Britain is to assist French military operations in Mali, Downing Street confirmed today. The help was agreed between the Prime Minister and President Hollande, and follows French intervention to support the Malian government's efforts to halt an advance by rebels.

A Downing Street spokesperson said:

The Prime Minister spoke to President Hollande this evening to discuss the deteriorating situation in Mali and how the UK can support French military assistance provided to the Malian Government to contain rebel and extremist groups in the north of the country. The Prime Minister has agreed that the UK will provide logistical military assistance to help transport foreign troops and equipment quickly to Mali. We will not be deploying any British personnel in a combat role. They also agreed that the peacekeeping mission from West African countries needs to be strongly supported by countries in the region and deployed as quickly as possible. Both leaders agreed that the situation in Mali poses a real threat to international security given terrorist activity there.

Britain's role in the intervention is planned to be minor – no troops will be on the ground, and current air support is limited to two transport planes, expected to be deployed in the next day or two – but it is already involved in the broader picture. There is a direct line from our intervention in Libya to the current explosion of violence in Mali.

The uprising in Northern Mali was the result of an alliance between the traditionally secular Tuaregs, a group who have their roots in Mali but also lived in large numbers in Libya, and Jihadist groups who were mainly expelled from Algeria. That alliance was enabled by the conditions left after Western intervention.

Dr Berny Sèbe, a lecturer in colonial and post-colonial studies at the University of Birmingham, explained:

From a military point of view, it offered to both groups a fresh source of modern and effective weaponry and ammunition which they could steal or buy cheaply, and drive home across the Sahara. In particular, it gave their flying columns a level of firepower they could only have dreamt of before Gaddafi's fall.

That military effect was exacerbated by the fact that many Turaegs had been working as mercenaries in the Gaddafi army. When that army fell, it created a surplus of well-trained unemployed soldiers – who returned to Mali.

The power-vacuum that Gaddafi left didn't just create a pool of armed, workless mercenaries returning to Libya. It also meant that "a major political counter-weight to Islamist terrorism disappeared", Dr Sèbe said.

"Gaddafi was powerful in the Sahel region and used his influence to counter the development of militant Islamism in his country and in West Africa. His fall accelerated the deterioration of political and military conditions, first in Northern Mali and then in the whole country," he added.

Whether or not that line of causality imposes on Britain a moral obligation to aid the Malian government against the Tuareg rebels is doubtless something which came under discussion between Cameron and Hollande. But if Britain does have an obligation, it cannot just stop at fighting back the immediate threat to the Republic of Mali, Dr Sèbe argued:

Mali has been one of very few functioning democracies in Africa over the last two decades, but it has had a tradition of neglecting its vast, and ethnically marginalised, northern half — where the rebellion started. Eliminating terrorist groups in the inhospitable and guerrilla-prone terrain of the Malian Sahara, with its complex make up of Tuareg confederacies, will become possible only if a viable political and economic alternative is offered by the central government. More than pounding training camps and flying columns of pick-up trucks, this will be the real challenge that Bamako and its African and Western allies will have to face in the coming months.

The path of further British engagement in Mali will be decided on Tuesday when the Government's National Security Council meets.