MIRED IN 'TRAFFIC'

As The Film Shows, The War On Foreign Drug Producers Is Becoming A Quagmire
For The U.S.

One of the thorniest foreign-policy quandaries President George W. Bush
must confront is the potential quagmire in Colombia he has inherited from
the Clinton administration.

Colombia has become the foreign front line in the war on drugs that this
nation has waged for years with not much success. But it is also the scene
of a fierce civil conflict deeply tied to the drug trade. With $1.3 billion
in mainly military assistance last year, Colombia is now the third-largest
recipient of U.S. foreign aid. And though much of the aid was predicated on
fighting the war on drugs in the coca fields, much of it is likely to go to
fight quite another war-the widening conflict between insurgent leftist
guerrillas who finance themselves through the drug trade and the embattled
government of Colombian President Andres Pastrana.

Efforts at peace talks in the civil war are faltering despite an
extraordinary meeting in the jungle this week between Pastrana and Manuel
Marulanda, the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as
FARC.

At the same time, thanks to U.S. aid, Colombian forces have been
defoliating large swaths of coca fields. The trouble is, this is likely to
drive growers-and the guerrillas providing security for them-across the
Andes mountains into Ecuador and Peru. At the same time, the defoliants
have killed crops such as coffee and yucca, often grown alongside coca,
devastating local farmers and contaminating the environment. That, in turn,
breeds resentment toward Pastrana's government and indirectly strengthens
the guerrillas and the drug lords.

The painful irony is that a short-term success in the war on drugs could
well lead to a spillover of the drug trade into a broader area of South
America. Already, Ecuador has asked for more aid from the United States to
confront that eventuality.

The question that Bush must ask himself is whether it's worth winning a
battle in the drug war but getting mired in a military debacle not of his
own making. And, as is shown in the powerful new movie "Traffic," the war
on the production of drugs, with all its contradictions and dilemmas, may
not be won easily, if at all.