A PLAN, BUT NO CLEAR OBJECTIVE

General Powell To Secretary Powell: We Need To Talk Colombia

Of all the unfinished foreign policy business Bill Clinton bequeathed to
George W. Bush, Colombia stands out as perhaps the most volatile and
dangerous. Later this month, when the 34 democratically elected leaders of
the Western hemisphere meet at the Third Summit of the Americas in Quebec
City, Bush will have his first opportunity to fully articulate his policy
toward Latin America. His fellow presidents will be especially eager to
hear what he has to say about the growing conflict in Colombia, which has
begun spilling into neighboring countries.

Bush has endorsed Plan Colombia, which was jointly devised by the Colombian
government and the Clinton administration in 1999 to fight drugs in the
southern provinces controlled by leftist guerrillas. Clinton won
congressional approval for $1.3 billion in new U.S. aid to Colombia, for a
total of $1.6 billion; Bush has proposed $400 million more.

When he met with Colombian President Andres Pastrana in Washington in
February, Bush pledged continued U.S. support -- economic as well as
military. Still,some administration officials have expressed qualms about
getting bogged down in Colombia.Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
said during his confirmation hearing that the drug problem in the United
States is "overwhelmingly a demand problem," unlikely to be alleviated by
increased military aid to Colombia. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has
warned against deeper U.S. involvement there, invoking the specter of Vietnam.

As the Bush administration formulates its policies toward Latin America and
Colombia's worsening crisis, no senior official will be more influential in
grappling with the diplomatic and military factors than Colin Powell. When
he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Powell was known for
advocating caution and clarity of purpose before committing U.S. military
forces abroad -- the so-called Powell Doctrine. Now, as secretary of state,
Powell has the chance to help craft the policy the military will carry out.

If Gen. Powell could buttonhole Secretary Powell, what advice might he give
him? Define a clear political objective, the general would say. Then make
certain the military's mission is clear and achievable. And make sure you
have the support of the American people.

Powell's thinking echoes Karl von Clausewitz's 19th-century treatise on
military strategy, "On War," which maintains that war is a means of
achieving a political goal, not an end in itself. As Powell put it in 1992,
speaking of Bosnia, "You must begin with a clear understanding of what
political objective is being achieved."

But what exactly is the objective of U.S. policy in Colombia? Is it to
reduce the flow of drugs into the United States? That's how former drug
czar Barry McCaffrey defended the increase in military aid and advisers
under Plan Colombia. Or is it to help the Colombian armed forces win their
decades-long war against leftist guerrillas, as some U.S. military
officials have intimated? U.S. policymakers have yet to clarify which of
these very different aims is paramount. Some policymakers want to fight
drugs, and some want to fight guerrillas. To satisfy both, Plan Colombia
calls for fighting drugs in areas controlled by guerrillas, even though
that is not a sensible approach to either problem.

If we could identify a clear objective, would our allies share it? The
Colombian military's central mission is to defeat the guerrillas. The drug
war has always been a sideshow -- a way to extract money from Washington,
which until now has been reluctant to entangle itself in Colombia's
fratrici-dal fighting, but has always found funds for counter-narcotic
programs.

For the Colombian military to wage a concerted war on drugs, it would have
to attack the rightist paramilitaries as well as the leftist guerrillas,
since the paramilitaries are deeply involved in drug production and
trafficking. The army has a notorious history of providing the
paramilitaries with arms, intelligence and protection because they are the
army's ally in the dirty war against leftist civilians and guerrillas. Will
the military betray this ideological ally in order to prosecute
Washington's war against drugs? Not likely.

Our regional allies are unanimous in their opposition to Washington's
current military strategy, fearing the war's escalation. Our European
allies, who Pastrana had hoped would provide several billion dollars in
aid, regard the military thrust of Plan Colombia as so misguided and
self-defeating that they refuse to fund even its social and economic
components.

After Gen. Powell advises Secretary Powell to clarify the aim of U.S.
policy, we imagine he would insist on a clear and achievable military
mission for U.S. forces. "Military force," Gen. Powell said in 1992, "is
not always the right answer. If force is used imprecisely or out of
frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse."

No close observer of Colombia believes that U.S. arms and advisers will
enable the military to defeat the leftist guerrillas who have held sway in
remote regions of the country since the 1960s. That is why every Colombian
president since 1980 has sought a negotiated settlement. Secretary Powell
acknowledged in January that the war "will only be solved by a political
solution, by negotiations." Bush, in his meeting with Pastrana, endorsed
the ongoing peace talks, though he rejected Pastrana's invitation for the
United States to join the process as an observer.

