AP Photo

For nearly 10 months, Mali sat on the international community's back-burner of global crises in need of addressing. The eurozone, Syria's civil war, and China and Japan's dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands garnered far more column inches among America's talking heads than did the situation in Mali, where an inadvertent coup d'état last March by low-level military officers created a security vacuum in the country's north. Meanwhile, the usual small group of experts on the Sahel -- the vast, parched region spanning across Africa from Mauritania to Sudan -- watched closely as jihadist groups seized more and more territory, imposing a harsh from of Islamic law upon hapless Malian civilians. It wasn't until Jan. 11, when France began bombing the Islamists to stop their advance...