Clear Warning

DRUGS, DEFENSE, CONGRESS AND THE COLOMBIA CRISIS 2000

Some people see further into the future than others.

Deep cuts in international counter-drug spending during the early
1990s, coupled with diminished interest in South and Central America
by the Clinton Administration and a remarkable underestimation of the
link between drug traffickers and South American terrorist movements,
have now come home to roost. These factors have given rise to the most
virulent strain of drug-funded guerrilla activity and the greatest
potential for regional instability in more than two decades.

In Fiscal Year 2001, which is now well under way, the US Congress is
attempting to catch a falling oak. Having warned the Administration
since 1995 that Colombia's military and National Police need critical
training and assets in order to effectively respond to a growing
cocaine- and heroin-financed insurgency-one that was and is poised to
spread drug-funded instability across Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Bolivia,
Costa Rica, and Venezuela-Congress compelled the President to submit a
meaningful supplemental aid package in January 2000.

Reality supported this move for new funding.

The drug-funded guerrilla movement in Colombia had nearly doubled in
seven years, topping out in 2000 at a reported 25,000 guerrilla troops.

The Colombian insurgency has become tightly affiliated with known drug
traffickers, acquiring a reported monthly take of between $60 million
and $100 million dollars in drug money for providing armed assistance
to the Colombian narcotics traffickers.

Looking back still further, in Fiscal Years 1994, 1995, and 1996, the
White House proposed and oversaw deep cuts of more than one billion
dollars in anti-drug "international" and "interdiction" funding.
Specifically, drug war spending on "international" programs fell from
$660 million in FY93 to $523 million in FY94, then plummeted to $296
million in FY95, settling at $290 million in FY96. During the same
period, drug war funding for "interdiction" efforts-stopping drugs as
they leave foreign soil and before they reach the US-fell by more than
$1 billion dollars in FY92 to $1.28 billion in FY96 (unadjusted for
inflation).

"Plan Colombia"

The President's eleventh-hour "Plan Colombia" package, offered in
January 2000, promptly drew broad bipartisan support. In fact, the
idea of a Colombia Supplemental package on the order of a billion
dollars was openly championed by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert in a
seminal 8 January speech.

Hastert had already pressed for increased funding, coordination,
accountability, and results in this region during his time as Chairman
of the National Security Subcommittee from 1997 to 1999. Moreover,
unlike many critics of the package, Hastert had been deep into the
country's jungle war zone half a dozen times by the time this aid
package was introduced. The billion-dollar "Plan Colombia" package was
passed by the US House as a "supplemental" spending bill in early
2000, passed by the US Senate in regular order attached to the
Department of Defense, Military Construction and Agriculture bills in
the spring, and was signed by the President in July of this year.

One motivator for the Plan Colombia package was plainly
political.

In an election year, after Republican harping for more than five years
about the lack of leadership by the White House in the drug war,
especially with regard to international programs, the White House was
required to respond with a substantial package or face certain
condemnation.

Another motivation was rooted in reality.

While President Clinton's 1993 Presidential Decision Directive 14 had
rhetorically urged increased attention to stopping dangerous narcotics
at their source, little had been done to convert PDD 14 into a
properly funded initiative. By 2000, reality had caught up. Colombia's
trafficking organizations had jumped from being third in the world for
cocaine production to being first.

Colombia's government had been forced to cede major parts of the
country to the narcotics-funded guerrillas. Colombia's National Police
were badly outnumbered and often ambushed in southern Colombian
townships, and Colombia's army was suffering repeated defeats at the
hands of the well-armed insurgents.

Increased assessment of the drug war as a national security issue was
also driven by another reality.

By 2000, Colombia was responsible for 90 percent of the cocaine on US
streets and between 40 and 60 percent of the heroin.

Additionally, heroin purities had jumped from single digits in the
late 1980s to somewhere between 70 and 90 percent in most major US
metropolitan areas.

The DEA reported more than 15,000 American deaths from drug
overdoses-many of them from drugs originating in Colombia. As one
retired US general said, highlighting disproportionate priorities,
"when did we last lose 15,000 lives to Russia?"

Plan Colombia's implications have not been widely reported.

Nor is Plan Colombia the end of new spending aimed at stabilizing this
region; on the contrary, it likely is just a modest beginning. For
example, the Foreign Operations bill which passed Congress in October
2000 contained a little-noticed add-on of $20 million, probably to
compensate for rising costs in bringing 16 UH-60 Black Hawks and 30
UH-1H Huey IIs up to war-fighting standards. Those helicopters were
part of the original Plan Colombia package.

Deeper Engagement

The specific appropriations in both Plan Colombia and other DoD
spending illustrate a trend toward greater US engagement with northern
South America, both in terms of military assets and military training.
As stability visibly erodes in Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama
(after US withdrawal), Bolivia (after President Banzar's retirement),
Peru (after President Fujimori's departure), and Venezuela (under
Chavez), there will necessarily be rising interest in this region.

The assets in the existing appropriations foreshadow future
commitments; they are more likely to be trail markers than capstones.

A few examples and interviews poignantly make this
point.

The assets now being committed are substantial, and the need for
additional attention throughout the region in coming fiscal years is
forging a hardening consensus.

In mid-October, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations
and Low Intensity Conflict Brian Sheridan testified before John Mica's
(R-FL) Drug Policy Subcommittee regarding the coming mission for DoD.
"The Department of Defense plays a key supporting role in creating the
opportunity for law enforcement agencies...to interdict drugs," he
began, noting that "DoD is committed to this counter-drug mission."

