General Sir Richard Barrons, a former Commander of Joint Forces Command (UK armed forces), also gave evidence to the Committee. Discussing the events of 2012, when he was UK Director of Military Operations, he concluded “the net effect is that unless you can meet a problem like Mali on the scale and in terms of the nature of the challenges it presents, it will not fix itself”. On the proposed deployment of 250 military personnel, which he described as tokenistic, he questioned the wider thinking within Government towards the Sahel: “these minor contributions to Mali are not in support of a strategy of any kind other than ‘we should do a bit more UN peacekeeping’”.
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