Slippery Slope: U.S. Role in Colombia Grows More Dubious

Colombian President Andres Pastrana has signed a law that makes the
U.S. commitment to his country's war against drug traffickers look
even more hopeless than it did last year, when Congress approved a
$1.3 billion aid program. The Colombian law allows the military, for
many years a major human rights abuser, to be virtually free of
civilian control in "conflict zones" in large areas of the country.

This raises serious questions about the wisdom of the U.S. aid
program. So does the absence of evidence that Plan Colombia, an
internationally backed attempt to wipe out drug trafficking while
creating economic alternatives for Colombian peasants, has produced
any gains to date. At a minimum, Congress must more closely tie U.S.
aid to verifiable steps to curb human rights abuse and to reduce the
production of cocaine for export to the United States.

Fortunately, Congress is becoming more attentive to this problem. The
Senate has voted to cut by about one-fourth the Bush administration's
request for new aid funds for Colombia and other Andean countries,
and there is strong sentiment in the House for similar action. But
even a reduced U.S. commitment would make no sense if Plan Colombia
turns out to be the failure that growing numbers of critics say it
will be.

Colombia's loosening of the reins on its military may be matched by
U.S. plans to expand the area of the country where U.S. military
advisers can train Colombian military units to combat drug
traffickers (for which 60 U.S.-built helicopters are being provided).
In effect, this would further blur the lines between the
antinarcotics struggle, in which Washington is playing a key role,
and the struggle between Colombian government forces and two leftist
rebel groups engaged in a four-decade-old internal war, which
successive U.S. administrations have pledged to avoid. The intense
cooperation between the narcotraffickers and the guerrillas makes
that virtually impossible.

U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson has said that Washington will
scrupulously avoid becoming involved in the Colombian government's
broader counterinsurgency efforts. "It's not going to happen," she
insisted.

One would like to believe that. But the history of Colombia's
conflict and the extreme difficulty of somehow preventing further
human rights abuses -- especially with the growth of pro-government
paramilitary units and the military's new free hand -- argues
powerfully otherwise.

Having committed itself to helping Colombia, the United States should
not pull the string on aid now. But Congress should set limits, both
in time and money. Beyond that, absent verifiable gains in shrinking
the illicit drug industry in Colombia, the United States should cut
its losses and use much of the money now being expended abroad to
attack the drug problem at home, on prevention and rehabilitation.
That war might actually be winnable, if only we would wage it as
vigorously as we now seem to have committed to doing, despite the
odds, in Colombia.