If that has not always been the case, it may increasingly be so in the
future. Sheridan said that increased engagement in training and asset
delivery "serves the national interests of both our countries" and "it
is absolutely necessary that the US continue to support Colombia." He
revealed that coca growth in the Putumayo region of Southern Colombia
"has progressed virtually unchecked," and that the Plan Colombia
emergency supplemental "will allow the Department to...accelerate the
implementation of efforts in Colombia." But he vowed that this "will
not require an appreciable increase in the number of US military
personnel present in Colombia."

Vowing also that the plan does not change US policy, he nevertheless
conceded that three Colombian army counter-drug battalions have begun
receiving specialized training from the US Army's 7 Special Forces
Group, as of July 2000. Despite interminable delays in delivery of
past assets appropriated to the Department of State and provided by
DoD, and despite indications that badly needed helicopters may not
arrive in Colombia for two years, Congress has insisted on speedy
delivery of critical assets.

Sheridan indicated that DoD will begin delivery in early 2001 of
additional military "training, communications equipment, computer[s],
facility modification, and similar requirements." The US, he said,
will also build a brigade headquarters with US troops, to be
"operational in February 2001." Nodding to the inevitable, Sheridan
said that "execution [of Congress' intentions] remains a challenge
before us."

New Twist

The justification for this increase in US engagement has roots that
are both domestic and international. Some elements have a political
constituency; others do not. The oddity is that Congress appears, for
the first time in years, to be successfully leading the Executive branch.

In the past eleven months, Congress has been methodically articulating
and appropriating for a foreign policy engagement that a growing
majority of Members feel is overdue, was long unrecognized by the
White House, and was almost wholly unsupported-until 2000-by any
meaningful presidential request for expanded international
counter-drug programs or engagement.

This new drive by Congress to press both law enforcement and Defense
assets into service, to visibly and directly combat the growth of
destabilizing drug-funded terror in South America through US training
and sophisticated US war-fighting assets, is a new turn in the drug
war. If not quite escalation, it is certainly a bid for more
serious-minded, hands-on counter-drug policy in the international sphere.

As Sheridan himself notes, the new mission is "to attack the center of
the cocaine industry in southern Colombia," an area he acknowledges is
tightly intertwined with the growing Colombian insurgency. He also
readily admits that this is a mission that raises concerns about human
rights and the need to proceed with caution.

In fact, no Member of Congress apparently denies the complexity or
legitimacy of these concerns.

There is, however, a note of growing urgency on Capitol
Hill.

As in the mid-1990s, there is the ring of prescience and of mounting
frustration in these congressional voices.

Congressman Mica, for example, told AFJI that he is concerned about
how we got to where we are, and how we will compensate for past errors
in judgement. "To be frank, this White House has made real conflict
more likely, across the entire region of northern South America,
because they have refused to acknowledge that the drug-funded
insurgency in Colombia is not a passing issue-it is a real and serious
national security issue borne of accumulated indifference by this
Administration." Mica added that "the only reason that there is any
aid at all down there is that Congress was tired of seeing both
Colombians and American kids dying in ever larger numbers."

Similar sentiments were heard from other prominent members of
Congress. Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN) offered views echoed by
others. "I have watched the Administration's approach to Colombia
since 1995, and have traveled to Colombia in each of the past five
years.

The Speaker of the House is committed to stopping the outflow of drugs
from that nation, and to helping that nation stabilize.

The real disappointment is that the current White House could have
engaged the People of Colombia constructively in 1995 or 1996,
avoiding the current crisis. Instead, they cut the international
counter-drug account, curtailed training, imposed sanctions under the
certification law, dragged their feet delivering lifesaving assets,
and only began taking the instability seriously in the past year.
Revelations and epiphanies are nice, but if they come too late they
are worth little.

This Administration's absence of leadership means that the next
President faces hard choices across that important region, from Panama
and Peru to Colombia, Bolivia, and Venezuela. The strength of the
narco-terrorists has continued to increase while the Administration
has delayed."

International Relations Committee Chairman Ben Gilman (R-NY) is
equally blunt, arguing simply that "The United States has a direct
national security interest in Colombia," and that future
Colombia-related legislation will "take into account the impact that
these narco-guerrillas have on the availability of drugs in the United
States."

Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-IN) echoed Gilman's
words: "For nearly three years, myself, Speaker Hastert, Chairman
Gilman and others have followed Colombia closely, have called on the
Administration to support our allies...the Colombian National Police,
in the War on Drugs." This administration appears not to know how to
handle this pending crisis.

Something needs to be done now, before it is too late."

Accordingly, watch for three events that are just beyond today's
horizon. First, expect an early 2001 supplemental to tackle the
emerging instability in Colombia and the region.

Second, don't be surprised to see a much larger set of appropriations
requests and congressional marks in the Fiscal Year 2002 accounts for
the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the State
Department and for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict
(including counter-drug funding for Colombia) at the Defense
Department. Third, expect renewed congressional-and maybe even
presidential-attention to international engagement by US law
enforcement agencies, ranging from Customs and the US Coast Guard to
the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.

Where this mounting national security threat in our own hemisphere
will lead is unclear, but that it matters to the US Congress and to a
growing number of Americans is as plain as the lettering on a Huey II
or Black Hawk helicopter. Perhaps the only question that might soon be
answered is how the next Administration will attempt to shorten the
lengthening shadow that drug-funded terror in Colombia and northern
South America is casting across our hemisphere.