AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE FROM COLOMBIA

President Clinton stopped in Colombia Wednesday to herald a new era in
U.S.-Colombian relations and to inaugurate the $1.3 billion
cocaine-fighting package that Washington is about to deliver to the Bogota
government. Hopefully, the president -- and other congressional advocates
of the aid package -- paid close attention to the response delivered by
Colombian President Andres Pastrana.

He properly warned that whatever Colombia's success in fighting cocaine
trafficking, it won't put a dent in cocaine use in the United States and
other drug-consuming countries until they do much more on their own to
control their citizens' demand for illicit drugs.

Mr. Pastrana's dissonant message probably was not what Mr. Clinton expected
to hear, but it merits emphasis. It is U.S. demand for cocaine which fuels
cocaine production in Colombia. Without the U.S. appetite, Colombia
arguably would not be having a cocaine production problem -- nor, most
likely, an expanding civil war, an outrageous kidnapping problem, and a
collapsing civil infrastructure.

True, 90 percent of the cocaine consumed by Americans is produced in
Colombia. But Colombia's role as main producer has occurred just since the
U.S., earlier in the '90s, promoted eradication programs in Peru and
Bolivia. And if, by chance, the expensive U.S. aid now helps Colombia
displace cocaine production, the problem likely will turn up elsewhere in
the South American rotation, or, as Mr. Pastrana suggested, even Africa. He
has intelligence reports, he noted, that plantings of the base coca plant
are now increasing in Africa.

That suggests the deep flaw in Washington's drug policy, and underscores
the futility of its risky intrusion into Colombia's civil war. It
compounds, moreover, the folly of Mr. Clinton's decision to remove crucial
human rights conditions from the Colombia aid package.

Cocaine and civil war are inseparably linked in Colombia, and by displacing
cocaine production from Peru and Bolivia, Washington has only aggravated
Colombia's problems. The main guerrilla armies fighting Bogota's government
have, since the cocaine explosion of the last decade, enmeshed themselves
in the cocaine problem as the drug cartels' "protectors'' from Bogota. The
guerrillas extract money from cocaine producers to finance their guerrilla
war, and both have flourished. What had been a low-level, high-country
civil war for 30 years is now an expanding, 40-year conflict. And American
helicopters and trainers will soon be in the line of fire.

Worse, they will be supporting a government with an egregious human rights
record and a history of supporting paramilitary thugs who regularly
massacre peasants. Thirty-five thousand people already have died in the
long civil war, but now lawlessness is expanding further into the cities.
Eight-hundred-thousand Colombians have fled in the past four years, many to
America. And with guerrilla kidnappings of anyone with money now expanding
- -- 3,000 people were being held for ransom at the beginning of the year --
businessmen are decamping, Colombia is suffering a massive brain drain, and
unemployment has soared past 20 percent.

Washington's belief that it can solve America's drug problem by intruding
in Colombia's civil war demonstrates colossal arrogance. Foreign military
aid, like domestic prison building, just hasn't worked to stop domestic
cocaine use; cocaine is more plentiful and cheaper than ever on American
streets. But military intervention has compounded many other problems in
the target countries. The only thing that might reverse the U.S. cocaine
problem is for Washington to take Mr. Pastrana's advice to heart -- and
spend the massive military aid money on treatment programs for cocaine use
in America.