Look, "Save Darfur" is a good thing to have on your to-do list if you are God Almighty, or perhaps Superman. If you are not, however, then it will be necessary to break down this overall goal into a workable sequence of steps.
At present, nobody has any idea of how any such sequence of steps might be put together. Sensible people believe that a no-fly zone might help, particularly since the Sudanese government is (according to the BBC) beginning to renege on its previous promise to stop using helicopter gunships to support its attacks on (what they claim are) rebel militias (and I have no reason to believe them) in Darfurian villages. Beyond that, there is no "save Darfur" plan and no reasonable hope of getting one.
Darfur is a country similar in size to Iraq or France. It is much less urbanised than Iraq or France, so it would require a *bigger* force of ground troops to effectively control the territory. Needless to say, nobody is proposing such a force, not least because nobody has such a force going spare. That, rather than anything else, is the reason why the African Union troops have been "ineffectual". The French troops in Chad have so far done very well in sealing off the Darfur conflict from expanding beyond its borders like the Congo did, but that is about as much as we can hope for at present.
So, everything hangs on the peace talks. These were going on in Abuja, Nigeria, over the weekend. The Sudanese government, under serious pressure from both the African Union and the Arab League, was prepared to disarm the Janjawiid militias, incorporate the rebel fighters into the Sudanese Army and make cash payments to Darfur from the government (it was originally over the issue of insufficient transfer payments that the Darfur secession movement started the civil war). These talks appear to have foundered over the weekend, with the two rebel movements (the SLA, who are the nationalists and the JEM, who are Islamists/jihadists; just to clarify that, the Islamists are on the *rebel* side, not the Khartoum government's) refusing to back down on any of their demands. These demands include keeping their weapons as part of an independent militia for a "transitional period" of six years, and having a third vice-President added to the Sudanese constitution and reserved for one of them. The SLA in particular are very nasty people - they fire on African Union troops who are meant to be protecting them, and they comandeer aid vehicles for military use which is just evil - and nobody at all trusts them not to ethnically cleanse the Darfurian "arab" population if they are left to their own devices.
In the circumstances, a number of commentators have noted that it was perhaps not the most helpful of things to have about a thousand fiery speeches from well-intentioned Christian marchers over the weekend of the peace talks, denouncing the Khartoum government who have been portrayed as the villains of the piece (perhaps unsurprisingly given their use of gunships against civilians) and thus giving the rebels reason to believe that global public opinion is on their side and so they should not be quick to make concessions.
The whole situation is just hellish. As far as I can tell there are no good guys; you can choose between the utterly corrupt Sudanese government, the jihadis, or people who turn aid vehicles into gunships. We have no means of taking control of the territory of Darfur, and even if we did, it would involve deposing the Khartoum government and in all probability re-igniting the civil war in Southern Sudan. Militarily, the choice is not between Fallujah or Rwanda; there is every possibility of getting both, plus a bit of Somalia thrown in. And as I noted above, it's not even as if a seemingly innocent expression of solidarity with the suffering Darfurians is necessarily harmless given the state of the peace talks.
best dd
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