US HEADING FOR A STUPID MESS

FIFTEEN years ago, long before Barry McCaffrey became a general, I was
riding in the hills south of San Agustin with my teenage 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 guerrillas who also operated in the area.

Small incident, nobody hurt. But the point is that the war in Colombia is
36 years old. The guerrillas 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 that 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 US 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 south-east of the country (now known as
"Farclandia") while they negotiated a final peace settlement.

But there is no peace. One reason is that the guerrillas have a profound
mistrust of peace deals with Colombian governments. M-19, in its day the
leading Colombian guerrilla movement, made just such a peace with a
previous government in order to enter legitimate politics, and then saw
hundreds of its activists murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces
working hand in glove with sections of the army.

FARC hasn't been helpful either, continuing to wage a full-scale campaign
of guerrilla attacks and kidnappings, including atrocities like the recent
decapitation of a kidnapped woman by an explosive collar set to blow up if
the ransom wasn't paid promptly. Just two weeks ago, a FARC force in the
north-western province of Antioquia killed 32 militia members in the
village of Santa Rita and destroyed a cocaine processing laboratory run by
the rightists.

Mr Pastrana feels that his willingness to negotiate isn't getting him
anywhere, and his own political position in Colombia has collapsed. In
March, after allegations of coca-corruption in the Congress - do the
cocaine cartels pay off Colombian congressmen? Do bears defecate in the
woods? - Mr Pastrana tried to call a national 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 (the economic reform package agreed with
the International Monetary Fund now has little prospect of passage by
Congress), 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 programmes 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 re-emerged from the Washington machine as a plan
for a mini-Vietnam.

It is a classic illustration of O'Neill's Law that "all politics is local
politics". The locality, in this case, is Washington and the stakes are
entirely American.

No member of the US Congress who can do joined-up writing truly believes
that voting $US1.3 billion for a reinforced "war on drugs" in Colombia last
month will actually cut drug production in Colombia, or drug consumption in
the US. It plays well with the public, however, and it serves the interests
of a variety of local constituents from helicopter manufacturers to cocaine
distributors and private prison operators. Congress's complicity in the
current foolishness was quite predictable, but the real blame lies elsewhere.

The real father of the revised Plan Colombia is General Barry McCaffrey, a
soldier who realised early on that political skills, not military ones, are
the road to fame and fortune. As President Bill Clinton's "drug tsar", 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 McCaffrey has a Reaganesque relationship with facts: he is mainly
famous internationally for claiming in 1998 that the Netherlands' relaxed
laws on drug use are responsible for a murder rate twice as high as the US
(the actual Dutch murder rate is one-quarter of the American). But he does
know how to play the Washington game.

General McCaffrey's version of Plan Colombia redefines the FARC as
"narco-terrorists" and provides hundreds of millions of dollars for
military operations against them. (FARC does tax the coca and opium-growing
operations on its territory, but is less deeply involved in the trade than
its right-wing militia opponents, and perhaps even than the army.) Mr
Pastrana has grabbed this plan like a drowning man grasping a straw, and it
gives General McCaffrey a whole war to run. So everybody 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
gunship attacks.

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