Might U.S. military aid help foster diplomacy by weakening the rebels and
making them more willing to bargain? Perhaps, but the opposite effect is
just as likely. The Colombian military has consistently opposed civilian
efforts to negotiate an end to the war. It also has one of the worst human
rights records in Latin America, as the State Department's recent human
rights report documents. U.S. aid will only encourage the army's dreams of
victory, stiffen its opposition to negotiation and enhance its capacity to
abuse human rights. If there is no attainable military solution and if
escalating the war will make settling it harder, then military force is the
wrong policy instrument.

Secretary Powell might protest that ending the civil war is not the central
objective of U.S. policy. Drugs are our target, and military force is
appropriate to the mission of eradicating coca -- the plant from which
cocaine is derived -- in southern Colombia. The guerrillas are defending
the peasants whose coca they tax; the police can't eradicate the coca
without protection against guerrilla attacks. Creating special
counter-narcotics battalions trained in counter-insurgency can accomplish
this mission. Some 75,000 acres have already been sprayed.

Not so fast, the general might reply. Eradicating coca production in
Colombia may be a policy goal, but it is not a clear military mission. Does
it simply mean eradicating coca crops in the southern provinces? That's the
thrust of Plan Colombia. But what about the plants and processing labs in
northern Colombia, protected and taxed by the paramilitaries? Or heroin
production, which is burgeoning throughout the country?

Plan Colombia ignores these other production points, making it hard to
imagine how it can significantly reduce the flow of drugs to the United
States. And when the fumigation of fields in southern Colombia drives
producers and traffickers into Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil, will the U.S.
military commitment extend to these new fronts? To combat drug production
wherever it spreads requires an open-ended commitment to an ill-defined
mission. Progress will end up being measured by the drug war's version of
body counts: acres of coca fumigated, tons of cocaine destroyed, millions
of dollars confiscated. By these metrics, we will win every battle, but as
in Vietnam, we will come no closer to winning the war.

To win a war, Clausewitz argued, you must identify and attack the enemy's
"center of gravity . . . the hub of all power and movement upon which
everything depends." There is no such "center of gravity" for the drug
trade -- no command headquarters, no capital city. Cocaine, heroin and
marijuana are easy to grow, process, smuggle and sell. The trade has low
barriers to entry, requiring little skill or start-up capital. To
compensate for the risk associated with the illegality of the drug trade,
traffickers exact premium prices for a commodity that is cheap to produce,
creating huge profit margins that lure recruits into the trade at all
levels. The Colombian government arrested or killed most of the drug lords
of the big cartels in the early 1990s, but the trade simply fractured into
dozens of smaller cartels. The Bolivian and Peruvian governments
significantly reduced the acreage planted in coca in their countries, but
production simply moved to Colombia.

Know your enemy, the general would surely remind the secretary. Think hard
about who the enemy is and how military force is supposed to overcome him.
The enemy in the drug war is not a guerrilla army, or peasant coca
producers, or drug traffickers, or even drug cartels -- though at times the
enemy assumes all these guises. The real enemy is an economic market in
which all these players seek profit by selling drugs to the United States.

With overwhelming force,the United States might decimate the ranks of the
producers and traffickers, but the market for drugs is so lucrative that
for every profiteer we eliminate, another steps forward, drawn by the
promise of quick riches. That is why, despite Washington having spent
billions of dollars on drug eradication and interdiction over the past
decade, more drugs enter the United States than ever before and the street
price of heroin and cocaine has been falling for years. You can't use
military force to repeal the laws of economics.

The quintessential element of the Powell Doctrine, a legacy of Gen.
Powell's service in Vietnam, is the injunction never to commit U.S.
military forces without public support. The human rights and religious
groups that were the organizational core of opposition to Ronald Reagan's
anticommunist policy in Central America are virtually unanimous now in
their opposition to Plan Colombia. Last year, Plan Colombia faced
significant opposition from liberal Democrats in the Congress, even though
it was authored by a Democratic administration. It was approved, but only
after the addition of stiff human rights conditions, which Colombia has not
met and Washington refuses to enforce. The bitter policy battles over El
Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s demonstrated that you don't need tens
of thousands of U.S. troops on the ground to unleash the kind of firestorm
of domestic controversy that makes coherent policy and sustained commitment
impossible.

Obviously, vital national interests may sometimes demand that the United
States use military force in less than optimal circumstances. Powell
himself has said that his "doctrine" is more a set of guidelines than a
list of prerequisites. But when a policy fails every test of the Powell
Doctrine as completely as does U.S. policy toward Colombia, that's a pretty
good indication that it is a quagmire waiting to happen.

Gen. Powell would see that in a second and protest mightily against going
down that road again.

Secretary Powell should, too.