la musique

With tea and a few of the good Marks & Spencer cookies and Vieux Farka Touré on the stereo at full blast, I sat down to ponder the state of the world this afternoon. I haven't done that in a while, but recent events have put me back in the mood. The French, formerly known as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, sent a handful of soldiers down to Mali, and look what happened.

The troops, by all accounts inexperienced owing to their country's persistent refusal to participate in various invasions until very recently, drove into the contested north faster than you can say the name of their destination, encountering virtually no opposition on the way. In Timbuktu, there was no information minister insisting in daily press conferences that the invaders were committing suicide by the hundreds at the city's gates. There weren't all that many days for press conferences anyway.

The French hadn't come as liberators or to win the hearts and minds of the Malian people. They wanted to (1) suppress an aggregation of devil worshipers suffering from delusions of both purpose and popularity but with the powers of convictions that come with the possession of large amounts of heavy weaponry and (2) secure uninterruptible supplies of fine dessert uranium, essential for the express trains between Paris and Marseille and anything else that runs on electricity in France.

It's fair to say that the average North Malian isn't much concerned about uranium, but without it the first military objective wouldn't have found the same urgency that it had in Timbuktu where drinks were forbidden, hair had to be hidden and music was punishable by death. As it happened – and luck doesn't strike often in this way – the interests of a majority of the local population were aligned with French geopolitical considerations. There was cheering in the streets when the French arrived.

It sounds absolutely hilarious if presented like this, but it's not that simple. The first weeks of the Americans' sojourn in Afghanistan and Iraq were also full of victories, exuberance and misplaced optimism. The French might suffer the same fate. The speed of their incursion into the north was kept high by a near-universal lack of fighting. All the Libyan ordnance that the previous French invasion helped release and spread is still out there with deranged people, and the Tuareg's anger is still the same. Add to this the regular Malian army that couldn't do in a year what it took a few hundred French soldiers a week, and you know that the French aren't going home anytime soon.

From what I've read, and in spite of the evocative name, Timbuktu isn't much of a place. It's mostly dust and sand, whipped up by storms from the Sahara, disintegrating mud huts under a ferocious sun, thorny bushes and rawboned dogs. Timbuktu doesn't conform to the legends that surround its name, but at least the music is playing again.