CONTRACT'S END HINTS OF COLOMBIA TROUBLE

After A Year, The Private Company Given Millions By The Pentagon To Upgrade
Colombia's Military Is Off The Job.

WASHINGTON -- Their mission was to help turn the Colombian military into a
first-class war machine.

But from the start, the mission was flawed.

They spoke no Spanish.

They didn't understand the culture.

And most obviously, Colombia didn't have time for them. It was too busy
fighting a war.

In February, the fate of the mission taken on by a Virginia-based private
military company, Military Professional Resources Inc., or MPRI, was
sealed. With pressure from Colombia, their boss gave MPRI the boot.

The boss was the Pentagon.

After only one year, the Pentagon's office of Special Operations/Low
Intensity Conflict decided not to renew its contract.

The move came as a surprise, because the idea had been for MPRI to help, in
the words of the Pentagon, "fix a defective soldier" and stay on to help
Colombia implement its recommendations.

For the company, it wasn't a total wash.

MPRI walked away with $4.3-million, paid largely from the $1.3-billion aid
package Congress approved for Colombia last year under Plan Colombia to
help fight the drug war.

The story of MPRI cracks a window into Washington's ignorance of Colombia's
complexity as U.S. military involvement there grows, and the use of private
contractors to do Uncle Sam's job.

Little local knowledge

After decades of bloody conflict, everyone agreed that Colombia -- the
world's top producer of cocaine and, increasingly, heroin -- needed help.

Well-financed armies of Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries
were running the nation's ill-equipped and poorly trained military ragged.
With law and order breaking down in large swaths of the country, drug
traffickers, often in cahoots with both the rebels and paramilitaries, were
having a field day.

The Pentagon compared Colombia's Ministry of Defense with a broken factory.
The job of MPRI was to fix the factory in order to produce a better soldier
to fight the drug war. Before MPRI won the one-year contract, it was hired
by the Pentagon in fall 1999 to assess the defense ministry. MPRI charged
the Pentagon $850,000 for six weeks of work.

MPRI consultants had the experience the Pentagon was looking for. They
included retired generals, ex-CIA officers, diplomats and academics.

The use of MPRI marked an unprecedented degree of cooperation between the
United States and Colombia. Before Andres Pastrana was elected president in
1998, relations between Washington and Bogota had soured. Washington had
revoked the visa of Pastrana's predecessor, Ernesto Samper, after accusing
him of accepting drug money to help finance his presidential campaign.

After MPRI arrived in Colombia, problems arose, according to military
analysts. The company chose to staff its Bogota office with people who
spoke no Spanish and had little or no experience in Latin America. Instead,
most had a background in U.S. operations in Europe and in the Pentagon
bureaucracy.

Colombians' complaints

Officially, the United States and Colombia say that MPRI did its job and
that it was no longer needed. Privately, however, officials admit that MPRI
and Colombia's Ministry of Defense were not a good fit.

From the Pentagon's perspective, it was "a business decision" not to renew
the contract, said a spokesman, Lt. Col. George Rhynedance.

"The contract expired. They did what they were asked to do," he said. "We
did not feel a new contract was needed. It was a business decision, with no
bad blood. I'm told we had a very collegial and thorough out-brief with
MPRI at the conclusion of their contract."

Over the course of the contract, MPRI worked with the armed forces and the
National Police in the areas such as psychological operations, training,
logistics, intelligence and personnel management.

Colombian officials, however, criticized MPRI's work as largely irrelevant
and not tailored for Colombia's needs. Indeed, they were frustrated with
the very mission itself, which strictly provided advice on how to fight the
drug war, not the guerrilla war.

Officers also complained that MPRI manuals were stacked with generic
military advice applicable to almost any country. They were littered with
references to U.S. operations like Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf but
with little or no mention of specific Colombian scenarios.

Finally, Colombian officers felt patronized by retired American generals
who hadn't seen combat in years.

One MPRI draft dated July 2000 described itself as "the Colombian Military
Forces keystone warfighting document."

Written in English and titled "Colombian Counter-Drug Doctrine," it offered
a recommendation to "know the culture and the issues."

It went on: "We must know who the decisionmakers are. We must know how the
involved parties think. We cannot impose our cultural values on people with
their own culture."

In an interview with the Colombian news magazine Semana, Defense Minister
Luis Fernando Ramirez confirmed what others in the Pastrana administration
were saying: that Colombia didn't get much out of the company. While MPRI
provided advice on military doctrine, "there was no empathy," Ramirez told
the magazine.

He offered several reasons, including the fact that sometimes Colombian
generals did not have time to meet with MPRI.

"In a country at war, there is not a lot of time to go to committees,"
Ramirez said.

But in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Ramirez was more
complimentary of MPRI, describing several of its recommendations as "valid
and useful." The company, he said, provided the defense ministry with
operational suggestions for fighting the drug war more efficiently.

He confirmed that some of the company's concepts had not been put into
effect, saying, "They serve as an element of analysis and discussion."

Ramirez said that in some cases, military officials did not agree with
MPRI's recommendations, "which happens a lot of times with the client (the
minister) and the consultant."

For MPRI's part, spokesman Ed Soyster said that as far as he knew the
Pentagon did not renew the contract because its job was done.

"We did everything we were supposed to do under the contract," he said.

Soyster declined to say whether MPRI had received any feedback from the
Ministry of Defense.

MPRI holds scores of contracts worth tens of millions of dollars with the
Pentagon around the world. Because of its experience with the Pentagon,
Soyster said he was not surprised that the contract was not renewed. He
said the Pentagon gave MPRI no reason for pulling the company out of Colombia.

Policy under fire

The MPRI experience provides a useful lesson for U.S. policymakers who have
consistently failed to come to grips with the reality of Colombia's
conflict, said Bruce Bagley, a leading expert on Colombia at the University
of Miami.

"They lord it over the Colombians, they don't know the language, or the
culture or the geography, and they certainly don't know the inter-service
rivalries that have been impediments to reform," Bagley said.

He said it also underscored the dangers of putting U.S. foreign policy in
the hands of private consultants.

"The underlying truth here is this subcontracting of the war allows for no
accountability for the millions of dollars the U.S. government is spending,
supposedly to help Colombia," he said. "Our millions very often don't help
at all."

The decision to sideline MPRI comes at an awkward time in the drug war.
Increasingly, lawmakers, public interest groups and America's allies are
questioning U.S. counter-drug policy in South America.

Legislation recently was introduced in Congress to try to limit the
government from turning to private companies for anti-drug operations in
South America.

The move follows the April 20 death in Peru of an American missionary and
her baby killed when the Peruvian air force mistakenly shot down their
small airplane. A surveillance plane operated by a private U.S. contractor
on loan to the CIA had identified the missionary aircraft as a possible
drug trafficker.

U.S. military sources say the Pentagon has no plans to replace MPRI in
Colombia. Any future collaboration with the Colombian military reform
effort likely will be left to the Southern Command, the Miami-based
military force responsible for Latin America.

Colombian officials say they will continue to reform the defense ministry a
la Colombiana, or Colombian-style.