UK Involvement in Mali

It was just a fortnight ago  when I wrote about our providing transport planes to assist the French in Mali and predicted that it wouldn't be long before we had troops on the ground.
Today the Telegraph reports that we are to provide 300 troops to help in Mali and adjacent countries. Whether this is in addition to the 70 Service personnel sent to Senegal who are operating a Sentinel spy plane and the 20 others who are operating the C-17 transport is unclear,  Nevertheless it is a significant increase in our involvement in the area.
The troops, we are told, will only be involved in training roles, and in particular helping with the training of soldiers from Nigeria and Ghana, which are supplying support to the Malian government. Let us hope we have no incidents, as in Afghanistan, of the troops under training shooting their instructors.
Certainly ensuring stability in this part of North Africa is in our interests, which is far more than can be claimed for our presence in Afghanistan, but I believe that our government needs to "come clean" about our present, and likely future involvement. Certainly there should be a Parliamentary debate in the near future.

In a related matter, it seems that BP was warned by the Algerian authorities that a relative of an al-Qaeda leader worked in a senior position in a company that provided transport at the In Amenas site,  It is know however that the Algerian Intelligence Services are not particularly scrupulous about how they obtain their information and our Intelligence Services have been told not to use information which may have been obtained by torture. Could political correctness or human rights consideration have prevented the information being used by BP?

That Gas Plant in Algeria

Since the attack on the gas plant in Algeria and the taking of some British hostages, Downing Street seems to have gone into a state of panic.
We have had two meetings today of COBRA, the emergency committee, Cameron has postponed his speech on the EU and Hague is cutting his visit to Australia short and flying back.
All for what?
There is absolutely nothing they can do about the situation. If there was a hostage situation in this country involving foreign nationals, I'm sure that those charged with resolving the situation wouldn't be happy to receive continuous "advice" from foreign governments.
As it is, I'm inclined to believe that the Algerians know best how to deal with the matter; they probably have a far greater understanding of the thinking and likely actions of the terrorists than any "expert" in this country. Regrettably perhaps, they don't place such a high value on life as we do, but on the other hand neither do the terrorists who have no fear of being killed as their religion teaches them that they will go to paradise. It is unlikely that negotiations with them would even reach first base, let alone a satisfactory conclusion.
We don't know why the Algerians launched an all out attack, no doubt we will discover in due course, but with reports of explosions from the site, they could have been concerned that the whole plant would be destroyed along with the hostages. The Algerians were best placed to understand the minds of those involved and probably acted accordingly.

Meanwhile what should COBRA do? Well, a large percentage of our natural gas is imported from Algeria. This is the real crisis, this attack could lead to the loss of our supplies and make us even more heavily dependent on Russian gas. The real emergency is our gas supplies, in the absence of which, this country could grind to a halt in weeks if not days. They should get together all those involved in fracking and clear the way for a massive effort to start getting our own gas out of the ground in the shortest possible time. That is the real emergency, the possible loss of gas supplies, not the hostages about which, regrettably, we can do absolutely nothing.