WHY CLINTON'S COLOMBIA POLICY NEEDS REHAB

In the northern Colombian town of El Salado in mid-February, a band of
paramilitaries allegedly drank and hooted as they slaughtered almost 30
peasants they suspected of being sympathetic left-wing guerrillas. One man
was allegedly killed in a church; others had their heads sliced off on a
basketball court. The paramilitaries may have been connected to the
Colombian military in some way; they may not have been. Still, nobody in
the United States seemed to notice.

Mass murder in Colombia seems almost commonplace and when Reuters finally
put the story on the wire a few days later, only one major American paper
picked it up. Just one more massacre that had something to do with drugs
and politics.

In the Dirksen Senate Office Building a week later and several thousand
miles away, Senator Jeff Sessions lit into Gen. Barry McCaffrey, America's
drug czar, and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, for being doves on
Colombia. It wasn't enough that McCaffrey and Pickering had shown up to
defend a Clinton administration plan to triple military aid to Colombia, a
country that receives the third most United States security assistance of
any nation on earth.

To Sessions, the United States needs far more radical steps to help our
southern neighbor. "We used to have a strong will and now we don't!" he
thundered.

Pickering tried to explain the complexities of the situation and McCaffrey
insisted that we are making progress.

But Sessions, turning redder and redder, would have none of it: "The nation
will not prevail until there's progress on the battlefield!"

There was definitely something in what the senator said. If you go to war,
you want to win battles; and to win battles, you've got to be committed.

But there was also something deeply unnerving: If you're going to win
battles, you've got to know who you're fighting and, in Colombia, it's
really not clear. Everybody's hands seem a little bit bloody and every
corridor seems a little bit dark. Clinton's proposal would give aid to the
government, ostensibly, to fight drug production. So are we just going to
war against the drug runners who are supplying America's cities with
cocaine and heroin?

Or are we also going to war with the leftist guerrillas fighting the
government and often allied with the drug runners?

Are we going to be fighting on the same side as the paramilitaries
responsible for the El Salado massacre--international pariahs and
public-enemies who have their own ties to the drug trade but oppose the
guerrillas?

The Clinton administration has a serious plan and there's a good chance it
will pass. But before it does, we should stop and think about what Senator
Sessions seemed to be saying.

If you're going to wade into a mess like this with guns-a-blazing, you'd
better know who and what you're fighting for, and you'd better be sure
you're willing to pay the price it's going to take to win.

Jungle War

Mention of Colombia almost immediately brings analogies to Vietnam. One
week after Sen. Sessions' outburst, Sen. Ted Stevens demanded of Gen.
Charles Wilhelm the commander in chief of the United States' Southern
Command: "Who's going to be there when this blows up? Tell me this isn't
Vietnam." In recent months, every media outlet seems to have drawn the
comparison and The Washington Post and The Financial Times even chose an
identical headline for different articles: "Shades of Vietnam."

This is not surprising. Much of our foreign policy is conditioned by a
visceral fear of repeating the disasters of the war in Southeast Asia. But
the mistake we have to avoid in Colombia isn't sending troops into jungle
action without full public commitment; the White House and Congress have
emphatically declared that troops aren't going south and there's almost no
chance that the Colombian end-game will see American soldiers dying in the
jungle while flags burn at home.

But the mistake we are in danger of repeating in Colombia lies in our
decision-making process.

Our Vietnam policy was crafted by highly intelligent people with legitimate
strategic concerns who thought they were acting in the country's best
interests. The problem was their lack of information: They underestimated
the North's tenacity, overestimated our allies' competence, and misjudged
the public's endurance for war. We didn't look the situation squarely in
the eyes, we didn't hedge our bets enough to offset the complexities of
that war, and we didn't listen closely to people on the ground who
considered the war hopeless.

With Colombia, we need to put a heavy burden of proof squarely on the
shoulders of those who urge increasing our military aid. There are reasons
to charge into Colombia--a country in quasi-anarchy whose drugs are pouring
across our borders--but we shouldn't unless we know our goals and exit
strategy, unless we know it's clear that we won't end up directly or
indirectly massacring innocent Colombians, and unless we know the benefits
conclusively outweigh the costs. Unfortunately, this burden is far from
being met.

The Problem and the Plan

Just a few hours south of Miami by plane, Colombia produces about 80
percent of the cocaine used in this country and more than half of the heroin.

