COLUMBIA POSES A HOST OF DIFFICULT PROBLEMS

Drowned out by the sound and fury of the Middle East, a nasty dilemma
closer to home is testing the United States. The dilemma's name is
Colombia, where President Bush, like Bill Clinton before him, seems
determined to make a bad situation worse.

Colombia has long been the epicenter of the U.S. war on drugs. Official
strategy has been to break the cartels, interdict drug shipments, catch the
traffickers and thereby win the war. Aided by money, advice and prodding
from the United States, Colombia followed that strategy. The cartels
folded. Interdiction intensified. So did arrests. As part of President
Andres Pastrana's "Plan Colombia," the government entered negotiations with
guerrilla leaders who had been financing their revolution with drug money.

In the past two years, U.S. support for Colombia, mainly in military aid,
rose to $1.7 billion. But as critics had warned, Plan Colombia failed.
Colombian coca production increased. Guerrillas took advantage of
Pastrana's earnest efforts at negotiations to enrich themselves further,
meanwhile raising the level of violence. Right-wing violence increased even
faster; by most estimates, private paramilitary groups opposing the
guerrillas accounted for 70 percent of the killings of noncombatants.

Nearly two years ago a working group convened by the Council on Foreign
Relations issued a brief, prescient report. While the group strongly
favored helping Colombia's government, a majority objected to the heavy
emphasis by the administration (at that time, Clinton's) on military aid.
Most of the group believed that "U.S. military assistance to Colombia will
not only fail to solve Colombia's worsening crises, it will not measurably
reduce illicit drug cultivation nor curtail the export of drugs from
Colombia to the United States."

The Bush administration chooses to overlook such reminders. Earlier this
month Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's president-elect, visited Washington to seek
more U.S. aid and to allay concerns about his hawkish reputation. His
pledge to respect human rights was as welcome to his listeners, including
Bush, as his promise of an energetic pursuit of the war on terrorism.

The emphasis on terrorism was astute. It fit nicely with the
administration's post-Sept. 11 priority and implied that Uribe would be a
successful peacemaker where his predecessor had failed. Bush's spokesman
said the two presidents discussed, among other things, "the need to fight
terrorism within the framework of democratic institutions and full respect
for human rights."

But Bush and his aides show little enthusiasm for making the framework
sturdy. Current law requires that military aid be conditioned on Colombia's
respect for human rights. A bill the administration sent to Congress
seeking supplemental appropriations to counter terrorism would have
eliminated the human rights requirement. To their credit, both houses of
Congress rejected that idea.

Even with the rights requirement in place, the administration seems
undeterred. Consider: Colombia's paramilitaries are on the State
Department's list of terrorist organizations. In March the department's
human rights report noted that in 2001, "Members of the security forces
sometimes illegally collaborated with paramilitary forces." The department
asked major human rights organizations whether Colombia was complying with
human rights norms. The uniform answer was no. In May the State Department
certified Colombia in compliance and released the first part of the
military aid appropriated earlier for this year.

The dilemma for the United States is that doing nothing for Colombia would
be terrible, but much of what this country has done so far is worse.
Ironies abound. Colombia is South America's oldest democracy; it has a 90
percent literacy rate; until recent years it had a vibrant economy. Yet its
democratic government is only nominally in charge of an army led by an
elite officer corps with the ranks peopled largely by the poor; high school
graduates are exempt from conscription.

If the United States needs to do something different, so does Colombia. As
has been evident all along, the answer to illegal narcotics lies not in
trying to cut supply but in reducing the drug abuse that creates demand.
U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad of Minnesota is one of the lonely Republican voices
speaking that truth. Among his unlikely allies is Democratic Sen. Paul
Wellstone.

Doing something different means more than just saying no to current policy.
It means changing the aid emphasis from military to civilian: for example,
encouraging stronger Colombian civil institutions including the courts and
police. It means doing more to help resettle those made homeless by
violence; Colombia has one of the world's largest number of internally
displaced -- refugees within their own country.

The initiative must come from Colombia. As a start, it needs to bring a
reformed army under firm control of the elected government. Precedent
suggests an unpleasant alternative. In the 1940s Colombia slid into a
paroxysm of bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands died. That reminder
should be incentive enough for insisting on reform, a reminder for
Americans North as well as South.

- -- Robert J. White, retired editorial page editor, writes on foreign affairs.