorists and disrupting their operations, said David Ottaway, a veteran Middle East correspondent and now a senior scholar at the Wilson Center international think tank in Washington. 
 
 The ECOWAS forces “are not ready to take on Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The French are going to have to stay involved, and we’re going to have to get involved in providing intelligence,” Ottaway said of the United States. 
 
 Unmanned surveillance aircraft that can track the militants’ movements are going to be essential to denying them a North Africa stronghold, Ottaway said. He pointed out reports from Washington-based intelligence sources this week that a base in Niger, Mali’s eastern neighbor, is on the drawing board to host Predator drones that can follow the flow of troops and weapons throughout the region. 
 
 Libya remains a dangerous redoubt of Islamic extremism even 15 months after Kadafi’s demise, mostly because of the failure of Western policymakers to anticipate what would happen after his regime fell, said Russell D. Howard, director of the Monterey Institute Terrorism Research and Education Program and a retired special forces brigadier general. Radical militias that protected the Kadafi regime simply slipped across the unpatrolled southern border, carrying off their replete arsenals to continue the fight elsewhere. 
 
 France must maintain a symbolic presence in Mali, but more important than the size is its capability to provide air support, training, logistics, intelligence and especially to track the elusive militants as they move about at night, Howard said. 
 
 “Being able to pursue, find and fix at night will be a game-changer,” Howard said of the prospects for defeating the militants in Mali and thwarting their relocation. 
 
 But there will be no lasting peace or stability in the region, the general said, as long as the social needs of minority communities are ignored and festering resentments draw them to the opportunistic Islamic extremists. 
 
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 A foreign correspondent for 25 years, Carol J. Williams traveled to and reported from more than 80 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. ||||| French planes destroy Islamist bases in Mali 
 
 BAMAKO — French warplanes destroyed two Islamist bases in northern Mali as a leading Al Qaeda-linked group in the region split Thursday, with the breakaway group saying it wanted talks to end a Paris-led offensive against the militants. 
 
 The French bombing raids overnight targeted Ansongo, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the town of Gao and extremist bases in the nearby village of the Seyna Sonrai, a Malian military source said on condition of anonymity. 
 
 "French military planes successfully attacked Islamist positions at Ansongo and nearby areas," the source said. "The strikes were very successful and caused damage to the enemy." 
 
 A security source in Niger confirmed the raids, saying "two main bases of the Islamists were destroyed" as well as their fuel stocks and armoury. 
 
 More than 2,000 Chadian soldiers and 500 troops from Niger are being deployed at Ouallam in Niger, near the Mali border, to open a second front against the Islamists as part of a UN-mandated African force to boost, and eventually take over, the two-week-long French-led campaign. 
 
 The battle-hardened Chadian soldiers are adept at desert warfare and are experienced in putting down rebellions at home and in neighbouring countries. 
 
 The first of the 6,000 troops pledged by African nations to support France started heading north, moving closer to the areas a trio of Al Qaeda-linked groups seized in April in the chaotic aftermath of a coup in Bamako. 
 
 But cracks emerged in the rebel front when a faction announced it had broken away from Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith). 
 
 The newly-formed Islamic Movement for Azawad said in a statement it "rejected all forms of extremism and terrorism and was committed to fighting them", adding that it wanted a "peaceful solution" to the Mali crisis. 
 
 The use of the term Azawad appeared to further signal a willingness among the group's Tuareg ranks to distance themselves from Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Malian insurgency's mainly foreign leadership. 
 
 The statement said the new group was composed entirely of Malian nationals and called on Mali and France to cease hostilities in the zones it was occupying in the northeastern regions of Kidal and Menaka "to create a climate of peace which will pave the way for an inclusive political dialogue". 
 
 The UN has authorised the deployment of a 3,300-strong force under the auspices of 15-nation West African bloc ECOWAS. The involvement of non-member Chad could boost its numbers by another 2,000. 
 
 Most of the estimated 1,000 African soldiers now in Mali are still in Bamako but a Malian defence source said a group of 160 troops from Burkina Faso had started making its way to central regions nearer the frontline. 
 
 France's surprise decision to intervene on January 11 has received broad international support with continental powerhouse South Africa the latest country to give its backing. 
 
 "From the French perspective, the issue in Mali was a terrorist threat involving Al-Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb which posed a threat not only to neighbouring countries in Africa but also to European countries," deputy foreign minister Ebrahim Ebrahim said. 
 
 But there has been increasing alarm about reports of rights abuses by Malian soldiers on ethnic Tuaregs and Arabs. 
 
 The International Federation of Human Rights Leagues said at least 31 people were executed in the central town of Sevare, and some bodies dumped in wells, according to local researchers. 
 
 Two Tuaregs were also executed by Malian soldiers in the central town of Niono, it said, calling for an immediate independent inquiry to "determine the scale of the abuses and to punish the perpetrators". 
 