Farmers grow their coca crop deep in the jungle or in the mountains and
sell it to traffickers. The traffickers then process it in mobile
laboratories and smuggle their product across our border with elaborate
networks of traffickers organized by cell phones, the Internet, and good
old machine guns. Once here, the drugs offer quick buzzes and destroy lives.

Over 50,000 people suffer drug-related deaths in the United States each
year and Gen. McCaffrey continually emphasizes studies that show that
illegal drug use annually costs this country $110 billion.

The Clinton administration believes in developing a broad strategy for our
national drug control policy and the current plan--more or less a
steroid-enhanced version of the policies of the Bush administration and
Clinton's first seven years--seeks to increase funding to choke off the
supply side. Specifically, the plan calls for $1.3 billion in additional
aid over the next two years on top of $300 million that has already been
budgeted. Almost $600 million of the new money would be spent arming and
training the Colombian army for a push into the country's remote southern
regions where most of the coca is currently grown.

Much of this would be spent purchasing 30 high-powered Black Hawk
helicopters and 33 UH-1Ns, commonly known as Hueys, the workhorse
helicopters of the Vietnam War. A further $350 million would go to upgrade
radar systems and provide narcotics intelligence assistance to Colombian
security forces and drug interdiction units in neighboring countries; $100
million would go to the Colombian National Police for coca eradication
programs, and the rest would be targeted toward economic development and
civil projects. Roughly 80 percent of the total amount is dedicated to
security and military; 20 percent is dedicated to economic assistance and
social aid.

Colombia in Chaos

To determine the potential efficacy of the aid, one needs to look at the
political situation and the different groups battling with, and around, the
military we'd be supporting. Colombia has been wracked by armed conflict
for much of its history, and for more than 30 years a leftist insurgency
group, known as the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the
Colombian government have been locked in a struggle in which each seems to
lose equally.

The FARC was founded in 1966 in reaction to the oligarchic settlement of
the bloody 10-year war between the Conservatives and Liberals known as "La
Violencia" that left more than 200,000 Colombians dead. Today, mixing its
own particular brand of terrorism, extortion, and socialism, the FARC
controls territory that, although sparsely populated, exceeds the size of
California and represents 40 percent of the country.

The FARC operates as a coalition of highly organized fronts scattered
around the country with a stronghold in the south. The guerrillas
specialize in kidnapping and are fairly well armed--better equipped, in
fact, than the Colombian military, according to our Congressional Research
Service. Guerrillas generally base themselves in camps---tents, barracks,
and, quite often, a soccer field--buried deep in the jungle from which they
send out multiple lines of roving patrols to ambush and warn of approaching
government troops.

Politically, the FARC is a mixture of grizzled idealists still pushing a
socialist agenda--according to conservative analyst Andy Messing of the
National Defense Council Foundation, leaders like FARC's commander Manuel
"Sure Shot" Marulanda, "are very serious and they clearly want a better
life for Colombians"--and brutal, opportunistic murderers reveling in power
and the money they wrestle from the drug trade.

Last year, the FARC kidnapped and murdered three American human-rights
advocates without any apparent reason--they demanded no ransom and offered
no explanation.

On the other side of the political spectrum are right-wing paramilitary
forces--organizations of loosely-knit mercenaries maintained primarily to
protect private business and drug dealers from the FARC and the ELN,
another, smaller, violent leftist insurgency. Many of the paramilitary
groups operating today were founded by the government in the late 1970s,
but official connections between the two were legally cut a decade ago.
Today, the State Department estimates that paramilitaries cause 70 percent
of the human rights violations that plague Colombia.

In no small part, the paramilitaries exist to hunt the FARC, the ELN, and
people who support them. On March 1, letting his face be shown for the
first time in seven years, Carlos Castano, the leader of the largest
paramilitary group (and a man who has been fighting the FARC since they
kidnapped and murdered his father more than 20 years ago) told a Colombian
television station: "Guerrillas are military objectives of ours, whether
they are dressed as civilians or in uniform. I know this violates
international humanitarian law. But the guerrillas violate humanitarian law
all the time.... This is a really vile war."

Colombian President Andres Pastrana has worked to break remaining
governmental ties with the paramilitaries. Still, as might be expected from
two institutions fighting the same enemies, there are, at least de facto,
links and, quite possibly, some serious, tight, and brutal connections. A
February report by Human Rights Watch reported that there is "detailed,
abundant, and compelling evidence of close ties between the Colombian Army
and paramilitary groups responsible for gross human rights violations." One
gruesome example detailed how members of the Colombian Army's Fourth
Brigade joined forces with paramilitaries to surround the village of El
Aro, later burning more than half of the residents' homes and killing 11
people.

