i have not been keeping up to date on the conflict in mali. africa is such a giant place, and what's happening on the ground is so difficult to get decent information about due to the fact that it remains a technological backwater, that i tend to block it out. i mean, you need to block things out.

these conflicts are all about oil and minerals and diamonds, and there's generally three sides, if you ignore all the complexities between the proxies: the americans and chinese are competing with each for colonial influence, while indigenous voices usually struggle to be heard, at all. the americans have taken over for the british (the french, in some ways, never really left), while the chinese have taken over for the russians. but, it's the same basic conflict.

and, sometimes the nato forces are the lesser evil, while, sometimes, the chinese forces are - although the cubans, when they were active, were legitimately almost always good guys. it was only ever the cubans that were worthy of serious moral support....

what canada has historically done in these situations is try and focus on the humanitarian side of the nato missions. and, sometimes that means being the softer face of something rather nasty and rather evil, which invites a lot of valid criticism. but, the reality is that we often have the choice of trying to minimize the slaughter or doing nothing in the face of it at all - we cannot offer a meaningful front of resistance. we just can't.

on top of that, we have our own mining interests, and they tend to be some of the worst human rights abusers going.

and, we have our own geo-political interests, as well, which i'll get to in a moment.

the last time i checked in to what was happening in mali, you had these rebel groups coming in from the north with weapons stolen from ghadaffi, and they were causing havoc in certain oil-producing regions. these are your typical saudi-backed lunatics that want to implement a strict religious order (including the enslavement or worse of the black africans in the south of the country), but this is really a conflict over who gets to control the supply of oil. so, it's essentially a conflict between arabs and europeans over who gets to steal the oil from the africans. much of the history of western africa is about arabs and europeans competing with each other, to determine who is the more brutal colonizer.

what canada is likely to be doing in this situation is two things. first, canada specializes in protecting civilian populations in these conflicts - which is very important to the nato mission, because the intent is to win hearts & minds. it's really a fluke of history that we managed to make ourselves the hewers of aid supplies and drawers of water like this, but it's what we do - it's what we're trained to do, and we're good at it, too. we'll also no doubt be on the front lines of this, trying to push out the tuareg rebels.

any development that follows from this mission will be created in the broader scope of the military objective of controlling the oil field. but, will anybody remember why the road was built, in the end?

as exporters of oil, is this even in our interest?

well, it is if it lets us duck out of getting too involved in ukraine.

and, that is the real purpose of pearsonian peace-keeping. rather than get bogged down in vietnam, we helped the empire build roads in africa - a no less important task for the projection of global power, but a far more benign one.

i'm consequently going to leave the criticism for historians - so long as the longer term strategy does, in fact, work itself out. if we start invading russia, this negates it's own worth, and all bets are off.