 Human Rights Watch said its investigators had spoken to witnesses who saw the executions of two Tuareg men in the village of Siribala, near Niono. 
 
 It also said witnesses had reported "credible information" of soldiers sexually abusing women in a village near Sevare, and called on the government to urgently investigate. 
 
 France has already deployed 2,300 soldiers in its former colony, whose poorly trained and equipped force has been overwhelmed by the Islamist rebels occupying the vast arid north and seeking to push south. 
 
 Mali's crisis began when Tuaregs revived a decades-old rebellion for independence of the north, which they call Azawad. 
 
 They allied with hardline Islamists and seized the key towns of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu in a matter of days. The Islamists later broke with the Tuareg and have imposed a harsh form of Islamic law in the north. 
 
 Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved. More » ||||| Also in play is the depth of the American commitment to France, which is deploying nearly 3,000 ground troops to stop the expansion of a major terrorist sanctuary in Mali, its former colony. 
 
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 Mr. Obama’s aides say that the model under way in Mali now — with the French taking the lead, and a force from the region backing them up — is exactly what they want to encourage. But some officials say they believe the French went into Mali hastily, in the words of one official “before they understood exactly what they were biting off.” 
 
 White House officials say they want to understand the broader political and strategic plan to end the conflict before they get more involved. 
 
 But since France entered the conflict in early January, there has been little time for strategic planning. The United States has begun transporting a 600-member French mechanized battalion and its gear to Mali, and is providing intelligence information, including satellite imagery, American officials said on Friday. “The spigot is opened all the way,” one official said. So far that help has been provided at no cost to the French. 
 
 But the refueling would bring the American involvement to a new level, directly supporting military attacks. And for Mr. Obama, who devoted part of his Inaugural Address on Monday to a celebration of the end of a war in Iraq and the winding down of the American commitment in Afghanistan, the prospect of getting involved in a conflict against a shadowy enemy far from the United States is unwelcome. 
 
 The issue also comes as major national security posts are in transition. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has one more week in office, and the Senate is considering the nomination of her successor, Senator John Kerry, along with Chuck Hagel, Mr. Obama’s choice as the next defense secretary. Both have been outspoken in the past about not intervening in conflicts that American partners can handle, or where American interests are somewhat remote. In the case of Mali, one official said, American intelligence assessments have concluded that the Islamic extremists have little ability to threaten the United States. “But they can threaten the region,” he said, “and that’s where the argument for American involvement comes in.” 
 
 The government of President François Hollande has said it will stay in Mali and the surrounding region as long as needed. The United States has been more hesitant about supporting the new government in Mali, which came to power in a coup mounted by an American-trained military leader. 
 
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 Mr. Obama talked on the phone on Friday with Mr. Hollande, but White House officials did not say whether the leaders had dwelled on the refueling issue. A White House statement said they had talked about the need to quickly establish an African-led force in Mali, as well as the importance of Mali’s establishing a path to elections and to “restoration of democratic governance” in the country. 
 
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 In support of its military operation in Mali, France is now flying a dozen Mirage and Rafale combat and reconnaissance aircraft from an air base in Chad. 
 
 Several French tankers are providing air-to-air refueling for those planes, but officials in Paris would like to have American tankers ready as a backup if the ground operation faces stiffer resistance than anticipated, or an unforeseen crisis requires France to send more aircraft, a French official said on Friday. 
 
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 “Our major commanders would feel much more comfortable if things are not going as planned or are more difficult, to very quickly have some support from the Americans,” said the French official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe bilateral discussions. 
 
 American and French officials have offered differing objectives for the military operation in Mali. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defense minister, said recently that the goal of France’s military action was to reclaim control of the north from the Islamist militants. 
 
 “The goal is the total reconquest of Mali,” Mr. Le Drian said. “We will not leave any pockets.” 
 
 But Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, voiced more limited objectives. 
 
 “We would all like to see the elimination of Al Qaeda and others from northern Mali,” General Ham said on Thursday in a speech at Howard University here. “Realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory.” ||||| First, they blunted an Islamist advance, saying the rest of Mali would have fallen into the hands of militants within days. Then on Sunday, French warplanes went on the offensive, going after training camps, depots and other militant positions far inside Islamist-held territory in an effort to uproot the militants, who have formed one of the largest havens for jihadists in the world. 
 
 Some Defense Department officials, notably officers at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, have pushed for a lethal campaign to kill senior operatives of two of the extremists groups holding northern Mali, Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Killing the leadership, they argued, could lead to an internal collapse. 
 
 But with its attention and resources so focused on other conflicts in places like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, the Obama administration has rejected such strikes in favor of a more cautious, step-back strategy: helping African nations repel and contain the threat on their own. 
 
 Over the last four years, the United States has spent between $520 million and $600 million in a sweeping effort to combat Islamist militancy in the region without fighting the kind of wars it has waged in the Middle East. The program stretched from Morocco to Nigeria, and American officials heralded the Malian military as an exemplary partner. American Special Forces trained its troops in marksmanship, border patrol, ambush drills and other counterterrorism skills. 
 
