IN COLOMBIA, AMERICA RELEARNS THE HARD LESSON

WASHINGTON - President Clinton's assurances that the United States will not
get involved in the Colombian civil war that the United States already is
involved in (with military personnel, equipment, training, financing,
intelligence) make sense if you think of the helicopters as farm implements.
The 60 transport and attack helicopters, and most of the other elements in
the recent $1.3 billion installment of U.S. aid, look warlike. However,
the administration says the aid is essentially agricultural. It is all
about controlling crops - particularly the coca fields that provide upward
of 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the American market.

Conceivably, important U.S. interests are implicated in the Colombian

government's fight with the more than 17,000-strong forces of Marxist
insurgency in the civil war, now in its fourth decade, that has killed
35,000 people, and displaced 2 million in the last 10 years. Political
violence has killed 280,000 since the middle of the 19th century. Do makers
of U.S. policy understand this long-simmering stew of class conflict,
ideological war and ethnic vendettas?

They advertise their policy as drug control through crop extermination. The
president, delivering the money that will buy military equipment, said: "We
have no military objective." And: "Our approach is both pro-peace and
anti-drug." As though the civil war and the anti-narcotics campaign can be
separated when the left-wing forces that control half the country are
getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by protecting and taxing coca
fields.

The U.S. policy - peace through herbicides - aims to neutralize the
left-wing forces by impoverishing them. But already those forces are
diversifying. The Wall Street Journal reports: "Armed with automatic rifles
and personal computers, guerrillas often stop traffic, check motorists' bank
records, then detain anyone whose family might be able to afford a lucrative
ransom." There are an average of seven kidnappings a day. Speaking of
diversification, does anyone doubt that, in the extremely unlikely event
that Colombia is cleansed of the offensive crops, cultivation of them will
be promptly increased elsewhere? In spite of Colombia's efforts, coca
cultivation increased 140 percent in the last five years, partly because the
United States financed the reduction of Bolivia's coca crop. However, the
pressure on Colombia's coca growers is "working": Some of them have planted
crops (and the seeds of future conflicts) across the border in Peru. And
guerillas have made incursions i! nto Panama and Ecuador for refuge.

Will the United States ever learn? As long as it has a $50 billion annual
demand for an easily smuggled substance made in poor nations, the demand
will be served. An anecdote is apposite.

A presidential adviser was fresh from persuading the French government to
smash the "French connection" by which heroin destined for America was
refined from Turkish opium in Marseilles. Boarding a helicopter to Camp
David to bring his glad tidings to President Nixon, the adviser, Pat
Moynihan, who then still had Harvard's faith in government's efficacy, found
himself traveling with Labor Secretary George Shultz, embodiment of
University of Chicago realism about powerful appetites creating markets in
spite of governments' objections. When Moynihan (who tells this story) told
Shultz about his achievement in France, this conversation ensued.

Shultz, dryly: "Good."

Moynihan: "No, really, this is a big event."

Shultz, drier still: "Good."

Moynihan: "I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for drugs,
there will continue to be a supply."

Shultz: "You know, there's hope for you yet."

That is more than can be confidently said for U.S. policy in Colombia,
which seems barren of historical sense. "The enduring achievement of
historical study," said British historian Sir Lewis Namier, "is a historical
sense - and intuitive understanding - of how things do not work." Such a
sense should produce policy. Instead, the most that can be hoped is that
U.S. policy in Colombia may, painfully and tardily, produce such sense.