Why? Because the villagers were suspected of being sympathetic to the FARC.
One store owner, Aurelio Areiza, was tied to a tree and had his eyes gouged
out and tongue and testicles cut off before his eventual execution.

The State Department responds that recipients of U.S. military aid are
required to be vetted for past human rights abuses and that none of the
recipients of our current package was specifically mentioned by Human
Rights Watch. But while serious improvements have been made over the past
decade, this distinction is a little too neat and the lines aren't nearly
as clear as one would hope. According to Human Rights Watch, the commander
of the brigade responsible for the alleged massacre in El Aro, General
Carlos Ospina, has since been promoted to head Colombia's fourth
division--an army unit of three brigades in southern Colombia, one of which
will soon be receiving Black Hawks and Hueys if the aid package goes through.

War and Peace

Along with many smaller groups such as the ELN, the FARC and the
paramilitaries are both causes and symptoms of an imploding society.

To a degree, Colombia has been at war with itself since it was founded in
1830 by the revolutionary leaders, and later rivals, Simon Bolivar and
Francisco de Paula Santander. It began this century with a bloody "thousand
days' war" and since then has averaged one civil war every decade, many
arising from the country's startling class stratifications. Today, the
raging war has forced approximately 300,000 OEdisplaced people' to leave
their homes.

This bloody chaos has helped create an ideal environment for the drug
business--and that business has pulled the country down even further.

Illegal narcotics are Colombia's third-largest export and Robert White,
former Ambassador to El Salvador, argues that, "You can't have a business
like that without having some sort of support from police, from banks, from
the military." The evidence bears him out: In November 1998, the chief of
the military air transport command for the Colombian army was caught trying
to smuggle half a ton of cocaine into Miami on his official airplane.

Even U.S. officials aren't completely to be trusted.

Laurie Hiett, wife of a former U.S. military attache in Colombia, recently
pleaded guilty to smuggling $700,000 worth of heroin through our embassy's
mail service.

With the nation spinning out of control it's not surprising that there is
one thing that everyone seems to agree on: They want peace.

President Pastrana was elected primarily because of his pledge to bring
peace to his country and, this November, approximately five million people
took to Colombia's streets demanding peace under banners reading "No Mas"
or, in English, "No More." The FARC has begun negotiating with the
government (senior officials from both camps have just returned from a
joint tour of Europe) and even Castano says he wants an end to conflict.

Most Colombians, like many Israelis, Palestinians, and residents of
Northern Ireland, are just sick of living in a state of perpetual civil
war. The war has forced people out of their homes, torn apart civil
infrastructure (in Medellin, Colombia's second largest city, university
buildings are riddled with bullet holes and residents tell of endless
nightly gunfire) and disrupted the economy.

It also pulls good people into the drug trade. Many farmers are forced to
grow coca simply because they have no other way to make a living.

Many have two choices: grow coffee, for example, and drive it to markets
over miles of torn-up roads stalked by guerrillas and paramilitaries; or
grow coca to sell profitably when drug-runners come to pick it up at your
doorstep.

The Hit

At first glance, the Clinton proposal has little to do with the civil war
or making peace.

Administration officials claim that it is exclusively an attempt to knock
out the drug trade and has nothing to do with the insurgency. But this is a
distinction without a huge difference; money that goes to the military will
almost certainly slip into counter-insurgency. The Colombian military isn't
focused solely on the drug campaign.

They have been fighting the FARC for 30 years and neither they nor any FARC
commander with a surface-to-air missile is going to care whether a
reconnaissance helicopter has been assigned to a counter-drug or
counter-insurgency mission.

Raul Reyes, top negotiator for the FARC, told The Associated Press on
February 28: "Plan Colombia, as we understand it, is no more than a way...
for hawks in the United States to become more deeply involved in our
internal affairs... It's a declaration of war by the United States." Even
Under Secretary of State Pickering hasn't been able to avoid touching the
issue: "Our goals in the military field are to eliminate the transport and
production of narcotics.

If the guerrillas are taking part, and I've no doubt they are, then they
will be targets of our fight."

But $1.6 billion is emphatically not enough either to win the drug war or
to knock out the insurgency. Over the past decade, Colombian cocaine
production has skyrocketed, even as we have poured hundreds of millions of
dollars into the Andes. This doesn't mean the aid so far has done nothing
(the problem would probably be worse if we had stood aside) but it does
suggest that our current solution (and maybe any solution short of, say,
$100 billion) will do little.