 But all that deliberate planning collapsed swiftly when heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya. They teamed up with jihadists like Ansar Dine, routed poorly equipped Malian forces and demoralized them so thoroughly that it set off a mutiny against the government in the capital, Bamako. 
 
 A confidential internal review completed last July by the Pentagon’s Africa Command concluded that the coup had unfolded too quickly for American commanders or intelligence analysts to detect any clear warning signs. 
 
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 “The coup in Mali progressed very rapidly and with very little warning,” said Col. Tom Davis, a command spokesman. “The spark that ignited it occurred within their junior military ranks, who ultimately overthrew the government, not at the senior leadership level where warning signs might have been more easily noticed.” 
 
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 But one Special Operations Forces officer disagreed, saying, “This has been brewing for five years. The analysts got complacent in their assumptions and did not see the big changes and the impacts of them, like the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic” fighters who came back. 
 
 The same American-trained units that had been seen as the best hope of repelling such an advance proved, in the end, to be a linchpin in the country’s military defeat. The leaders of these elite units were Tuaregs — the very ethnic nomads who were overrunning northern Mali. 
 
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 According to one senior officer, the Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units fighting in the north at the time defected to the insurrection “at the crucial moment,” taking fighters, weapons and scarce equipment with them. He said they were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from within the Malian Army, crippling the government’s hope of resisting the onslaught. 
 
 “The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” said another ranking Malian officer, now engaged in combat. “They made the wrong choice,” he said of relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state. 
 
 The virtual collapse of the Malian military, including units trained by United States Special Forces, followed by a coup led by an American-trained officer, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed top American military commanders. 
 
 “I was sorely disappointed that a military with whom we had a training relationship participated in the military overthrow of an elected government,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Africa Command, said in a speech at Brown University last month . “There is no way to characterize that other than wholly unacceptable.” 
 
 American officials defended their training, saying it was never intended to be nearly as comprehensive as what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We trained five units over five years but is that going to make a fully fledged, rock-solid military?” asked an American military official familiar with the region. 
 
 After the coup, extremists quickly elbowed out the Tuaregs in northern Mali and enforced a harsh brand of Islam on the populace, cutting off hands, whipping residents and forcing tens of thousands to flee. Western nations then adopted a containment strategy, urging African nations to cordon off the north until they could muster a force to oust the Islamists by the fall, at the earliest. To that end, the Pentagon is providing Mauritania new trucks and Niger two Cessna surveillance aircraft, along with training for both countries. 
 
 But even that backup plan failed, as Islamists pushed south toward the capital last week. With thousands of French citizens in Mali, its former colony, France decided it could not wait any longer, striking the militants at the front line and deep within their haven. 
 
 Some experts said that the foreign troops might easily retake the large towns in northern Mali, but that Islamist fighters have forced children to fight for them, a deterrent for any invading force, and would likely use bloody insurgency tactics. 
 
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 “They have been preparing these towns to be a death trap,” said Rudy Atallah, the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the Pentagon. “If an intervention force goes in there, the militants will turn it into an insurgency war.”
– France's foreign minister is optimistic about the campaign it started in Mali Friday, saying it will be over within "weeks." He rejected a comparison to the Afghanistan war, adding, "we have no intention of staying forever," the BBC reports. The country's defense minister was also positive, saying the mission is "developing favorably," even as Islamist fighters today seized Diabaly, a government-controlled territory 250 miles from the capital of Bamako. A Malian intelligence agent tells the AP that French pilots launched a raid near Diabaly this morning, which marks an expansion of the conflict—until now, raids were occurring in the distant north. The defense minister says Islamists are retreating in the east, but still causing France difficulty in the west. Aides to French President Francois Hollande say they are better trained and better armed than had been expected. More from the conflict: Mali rebels have sworn to take revenge; one leader for al-Qaeda offshoot Mujao tells AFP, "France has attacked Islam. We will strike at the heart of France." French authorities are on high alert for retaliatory attacks on home soil. The European Union will send military trainers to the Malian army late next month or early in March, Reuters reports, but the EU does not plan for those trainers to have any combat role in the country. And NATO says France has not asked it for any help, Reuters adds. A spokesperson says the organization is "concerned" about the situation in Mali and welcomes France's efforts, but "there has been no request, no discussion [within NATO] on the situation in Mali, the alliance as such is not involved in this crisis." Hollande is holding a cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis today, and the UN Security Council will also meet today at France's request. The New York Times takes an extensive look at the crisis and its background, noting that the US for years attempted to stop the Islamic militants from gaining a foothold in the region. But last year, many of the commanders trained by America defected. "It was a disaster," says a senior Malian officer. It was also an American-trained officer who led the coup that eventually overthrew Mali’s elected government. Meanwhile, a west African intervention force is putting together the promised troops who will be sent to Mali though it's not clear when they will arrive.