CLINTON'S COLOMBIA ENTANGLEMENT MAY MEAN TROUBLE

Despite the hoopla that accompanied President Bill Clinton's farewell trip to Africa this week, his brief visit to Colombia today may well be the most significant - and troubling - of his official stops, the one carrying unforeseeable consequences for his successor.

The White House likes to characterize the visit as the opening of a new era in U.S.-Colombian relations, which have remained distinctly cool, thanks to the massive drug trade coming out of Colombia and the Colombian military's penchant for human-rights abuses in its war against Marxist guerrillas.

What Clinton will do, beyond showing strong support for Colombia's embattled president, Andres Pastrana, is to supply him $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid. Ostensibly, the aid is to fund a new initiative to suppress the cultivation and export of illegal drugs. In reality, most of the money and military hardware will go to help the Colombian military fight the guerrillas waging an increasingly successful civil war to overthrow the elected government.

Clinton is right to support Pastrana, a decent man trying, however unsuccessfully, to defend Colombia's democracy against a ruthless coalition of rebels and drug lords. But the massive aid package is a mistake. It could be the thin edge of the wedge for a potentially much wider U.S. involvement in a bitter civil conflict in which both sides have connections to Colombia's drug traffickers.

Neither the aid nor Clinton's visit may do much to prop up the well-meaning Pastrana's eroding political fortunes. Elected on a peace platform two years ago, Pastrana has failed to make any inroads in quelling the civil war. Now the United States is becoming a silent partner in that war, though it will have no say in its conduct or any control over the troops.

And Clinton will have saddled the next U.S. president with a foreign entanglement that is almost certain not to produce the desired result of stemming the flow of drugs - and which could backfire badly.