Europe Ready to Send Military Trainers as Mali War Looms

LONDON - The European Union is ready to send troops to prepare an offensive against renegade Islamist troops occupying northern Mali, a fiefdom that could become a springboard for terrorist attacks on Europe.

“It's 1,200 kilometers from France and from Europe. Therefore our security is at stake,” Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defense minister, said on Tuesday.

However, the Union's contribution to an African-led international effort to oust the Qaeda-linked militants is likely to be limited to a few hundred military trainers. “I haven't heard from member states a willingness to put people in the field,” an E.U. official told Reuters.

The crisis has been building since mutinous soldiers staged a coup in Bamako, the Malian capital, in March.

Separatist Tuareg tribesmen grabbed the opportunity to seize the north, but they were promptly pushed aside by radical Islamists. The radicals have imposed a brutal fundamentalist regime on two-thirds of t he country, funded with the proceeds of drug, cigarette and people smuggling.

Six French hostages are being held there by the local affiliate of Al Qaeda. The same group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has been linked to the death of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya killed in Benghazi last month.

France, the former colonial power in Mali, took the initiative in pushing for a United Nations Security Council resolution that this month cleared the way for military intervention if the crisis of the breakaway north cannot be resolved peacefully.

The French and their European partners fear that Mali could become a new terrorist haven like Somalia, but this time much closer to the Continent.

Alain Praud, a reader of France's Le Monde, suggested the Islamist takeover in the north had more to do with crime than religion.

“The desert bandits, who have long trafficked in slaves, are now doing the same with drugs, weapons and illegal immigrants,” he wrote in an online comment. “The banner of Islam is serving as a cover for hypocrites.”

António Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and a former prime minister of Portugal, wrote in a Global Opinion article last month:

If unchecked, the Mali crisis threatens to create an arc of instability extending west into Mauritania and east through Niger, Chad and Sudan to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, characterized by extended spaces where state authority is weak and pockets of territorial control are exercised by transnational criminals.

The perceived threat has proved sufficient to involve the United States, which this week sought the support of Algeria in the international effort to oust the Islamists.

My colleague Michael R. Gordon wrote from Algiers that Hillary Rodham Clinton, the visiting U.S. Secretary of State, agreed to pursue a dialog with the North African state on the most effect ive approaches to take.

It is already apparent that, if it comes to a shooting war, Malian and other African troops would be doing the fighting, with Europe picking up the bill and providing training.

Germany is among the countries that have said it would send military trainers, despite some skepticism among the German public.

“The mission threatens to become a failure, particularly because time is running out,” according to Germany's Der Spiegel.

“If the Malian army and the West African intervention force hope to invade the north before the hot summer, the Europeans will have to begin their training activities in the winter,” according to magazine. “And if they delay the mission, the Islamists will have plenty of time to strengthen their positions.”