A PALE SHADOW OF VIETNAM

LONDON---- Fifteen years ago, long before Barry McCaffery became a general,
I was riding the hills south of San Agustin with my teenaged sons when a
Colombian army skirmish line swept up over the lip of the plateau. They
passed us without a word, and vanished down the other side of the mountain,
searching for the FARC guerillas who also operated in the area.

Small incident, nobody hurt. But the point is that the war in Colombia is 36
years old. The guerillas have been around far longer than the current
government or the drug cartels, and it is neither America's fault nor
America's business.

"We are winning this war they have declared on Colombia," said Colombian
President Andres Pastrana in a belligerent national television broadcast on
July 20. "The country knows well that I will not accept peace at any
price...." In other words, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Now I have the whole U.S.
military machine behind me.

Mr. Pastrana's frustration with the peace process that he launched just
after the presidential elections two years ago is easy to understand. He met
Manuel Marulanda, legendary leader of the main guerrilla group, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and granted him a
Switzerland-sized safe haven in the southeast of the country while they
negoatiated a peace settlement.

But there is no peace. One reason is that the guerrillas have a profound
mistrust of peace deals with Colombian governments.

Mr. Pastrana feels that his willingness to negotiate isn't getting him
anywhere, and meanwhile his own political position in Colombia has
collapsed. In March, after allegations of coca-corruption in the
congress --- Do the cartels pay off Colombian congressman? Do bears defecate
in the woods? --- Mr. Pastrana tried to call a referendum to reform congress
and hold fresh elections. Instead his governing coalition disintegrated.

The shipwrecked president suddenly found himself with no political support
to speak of, a collapsing economy, and a becalmed peace process. So he
grabbed the first piece of flotsam to float by: "Plan Colombia."

Plan Colombia was originally Mr. Pastrana's own initiative, presented to
Washington two years ago. At that time it envisaged a variety of economic
and social programs that he hoped would transform the poverty on which the
guerrillas feed --- a "Marshall Plan" for southern Colombia, as he put it.
Two years later it has reemerged from the Washington machine as a plan for a
mini-Vietnam.

The real father of the revised "Plan Colombia" is Gen. Barry McCaffery, a
soldier who realized early on that political skills, not military one are
the road to fame and fortune. As President Clinton's drug czar, he has a
whole "war on drugs" that can be fought solely in terms of public relations,
and he has exploited it for all it's worth.

General McCaffery's version of "Plan Colombia" redefines the FARC as
"narco-terrorists," and provides hundreds of millions of dollars of military
operations against them.

Mr. Pastrana has grabbed this plan like a drowning man grasping a straw, and
it gives general McCaffery a whole war to run. So everbody wins except rural
Colombians, who can look forward to being sprayed from the air with the
fungus Fusarium oxysporum (guaranteed to wilt coca plants) in between the
gun ship attacks.

Colombia will never be a full-scale Vietnam, because the united States will
not do that again. But it will be an extravagantly stupid mess.