GOING CAPLESS: THE ANDEAN COUNTERDRUG INITIATIVE

WASHINGTON -- These days, the buzz on Capitol Hill seems loudest about Gary
Condit. But late Thursday afternoon, phones started ringing after a
congressional staffer discovered a disconcerting bit of text in the
considerably-less-sexy but eminently-more-important House Foreign
Operations Appropriatons bill.

The passage has left a number of legislators and staffers wondering: Is the
Bush administration trying to quietly increase the use of private U.S.
military contractors in the Andean drug war?

When the Clinton administration was pushing Plan Colombia -- the $1.3
billion package of largely military aid it held would help end Colombia's
narcotics-financed civil war -- Congress took into account concerns that
the U.S. might find itself mired in another Vietnam. As such, legislators
capped the number of Colombia-based U.S. military personnel at 500, and
restricted them to training activities. Unlike their active duty
counterparts, however, civilian contractors -- many of whom are former
soldiers or airmen working under State Department auspices -- can put
themselves in harm's way, as they're specifically paid to do everything
from piloting fumigation planes to ferrying and even rescuing
counternarcotics troops.

But Congress capped their numbers, too, mandating that no more than 300
outsourced civilians can be in Colombia at any time.

As violence and drug production spills over Colombia's borders, the Bush
administration has decided to broaden Plan Colombia. Congress is giving the
Bush administration an additional $676 million to fund what is now called
the Andean Counterdrug Initiative (ACI) -- an effort that would send more
drug war cash to Colombia, and, now, its neighbors.

Many are skeptical that a disproportionate amount of money spent on supply
reduction will ameliorate the U.S.'s drug problem or Colombia's war; as
such, on July 10, House Appropriations Committee Democrats Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) and David Obey (D-WI) offered amendments that would have redirected
some or all of the money to U.S. drug treatment programs. No one was
surprised when they failed. "At least on this side of the Hill," sighed one
Democratic staffer, "the notion of expanded treatment or demand reduction
is virtually hopeless."

But what did come as a shock was the discovery of language in the bill
(apparently inserted late in the game by Foreign Operations subcommittee
chairman Jim Kolbe (R-AR)) that not only gives the Bush administration
authority to send as many private military specialists as it wants to
Colombia, but to send them in as heavily armed as they want -- and with
broad rules of engagement.

According to the bill, the $676 million will only be available as long as
its "without regard to section 3204(b)(1)(B) of Public Law 106-246" -- the
part of Plan Colombia that capped the contractor cadres at 300. Neither
Kolbes' office nor State Department officials had responded to queries by
Friday evening, leaving critics of U.S. Colombia policy concerned that the
bill's language could open the door for the U.S. to start fielding a
private army in Colombia. "It's a backdoor way of escalating our
involvement in the Andean region and providing additional money to private
military contractors [PMCs] who have not been effective," said Nadeem
Elshami, a staffer for Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL).

Lisa Haugaard, legislative coordinator of the Washington-based Latin
America Working Group, said that State is likely to explain the waiver of
contractor limits as necessary to accommodate more contract personnel for
the U.S. Agency for International Development, or "the more palatable side"
of the Plan Colombia expansion.

While ACI does increase funds for social and economic development programs,
according to the State Department's fact sheet on ACI, there is also more
fiscal support for "backing joint operations between the Army's new air
mobile counternarcotics brigade and the Colombian National Police's
anti-narcotics unit" as well as "maritime and aerial interdiction [and] the
Colombian National Police's aerial eradication program with additional
spray aircraft" -- all areas where U.S. private military contractors play a
role.

"This is an attempt by the Bush administration to shake off the limits
imposed by Congress last year," says Haugaard. "The question is, is
Congress going to let them?"

Any effort to strike the language is likely to face an uphill battle in the
House, which will likely vote on the bill July 18 or 19. But Schakowsky
(who has introduced legislation banning the use of PMCs in the Andes) and
Rep. John Conyers (D-MICH) are nonetheless gearing up to lead a fight
against the contractor cap waiver.

On the other side of the Hill where the Democrats are in control, several
powerful senators have seen the House bill, and are not pleased --
especially after a pointed encounter with administration representatives
last week. At a July 11 hearing before the Senate Foreign Operations
Appropriations subcommittee, Assistant Secretary of State for International
Narcotics and Law Enforcement Rand Beers incurred some ire by dodging a
number of questions put to him about the use of -- and lack of information
about -- State Department contractors like DynCorp.