Drug production has a way of operating like a girdle: squeeze down in one
place, and it just pops out in another.

When Peru stabilized its political situation in the early 1990s, drug
production there began to plunge as traffickers simply moved east into the
chaos of Colombia. Meanwhile, the biggest triumph the United States has had
in the war on drugs in Colombia--the defeat of the Cali and Medellin
cartels and the killing of Pablo Escobar in the early '90s--appeared not to
make a dime's worth of difference. New, less-centralized and
harder-to-isolate, traffickers filled their shoes and drug production shot
up. Even if drug production was eradicated in Colombia, it's quite possible
the traffickers would just move into Ecuador (where the military recently
toppled the government) or Brazil.

Furthermore, the military's war on the FARC seems presently unwinnable and
$1.6 billion is not going to change that equation. Colombia is more than
three times the size of Vietnam and fifty times the size of El Salvador
and, if anything, the FARC has been gaining ground on the army over the
past two years of this more-than-30-year-war, though the government has won
the most recent battles.

The army deploys significantly more soldiers than the FARC (about 130,000
vs. 15,000) but more than two thirds of them (including, by law, every
high-school graduate) are stationed in defensive positions and the
guerrillas have proved themselves much more mobile than the military.

In the jungle territory the rebels call home, the FARC has built and mapped
networks of trails that allow them to move easily from one place to another
while the army, frightened of ambush on the enemy-built trails, trudges
slowly with compass-based navigation. The helicopters provided by the
United States will certainly help the army's fight, but, in a country as
large as Colombia, 60 helicopters manned by soldiers with limited training
is not going to turn the tide.

The Price of Peace

The danger of the administration's aid package is that it will simply
intensify the violence.

The FARC will see it as a foreign invasion, the poorly disciplined military
will start to run rampant, the drug trade won't be slowed at all, and the
only people who will really lose will be those caught in the crossfire--as
has always been the case in Colombia.

But a $1.6 billion military aid package is not our only option.

If we wanted to be sure to stay out of the war, and if we wanted to keep
our hands clean of human rights violations, we could conceivably give the
government money for schools and roads, not machine guns and helicopters.
Instead of spending $200 million out of $1.6 billion on civil programs, we
could spend every cent on them. Indeed, as this article goes to press, Rep.
Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Ca.) have taken the
Hippocratic position of "first do no harm" and are circulating a "Dear
Colleague" letter requesting that we stop considering any military aid.

There is merit to Schakowsky and Campbell's plea; but there's also reason
not to go that far. If you build schools you still need to protect the
children from being kidnapped by the FARC. If you build roads you may be
facilitating drug smuggling. But even so, to protect the schools and roads,
you don't need to provide hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Black
Hawks. According to former Ambassador White, one of the plan's most
vehement and public critics: "Would I support the aid package if it was 75
percent targeted toward civilians and 25 percent targeted toward the military?

Of course." Michael Shifter of the Inter-America Dialogue and one of the
most respected Colombia experts in the country told me that the plan "is
disappointing" and "misses an opportunity... I'm not sure giving them 60
helicopters to fight drugs is the wisest thing to do."

Armed and Dangerous

The administration counters the argument that its aid package is too
focused on the military by noting that the United States' aid is simply a
share of Plan Colombia, a blueprint for national Colombia's development
that balances military and non-military aid and includes contributions from
Colombia, the United States, other countries, and international
organizations. And, for better or for worse, the United States has the
reputation for being the country most willing to provide military aid.
Sweden and the World Bank aren't going to give the Colombian military Black
Hawk helicopters.

This argument, although not specious, is disingenuous. It is true that
President Pastrana was talking about a Colombian "Marshall Plan" even
before his election, but there's evidence that the United States pushed a
great portion of the military aid into the Plan or, at the very least,
strongly suggested it during consultation. According to one defense analyst
very familiar with the negotiations "it wasn't written by Colombians for
Colombians; it was written by Colombians and Americans for Americans."
According to the Center for International Policy, a non-profit organization
that opposes the aid package, the first draft of the Plan, written entirely
in Spanish, contained very little military planning.

The final draft, which provides for the aid that the United States is
supplying, was written with significant U.S. counsel and, according to
opposition party leader Luis Guillermo Velez, quoted in the Colombian paper
El Tiempo, "The first information that we had of the famous Plan Colombia
came to us directly from the American Embassy and in English."

The leader of the opposition party may just be trying to embarrass
President Pastrana, but there still seems to be strong evidence that our
administration has wedded itself to circular logic to support the military
emphasis.

