ENTERING COLOMBIA'S CIVIL WAR WON'T SOLVE THE U.S. PROBLEM

PARIS - The Clinton administration has put before Congress an
"emergency" $1.6 billion program to expand military assistance to the
Colombian army and security forces fighting both an insurrection and
the drug trade.

Administration officials say this program will be part of what will
"probably be a huge effort, lasting for years," whose objective is "to
strengthen Colombian institutions and help the government reach a
peace" with the leftist guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitary
forces responsible for years of chaotic violence in Colombia.

The guerrillas claim to defend peasants evicted from their land, and
have a program of social revolution. The main rebel group currently
has a delegation in Europe looking for support.

The guerrillas are subsidized by coca dealers operating in the regions
they control. The militias are backed by landowners and supposedly
have ties to the army, whose own record displays a lack of efficiency
and poor regard for human rights.

The ingredients in this story are classic in recent Latin American
history. Washington's is the classic U.S. response, which in the past
has invariably failed.

Washington alleges that Colombia now produces more than half the
world's coca, most of which, when turned into cocaine, reaches the
United States. Its alarm rests on a new CIA and Drug Enforcement
Administration study, which claims that' Colombia's current coca
production, is some. three times greater than American analysts had
previously thought.

One must ask if it is the reality that has changed or the accuracy of
Washington's analyses. Politically, it makes little difference. The
administration has convinced itself that new American-trained mobile
army battalions (originally five, with three years' training, cutback
to two with eight months of instruction) and a new fleet of 30 highly
expensive Blackhawk helicopters are needed for the Colombian army.

The government of Colombia wants to increase U.S. involvement,
although President Andres Pastrana insists that he will not allow
active U.S. military intervention -- which, according to some polls,
is what a majority of Colombians want.

There are many in the U.S. government (notably the Pentagon, allergic
to counterinsurgency wars) to whom all this seems depressingly
familiar. The White House policy chief on drug policy, Barry
McCaffrey, replies that some of this criticism merely comes from
agencies that lost out on funding.

The U.S. Coast Guard and 'the Drug Enforcement Administration insist
that they have demonstrated better ways to deal with the drug trade
than subsidizing civil war inside Colombia. Other critics make the
usual argument for social and economic reform in Colombia, rather than
a bigger war. (Colombia is experiencing its worst economic conditions
in a half-century.)

Whatever the criticisms, the program is expected to be approved by
Congress. Its popularity reflects an understandable but ultimately
vain wish to solve an American domestic problem somewhere other than
in the United States.

The world's biggest market for drugs is in the United States. As any
of the Clinton administration's apostles of trade globalization could
explain, when the rewards of a market are very great (in this case,
because official repression creates an artificial scarcity of
cocaine), the demand will be met.

Even if this U.S.-financed extension and intensification of the
Colombian government's effort to eradicate coca production should
succeed (which is not likely, but never mind), coca production would
simply move someplace else. The demand would still be there.

The venture capitalists on the dark side of the globalized economy are
willing to finance new sources of drug supply. For them the risks are
negligible. The real risks of the drug trade are off-loaded onto
lower-ranking functionaries in the business, including the U.S. street
dealers who now overburden American prisons.

The drug problem is inside the United States, not outside it. Why
reinforce a Colombian army with a poor record, which operates in the
social and political environment of a country that has been at war
with itself for most of its modern history, while refusing funds to
the U.S. Coast Guard to expand surveillance and interdiction of drugs
coming into the United States?

Some critics of U.S. drug policy want legalization or even
nationalization of drug supplies, in order to take the profits out of
the trade. Others oppose so radical a policy shift, citing some of the
unforeseen consequences of Dutch, Swiss and other experiments with
legalization. However, this is a legitimate debate. dealing with the
source of the problem. It does not project the solution elsewhere.

The drug trade responds to U.S. demand. Colombia's production and
exports are merely a sideline in an indigenous political and social
struggle whose causes have nothing to do with drugs, and for which the
United States has no answers,