'MISSION CREEP' IN COLOMBIA

Eradicating coca production in Colombia is like eliminating crabgrass from
a lawn: As soon as you think it's gone, it pops up somewhere else.

That is precisely what has happened in Colombia, a nation that has received
$1.3 billion from the United States to stop the production and traffic in
narcotics and to fumigate coca fields by air.

But it hasn't worked. New coca and poppy fields keep appearing in remote
areas of the countryside.

Frustrated by its failed policy, the United States is now considering a new
plan. One of the three U.S. battalions would train Colombian soldiers to
close down drug labs protected by guerrilla forces. Instructed by the Green
Berets, soldiers would be taught to avoid shooting lab workers and to
secure the space for processing by the Colombia police.

These rules of engagement sound fine on paper. But they defy common sense.
As a recent Rand report explains, neither American nor Colombian troops can
attack coca fields or drug labs without engaging in military battles with
the guerrilla forces that surround them.

Still, the United States insists on maintaining the charade that our
expanding role in Colombia's four-decade civil war is exclusively about
drug interdiction. According to the Los Angeles Times, Anne W. Patterson,
the American ambassador stationed in Bogota, recently told a group of
reporters, "We can do a lot under the counternarcotics rubric."

Indeed, we can. As advisers, U.S. soldiers or our privately paid
contractors can train Colombian soldiers in what amounts to a
counterinsurgent war against guerrillas. Without a goal or an exit
strategy, it is, in effect, a war of attrition.

Sound familiar? It is. In the early 1960s, this was how the United States
involvement in Vietnam began.