LATIN DRUG WAR IS QUAGMIRE FOR U.S., CRITICS SAY

WASHINGTON With critics of growing U.S. military involvement in Colombia
warning that another Vietnam may be just around the corner, U.S. Army
Special Forces are preparing Colombian military units to launch a sweeping
offensive, aimed at eradicating coca and poppy fields and destroying the
jungle laboratories that turn the crops into cocaine and heroin.

The plan calls for three battalions of Colombian army commandos - using
U.S.- supplied helicopters, weapons and intelligence - to crush that
nation's drug trade over a five-year period. Critics, citing the gradual
U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War, warn that these steps could lead to
deep American involvement in a bloody civil war in Colombia.

U.S. Army advisers have trained two of the battalions, and a third will be
ready for deployment in April. The arrival this month of combat helicopters
- -- first of a fleet of 33 H-1N Hueys and then 16 advanced Blackhawk
helicopters beginning in July -- will presage the kickoff of the offensive,
U.S. officials say.

Congressional skittishness over U.S. troops being drawn into a battle with
narco-guerrillas is one reason that former Defense Secretary William Cohen
ordered the U.S. forces training Colombian troops in the Amazon jungle to
stay clear from combat. The Americans are there only to train, not to
participate in what is known as Plan Colombia.

"We are not going to be drawn into any conflict in Colombia or anywhere
else in Central or South America," Cohen said.

SENATOR CONCERNED

Those concerns are typified by Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), who argues
that the United States could get sucked into a Vietnam-style entanglement.
"It would be a tragic mistake for us to get involved in this civil war," he
said.

The Bush administration has indicated agreement with the assessment of its
predecessor. But Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's defense secretary, has
indicated there might be an emerging division in the new administration on
the extent of U.S. involvement.

"I am one who believes that the drug problem is probably overwhelmingly a
demand problem," Rumsfeld said at his Senate confirmation hearing Jan. 11.
"If the demand persists, it's going to find ways to get what it wants, and
if it isn't from Colombia, it will be from somebody else."

Rumsfeld added that he had not yet studied the Colombia problem in depth.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam POW, has urged Rumsfeld to take a
close look at growing U.S. involvement.

Plan Colombia is being heralded by U.S. and Colombian officials as a key
step toward eliminating the source of many of the drugs that enter the
United States and the economic means by which a guerrilla insurgency there
has been funded. The overall goal of Plan Colombia is to hold coca
production steady by the end of 2001 and to cut it in half over five years.

The effort is part of a $7.5 billion international aid program conceived in
1999 by both governments. In addition to using Colombian army troops to
close down drug laboratories, the project includes funding to wean
economically destitute farmers and peasants from planting the profitable
drug crops.

BILLIONS SOUGHT

Of the total aid package, Colombia hopes that $3.5 billion will come from
countries with a strong interest in shutting down the drug trade there. But
so far only the United States has kicked in a substantial sum: $1.3 billion
that was authorized by Congress last summer aimed mainly at buying military
equipment and training Colombians.

Even among Colombia's neighbors, there is only lukewarm support for the
U.S. military presence, a fact that continues to vex U.S. officials.

Plan Colombia represents a major escalation in the U.S.-Colombia military
relationship. For more than 40 years, the United States and Colombia have
had some military-to-military contacts, with a steady increase beginning in
the late 1980s in an effort to curtail drug cartels. The Pentagon, which
has had ground-based radars in Colombia since the early 1990s, has been
sharing intelligence with its Colombian counterparts for several years. And
the U.S. already has funded Colombian air and river interdiction efforts in
an unsuccessful attempt to curtail the drug supply.

While the U.S. military and law enforcement have worked alongside other
South American countries -- notably Peru and Bolivia -- to curtail their
drug fields and illicit drug supplies, Colombia is in an entirely different
league. Simply put, it represents the mother lode.

The statistics are staggering. Colombia is the world's leading cultivator
of coca and the source of most of the cocaine and much of the heroin
entering the United States. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, net coca cultivation in Colombia has more than doubled,
from 120,000 acres in 1995 to 294,000 acres in 1999. Put another way,
potential cocaine production from this crop in 1999 was at 520 metric tons,
an increase of 290 metric tons over 1995.

Colombia, about the size of Texas, New Mexico and Arkansas combined, has
the distinction of producing about 70% of the world's cocaine base.

But eliminating the drug supply in Colombia is compounded by the desperate
predicament in South America's second-largest country. Colombia is in
virtual chaos: It is wracked by the worst recession in decades as the
central government in Bogota faces armed insurrection from all directions
and with rebels taking an increasing role in the production and
distribution of drugs.

U.S. officials fear that left unchecked, Colombia will sink into
"narco-state" status -- a condition in which the nation's rebels, powered
by drug revenue, will overwhelm the democratically elected government.