Indeed, Algiers has hosted a parade of Western and regional leaders hoping for a white knight to face an increasingly disastrous-seeming situation. Yet the events in Mali have come at a time when Algeria’s leaders are distracted by narrow domestic interests, and by deep political changes in the Maghreb region that have left Algeria’s aging elite more isolated than ever. Algeria’s ambiguous stance in the face of a genuine regional crisis complicates the country’s self-projected image as a key regional player.

Mali’s crisis (at least in the immediate, as its roots are far deeper) began in late 2011 as independence-seeking Tuareg insurgents, armed with weapons from Qadhafi’s arsenal, streamed home to Mali from Libya. The crisis escalated in March, when mid-ranking Malian soldiers, dismayed by repeated defeats and defections and by massive corruption at the senior command level, overthrew the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré. The Tuareg insurgency took advantage of the disorder to seize all the main towns in the north, and then fractured among rival factions. Of these, the autonomy-seeking National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which launched the fight, appears increasingly irrelevant, while the Islamist movement Ansar al Deen, which seeks to impose an extremist vision of sharia throughout Mali and has leveraged its ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), appears to enjoy the upper hand.

The increasingly brazen presence of AQIM commanders in northern Malian cities, the brutal treatment of local populations by militant Islamists, and reports of foreign fighters flocking to the region have provoked concerns in the region and in Western capitals that northern Mali could become a launching pad for transnational terrorist attacks. Some additionally fear that the ideology that ostensibly motivates Ansar al Deen and AQIM could gain currency beyond Mali’s borders. Meanwhile, Mali’s political class and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have struggled to reconstitute any semblance of an effective government in Bamako.