PANETTA GETS A PHONE CALL

It was Friday, January 11, 2013 morning in Washington afternoon in Paris and Bamako. U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta took an emergency telephone call from French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Le Drian had requested the call through his defense attaché Bruno Caitucoli only a few hours earlier. The normally collected Caitucoli had been visibly concerned. No one was sure exactly what had prompted the emergency call. Their French counterparts had been focused on a developing crisis in their former West African colony of Mali for the last few days, but U.S. officials had several more pressing national security issues on their minds – especially NATO's controversial drawdown after a decade of war in Afghanistan and a civil war in Syria that was growing bloodier by the day.

The call got off on the wrong foot when Le Drian began by explaining the time had come to take action “rapidly” in Mali, and Panetta took this to be a request that the United States start the process of considering some form of joint intervention – perhaps some modified version of the 2011 intervention in Libya – and responded positively that he was prepared to begin discussing an intervention. “No, Mr. Secretary,” replied the French defense minister, “We are not asking for you to consider an operation. I am calling to inform you that we have just begun one.”

Secretary Panetta's jaw dropped. At the French Defense Ministry, officials waited for the silence on the other end of the line to break. Terrorist groups closely tied to al Qa'ida had been in control of northern Mali for a year, but that France should act so precipitously, so boldly, and so independently came as a surprise in Washington. For several months France and the United States had been struggling to put together an African-led response to the problem of Mali's north. France's decision to go in alone was a near total about-face. It went against a recent, hard-won Franco-American agreement on how the situation in Mali would be handled and threatened to open new rifts within the U.S. government over the role of military force in resolving the crisis.

But Secretary Panetta's fierce antiterrorist convictions immediately overcame any initial hesitations.