DRUG WAR IN COLOMBIA HAS BACKFIRED

WASHINGTON - With the delicacy of someone seasoned by much experience near
the summit of government, Donald Rumsfeld has indicated strong skepticism
about a policy from which this country might reap a bumper crop of regrets.

Asked about the $1.6 billion - so far - undertaking to help fight the drug
war in Colombia, Rumsfeld said he had not formulated an opinion.

However, he embroidered his agnosticism with thoughts antithetical to the
program for which George W. Bush, during the campaign, indicated support.

In his confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld, the new secretary of defense, said
combating illicit drugs is "overwhelmingly a demand problem," and added:
"If demand persists, it's going to get what it wants.

And if it isn't from Colombia, it's going to be from someplace else."

Indeed. In authorizing the aid for Colombia, Congress demanded,
delusionally, the elimination of all of Colombia's coca and opium poppy
cultivation by 2005. That would almost certainly mean a commensurate
increase in cultivation in Colombia's neighbors.

One reason Colombia is the source of nearly 90 percent of the world's
cocaine and a growing portion of heroin is that U.S. pressure on coca and
poppy production in countries contiguous to Colombia, especially Peru and
Bolivia, drove production into Colombia, where coca production has
increased 140 percent - to 300,000 acres - in five years.

Now pressure on Colombia is pushing production into Colombia's neighbors.
The New York Times reports that cocaine processing labs have recently been
found in Ecuador's Amazon region.

This is evidence that local peasants, who have crossed the border in recent
years to work in the cocaine business, are "returning with the drug
expertise they have acquired in Colombia."

Regarding the use of the U.S. military in policing this region, it is
depressing to have to say something that should be obvious, but here goes:
The military's task is to deter war and, should deterrence fail, to swiftly
and successfully inflict lethal violence on enemies.

It is difficult enough filling an all-volunteer military with motivated
warriors without blurring the distinction between military service and
police work.

The $1.6 billion for Colombia will mostly pay for helicopters that
Colombia's military will use to attack drug factories and 17,000 Marxist
guerrillas, who are the world's most affluent insurgents. They use drug
trafficking, taxes on coca production, extortion and ransoms - grossing
perhaps as much as $900 million a year - to wage a war now in its fourth
decade.

The guerrillas also are opposed by right-wing paramilitary forces - 8,000
strong and growing - that are increasingly involved in drug trafficking.

Speaking of narcotics, Colombia has a "peace process" with a familiar
asymmetry: Colombia's government wants to tame the guerrillas with a peace
agreement; the guerrillas want to topple the government. Colombia's
government is creating a second demilitarized zone in the country, this one
for the second-largest guerrilla group to use as a haven during peace talks.

But The Washington Post reports that since the first such haven was created
two years ago for the largest guerrilla group, that group has used it "to
increase drug cultivation, stage military offensives, train new recruits
and hold more than 450 soldiers and police officers captive in open-air pens."

Kidnapping has become industrialized in Colombia, and assassins can be
hired for "a few pesos" according to Brian Michael Jenkins. Writing in The
National Interest quarterly, Jenkins, an analyst of political violence and
international crime, says Colombia's 30,000 murders unrelated to war
translate into 100 deaths per 100,000 Colombians, a rate that in the United
States would mean 250,000 murders a year.

Colombia, Jenkins says, is a combination success story and tragedy. The
unemployment rate is 20 percent and will go higher if defoliants and other
anti-drug efforts put small growers and processors out of business. But
Colombia has Latin America's fourth-largest economy and one of its highest
literacy rates.

It has 40 flourishing universities and has never defaulted on its debts.

Yet a Gallup poll reveals that 40 percent of Colombians have considered
emigrating and 60 percent know someone who has emigrated in the last two years.

Colombia's drug-related agonies are largely traceable to U.S. cities.
Though one-third of Colombia's cocaine goes to Europe, America's annual $50
billion demand is a powerful suction pulling in several hundred tons of
cheaply made, easily transportable and staggeringly profitable substances.
Here is the arithmetic of futility: About a third of cocaine destined for
the United States is interdicted, yet the street price has been halved in
the last decade of fighting the drug war on the supply side.