But Beers also told senators that U.S. contractor pilots would be out of
Colombia by the end of 2002 -- an assertion that some senators and their
staffs now find strange, given the language in the House bill. "If
anything, the number of Americans should be going down, not up, as people
in the Andean countries learn from Americans and take on their own
responsibilities," says a senior aide to one committee chairman. "There are
concerns here about the growing presence of Americans in Colombia and
throughout the Andean region, and about the limited information on what
they're doing, and risks to their safety."

Which raises another question about the Andean Counterdrug Initiative.
Apparently, even the most vigilant Andean policy critics missed a condition
buried in the original Plan Colombia package that has cropped up again in
the ACI legislation, a proviso stating that "section 482(b) of the Foreign
Assistance Act of 1961 shall not apply to funds appropriated under this
heading." The first part of Section 482 forbids State Department
contractors from using federal money to buy weapons.

But Section 482(b) actually exempts State Department counternarcotics
contractors from this restriction, allowing them to buy guns and ammo with
federal funds to arm aircraft and personnel -- as long as it's for
"defensive" purposes.

"Defensive," as staffers and others note, can already be expansively
interpreted. By essentially erasing the "defensive" clause, the new bill
removes even the vaguest restrictions on armed contractor arsenals and
activities. According to Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project of
the Institute for Policy Studies, the re-affirmation of the Section 482(b)
exemption is particularly troubling, as it echoes a proposal in a U.S. Air
Force-sponsored RAND Corporation report that policymakers are reading with
increasing interest.

Entitled "Colombian Labyrinth," the RAND report, asserts that "drugs and
insurgency are intertwined in complicated and changing ways but the former
cannot be addressed without the latter," and concludes U.S.-backed efforts
to reduce the drug supply in Colombia have been ineffective. The reason,
RAND says, is because the U.S. has focused more on "counternarcotics"
assistance (aid to anti-drug police and special military anti-drug units)
rather than "counterinsurgency" (aid to Colombian military in its war with
the left-wing FARC and ELN).

While a number of investigative journalists and watchdog groups have
demonstrated U.S. aid and assistance has already crossed the line from
counternarcotics to counterinsurgency, RAND recommends that the U.S. once
and for all dispense with the dubious notion that there's any difference
between the two, and lays out an expansive proposal for increasing U.S.
military aid and assistance to the Colombian government in its fight
against leftist rebels. But use of U.S. troops is something even the Bush
administration is leery of: at his confirmation hearing earlier this year,
Peter Rodman, Bush's nominee to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs, told senators that "None of us wants to get
into a war. The word 'counterinsurgency' scares the hell out of everybody."

But as Tree notes, everything the RAND report recommends -- helping the
Colombian military develop new infantry and air tactics, setting up better
intelligence networks in Colombia, and greater training and equipping
Panama's police and military -- are all things that don't necessarily have
to be done by active-duty U.S. military personnel, but can be done by hired
contractors.

"While there are certainly those who favor that approach," says a
Congressional specialist on Colombia, "we haven't really felt that much
pressure to go down that road this year, contrary to last year. Whether
that view would carry weight here, without a fair amount of more selling on
the part of the administration, isn't clear." There is, however, even more
money slated for Colombia's armed forces and counternarcotics operations in
the Pentagon's FY02 spending bill, which is still stuck in the Defense
Appropriations subcommittee. In addition, while troops may be capped, a lot
of U.S.-produced military hardware is already heading south.

As for the language in the House bill, whether or not it gets a warm
reception from Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee
remains to be seen. Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is no fan of the drug
war, and even ranking minority member Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is working
with Leahy to legislate a ban on presidential waivers of human rights
conditions tied to counternarcotics aid. While Leahy's office did not
return calls, Allison Dobson, press secretary to Senator Paul Wellstone
(D-MN), said Wellstone will "certainly fight the House provision" if it
crops up in the Senate. "Plan Colombia," she said, "is quicksand. What this
shows is we're being asked to put more and more into it, which is what we
feared from the beginning."

A forthcoming version of this article will be published on The Nation's
website on July 17.