'Military force unable to solve Mali crisis': Is political solution only 'viable path forward'?

As Mali's junta mourns the death of their Defence Minister General Sadio CamaraIn, thousands coming out to pay tribute, FRANCE 24's François Picard welcomes Paul Melly, Consulting Fellow for the Africa Programme at Chatham House and an expert on the Sahel region. He offers a sobering assessment of Mali’s deepening crisis, framing current events within both historical precedent and a radically altered geopolitical landscape. While echoes of the 2012 Mali crisis are unmistakable, "are we in the same situation as in 2012 when the French military had to swoop in to save Mali's capital from being overrun by insurgents?" asks our host. Melly argues that today’s conditions are far more complex and less conducive to external stabilization. As he puts it, “we’ve seen the creation of this new alliance between the jihadists and the Tuareg separatists who have a secular agenda and want to carve out a homeland for the Tuareg Azawad in the north, in the Sahara desert.”: So you have a convergence of forces that blurs ideological lines and competing objectives, complicating any straightforward military response. Yet the decisive shift lies not just on the battlefield, but in diplomacy: “what’s really different this time is the regional and international context.” Mali, once embedded in regional and international cooperation frameworks, now stands increasingly isolated, having broken away from ECOWAS, distanced itself from France, and grown disillusioned with Russian mercenary support. In this vacuum, Melly suggests, the logic of force is giving way to a more fragile but necessary alternative: “curiously, out of this shocking wave of violence, we might find that politics is the more viable path forward.” Would the junta consider embracing this option? Melly even takes it a step further: "We could see the junta under pressure to begin to negotiate with some of its exiled opponents, for example, the very influential Imam Mahmoud Diko, who is currently in exile in Algeria, but has a big popular following. And he has formed a partnership, an alliance with civilian political opponents", some in Mali, and others in exile.