DO YOU LOVE THE SMELL OF COCA IN THE MORNING?

It will be the leftist dream come true, this Plan Colombia to dump $1.7
billion over the next two years in "emergency requests" for antidrug efforts
in the South American country.

When poor Colombian farmers and citizens die from the bullets flying between
American military personnel in-country to support the Colombian army's
antidrug battle with revolutionary forces, see how long it takes for
American soldiers to be painted as repressive democratic dogs by guerrilla
leaders wanting to capitalize on U.S. involvement.

The "emergency" in Colombia, brewing since the mid-'90s, is actually the
Clinton administration's late-term discovery that ignoring South America for
most of its tenure is coming home to roost as an incredible failure.

Clinton has to do something and fast to avoid one of his legacies being the
abject failure of the war on drugs in South America.

And what better time to propose a billion-dollar aid package than an
election year, when members of Congress will be hard-pressed to object for
fear that their opponents will label them as soft on the drug war?

What's so terribly wrong with this plan? The fact that, of the $1.3 billion
proposed in emergency funding, $1 billion of it is going to military and
police assistance.

It's not going to crop substitution programs; not to building roads so that
farmers can get those substituted crops to market; and not to judicial
reform, human rights protections or initiatives to stop high-tech crimes
like money laundering an all-important aspect of the drug trade.

Nope, the United States is going to do a little aerial fumigation to kill
off those coca fields that can actually be seen from the air, and a lot of
training and equipping of a military embroiled in a civil war. Never mind
that federal law prohibits the United States from doing just that.

Section 1004 of the 1991 National Defense Authorization Act allows foreign
military training only for anti-drug efforts.

Defense funds cannot legally be used to train foreign troops for
counterinsurgency purposes. Yet the line between the two is so fuzzed that
no one can tell the difference.

Even U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey suggested in July that differentiating
between anti-drug and anti-insurgency efforts is counterproductive,
indicating that the two are interdependent.

Proponents of the plan, including Kenneth MacKay Jr., the president's
special envoy to the Americas, point to the successes of the mid-to late
'90s of reducing the coca crops in Peru and Bolivia.

"The plan builds on the very successful strategies that were carried out
with Peru and Bolivia that succeeded in reducing the amount of cocaine
produced in those two countries by 55 and 65 percent, respectively, over the
last three years, thus reducing the amount of cheap cocaine making its way
into our country," MacKay wrote in an opinion piece submitted to U.S.
newspapers last week.

"Critics who say that the plan will not work must consider the evidence in
Peru and Bolivia."

OK, let's consider Peru and Bolivia. Coca production there declined because
of a series of crop substitution programs funded by the international
community and because of a Peruvian government policy of shooting or forcing
down planes suspected of shipping coca to Colombia, where the processing and
smuggling has always taken place, even for Peruvian and Bolivian grown
plants.

And it didn't dry up coca production in South America. The drug cartels just
moved the entire operation into the southern plains of Colombia.

This package is more of the same as the Center for International Policy puts
it all stick and no carrot. It will do little to stop drug flow while
forcing desperate small-scale growers to move farther into the jungles while
turning to armed groups for help.

And for the first time, U.S.-aided units will be engaging in offensive
operations against guerrillas who are holed up in their oldest, most
fiercely defended strongholds.

Welcome to Vietnam, millennium-style.