Yeah, I was kind of glossing that over. I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France, and it seems less likely still that it has been helpful to Africans (with a few exceptions, Jean-Bedel Bokassa comes to mind).

I think you're underselling the effectiveness: there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour. Sri Lanka's genocidal suppression of the Tamils, for example, or the propping up of Bahrain.

The broader point is, at no point do these actions run against US interests.

A number of African countries continue to store their reserves in France and work with the CFA Franc, which makes it worth it.

> there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour

Yeah, but they are all in the past. It's today's news that the French failed in Mali. The combination of increasingly-difficult asymmetrical warfare (with guerrilla becoming more and more effective) and practical cuts to national budgets make such interventions increasingly ineffective. If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone.

My sort of uninformed reading of the problem in Mali / Sahel desert insurgencies is just that the French didn't do a very good job at a strategic level, which isn't really the military's fault.

It strikes me that most of the western debacles have been essentially down to a pretty thin understanding of how to discover and support regional partners. There's no quantity of bombs or boots that would make the Afghan kleptocratic torture state command a plurality of support, and worse, the Americans were temperamentally incapable of building bridges with the kind of people that could form a stable government.

My feeling is that resources aren't the problem: the problem is that (for a number of reasons) western policy making elites are just making the wrong decisions, both in terms of how ambitious their projects are (the post-invasion Iraq project was insane), and in terms of who they choose to work with.

If you take Iraq for example, the US chose to marginalize Iran early on, despite the fact they would have been (practically speaking) a great partner, who were more than willing to involve themselves in Iraqi regime change.

You have that exactly backwards. The French expeditionary force can only be deployed with American approval because it requires American logistics. If this were not the case, you would have something approximating Russian expeditionary capabilities.

No, my point is that the Suez crisis proves that even if you do have logistical independence, it doesn't matter, because the US can crash your economy and excoriate you in the UN if you do something they don't like.

At no point in either the french nor the british military operations do you see either tactical defeats or supply issues.