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It took slightly longer than planned to get out of Sudan, thanks to the combined efforts of the haboob and the staff of Khartoum airport. Flights were cancelled left, right and centre; I ended up staying an extra day in Khartoum, which I managed to fill with drinking juice and pretending that I hadn’t left my deodorant in my suitcase at the airport.

I also started thinking about exit strategies, which seemed particularly relevant given the debate that was taking place that day about whether the African Union should hand over its peacekeeping mission to the UN.

In light of the widely-recognised inefficacy of the AU mission, it would seem an obvious move, with existing AU troops folded into a better-resourced multinational force (possibly bringing in troops from Arab states). However the last thing the government of Sudan wants is foreign troops on its soil, and they made sure that was exactly what the people of Khartoum wanted as well. At this point, the opinions of the people of Darfur didn’t count for much. In the end, the AU voted to extend its mission through until September. And so it continues.

The complexities of UN decision-making (and particularly the Security Council) tend to be beyond the ability of the blogosphere to grasp, and I’m not going to try. The impact of this decision on the aid community is my immediate interest – and particularly the question of whether we can actually see a way out of the Darfur situation.

The short answer from people actually working in Darfur seems to be “no” which makes life easier if not more pleasant. The situation is a knot of political questions that can’t be easily solved, laid on top of an environmental problem that actually can’t be solved (as far as I can see, although I’ll be reading up on my Thomas Homer-Dixon just to be sure).

This means that the UN agencies and NGOs are going to be sitting in the middle of the desert for a long time, which in turn raises that hoary old question – are we making things worse? Specifically are we either building dependency into the displaced populations we’re working with or – worse still – enabling the continuation of the conflict by taking the aid burden off the Sudanese government?

I don’t have any answers to these questions, but I thought I’d raise them in any case. Don’t even get me started on the regionalisation of the conflict – I read today that the situation has deteriorated even further in the Central African Republic, with a knock-on effect in Chad.