U.S. SAYS SEES NO 'VIETNAMIZATION' OF COLOMBIA

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States insisted on Thursday its plan to
send U.S. military advisers to Colombia does not represent a deeper,
Vietnam-style involvement in the country's drug war.

As President Clinton prepared to travel to Colombia next Wednesday, his
national security adviser, Sandy Berger, defended the U.S. plan to help
Colombia battle drug trafficking.

Under a U.S. aid package worth $1.3 billion, a few hundred U.S. military
advisers will go to Colombia to train special battalions in fighting the
drug trade, and indirectly, the leftist guerrillas who protect and profit
from the trafficking.

Asked if this represented the "Vietnamization" of Colombia, Berger
disagreed. American involvement in Vietnam began with the dispatch of
military advisers and ended with the deaths of around 50,000 U.S. troops.

"I think you can get paralyzed by the foreign policy of analogy," Berger
said. "You should learn from what happened before. But the fact is this is
nothing similar whatsoever. We're talking about a few hundred American
people going to train some Colombian army battalions."

The training is to allow the battalions to provide security for the
Colombian national police to go into the areas where the drug problem is
most pervasive and destroy crops and laboratories.

"We don't think there is a military solution to the guerrilla war in
Colombia nor does President (Andres) Pastrana. That is why he has embarked
upon such a vigorous peace initiative," Berger said.

Other Latin American countries are watching the U.S. plan with great
interest, some with concern and others with cautious enthusiasm at the
prospect of removing an unstable situation in the region.

Clinton is due to meet the Colombian president in the Caribbean coast
resort of Cartagena on Aug. 30. It will be the first trip to Colombia by a
U.S. president in a decade.

Berger said it was critical to provide the assistance to Colombia because
the country's democracy could be at stake.

"There is risk in Colombia every day -- 35,000 people have been killed in
Colombia in the last 10 years. This is a very tough place," he said.

"We can either help Colombia try to come to grips with that, help Colombia
in its effort to deal with that problem, or stand back and let Colombian
democracy collapse," Berger said.