Why do we need to give them helicopters? Because it's in Plan Colombia. Why
is it in Plan Colombia? Because we need to give them helicopters.

The administration does have some strong reasons for wanting to act
forcefully in this way--Pastrana is far more trustworthy than his
predecessor, the Colombian military is becoming more and more organized and
reputable, and helicopters are a very useful tool for jungle drug
interdiction. Still, there are also reasons to suspect that U.S. enthusiasm
may be more a function of politics and the usual suspects than efficacy.

First, an aid policy so focused on military aid lets the Clinton
administration (and the Democrats) look tough on drugs in an election year.
Despite the billions that Clinton has poured into the drug war, the
administration constantly faces fire for being soft. In August,
Representative Dan Burton (R-Ind.) condemned the Clinton White House:
"There is no war on drugs being waged by this administration unless you
count the $200 million General McCaffrey spends annually for... television
ads and these Frisbees and key chains." Sen. Mitch McConnell refers to
1985-92 as "the era of OEJust say no'" and 1993-99 as "the era of OEI wish
I had inhaled.'"

The Republican strategy has worked: According to research done this fall by
the Mellman group, a Democractic polling organization, the public believes
the Democrats are doing a better job than Republicans on almost every
issue, from balancing the budget to improving education.

The one issue where Republicans have a clear advantage is "keeping out
illegal drugs."

A military aid package so wrapped around hardware also offers substantial
advantages to U.S.-based companies.

United Technologies, the manufacturer of the unquestionably-effective Black
Hawk helicopters, is based in Stratford, Conn., in the home state of Sen.
Christopher Dodd, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on Narcotics, and extremely near the district of Rep. Sam
Gejdenson, the ranking member of the House International Relations
Committee. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, United
Technologies and its employees have given $33,200 to Dodd and $19,000 to
Gejdenson over the past two years.

Even if, as their spokesmen claim, neither Sen. Dodd or Rep. Gejdenson
thought directly of donor obligations while considering the plan, money
does have a funny way of working in Washington and, over time, policies
that help out powerful lobbies do have a curiously strong tendency to win
out over those that don't. Rep. Schakowsky said to me: "I have no doubt
that, in some ways, this is about helicopters."

Third, and most importantly, the bill has to pass Congress and many
Congressmen, particularly on the very powerful Republican far right, would
much rather give money to fight guerrillas than to promote development. As
Sen. Sessions demanded incredulously of Gen. McCaffrey and Undersecretary
Pickering, "Is it the position of the United States that we are neutral
[between the FARC and the government]?" Rep. Burton goes even further,
using rhetoric that takes us back to the Cold War: "Colombia is important
because, should democracy fall there, and a narco-state prevail or a
Marxist-led government run by the FARC narco-terrorists succeed democracy,
we are at severe risk in the United States." Burton's may be an extreme
case, but he's also one of the congressional Republicans who have invested
the most time and effort in the issue.

Just Say No

If the package does go through, the administration argues that, in a
best-case scenario, the threat of increased U.S. weaponry could help to
push the FARC to the negotiating table as well as push them to keep their
promises (as they very rarely have before). Then, if peace could be brought
between the government and the FARC, perhaps the paramilitaries would begin
to layoff, peace would come to the entire country, and Pastrana's successor
would have the opportunity to crack down on the drug trade.

But there's a lot that could scuttle that scenario: the FARC might not be
frightened by the money, it might just harden their resolve; it could
become clear that Black Hawk helicopters are being used to slaughter
villagers in places like El Salado or El Aro; Pastrana may be replaced by a
hard-liner opposed to the peace process.

These are all distinct possibilities and strongly suggest that the current
aid proposal doesn't come close to clearing the high bar for military
involvement our experiences in Vietnam should have taught us to set. The
situation on the ground in Colombia is more like Vietnam than Kosovo or
Iraq. We don't know exactly what's going on; we don't have clear
objectives; and there's a fairly good chance that our guns and helicopters
will merely increase the conflict and tear the country apart a little bit
more. The odds of bringing peace by offering a package that emphasizes
carrots seem just as likely as the odds of bringing peace through a package
of sticks.

And with carrots, you can't swing, miss, and break your own knee-cap.

The unfortunate truth is that domestic politics have probably helped push
us into a situation where we are forced to provide an aid package that is
too militarized, and too likely to blow up in our faces.

In fact, as we plunge toward Colombia, it almost seems as though we've only
learned one thing since our mistakes in Vietnam: how to make new ones.