WE'RE JUST ASKING FOR ANOTHER VIETNAM IN COLOMBIA

ALTHOUGH President Clinton seems unaware of it, the $1.6 billion he is
requesting to fight coca production in Colombia amounts to
intervention in another country's civil war. Neither the president nor
the secretary of state has given the American people any coherent
explanation of what is at stake in Colombia or of how massive military
assistance can do anything but make matters worse.

Americans have always been skeptical about the wisdom of intervening
in the civil wars of other countries. Although our diplomatic history
is studded with lapses, the doctrine of nonintervention still carries
considerable weight -- enough to require that those advocating
military excursions be able to justify them in terms of global threats
to national security.

Our intervention in El Salvador's struggle was not true intervention,
President Reagan argued, because the revolutionaries were fighting not
in their own cause but as hirelings of Moscow and Havana. The
rationale for involving the United States in Colombia's civil war
rests on the equally specious ground that the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is not an authentic insurgency but an
armed drug cartel that fights to protect illicit profits --
"narco-guerrillas," to quote from the charged vocabulary of the White
House drug policy adviser, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey.

The largest component of the military assistance, called "Push into
Southern Colombia," calls for $600 million to train two additional
special counternarcotics battalions with 30 Blackhawk helicopters and
33 Huey helicopters so the army "can access this remote and
undeveloped region of Colombia." Some funding would "provide shelter
and employment to the Colombian people who will be displaced."
Although there is $145 million for crop substitution, the emphasis
will continue to be on aerial spraying of herbicides to destroy the
coca leaf. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a
counterinsurgency strategy packaged as a counternarcotics program.

To McCaffrey, with a thin background in foreign policy and a mandate
to win the war on narcotics, it must seem logical to reduce complex
political, economic and social forces to one manageable target and
attack it with military force. But is it too much to hope that
experienced diplomats will grasp the elementary proposition that an
insurgency that has acquired the strength and cohesion necessary to
dominate 40 percent of the national territory represents something
authentic in the history of Colombia, something not adequately
explained by references to illicit commerce?

Has it truly escaped senior administration aides that the Colombian
civil war is more about massacres of civilians and selective
assassinations than armed confrontation? Does it really not matter
that to declare war on the FARC puts us in league with a Colombian
military that has long-standing ties to the drug-dealing, barbaric
paramilitaries that commit more than 75 percent of the human rights
violations afflicting that violence-torn country?

It's curious that a government as sophisticated as ours should cling
to the naive belief that spraying with herbicides can do anything but
drive the campesino cultivators deeper into the jungle. The campesinos
grow coca not just because it commands bonanza prices but because the
traffickers' planes land nearby and pay cash on the barrelhead.

Alternative production -- rubber and palm oil, for example -- could
compete because their prices, while lower, are more stable. But the
isolated farmers cannot get their crops to the city. The $1.3 billion
in the Colombia aid package for war could be more constructively used
to build farm-to-market highways that would peacefully carry the
government's authority into this remote zone.

Nowhere in the official statements on Colombia will Congress find any
discussion of risks vs. rewards, nor any measurement of objectives in
relation to resources. Recall that in El Salvador, our bloody,
divisive 12-year pursuit of military victory proved fruitless. We
finally settled for a U.N.-brokered accord that granted the guerrillas
many of their demands.

The FARC-controlled territory that this program casually commits us to
reconquer is 20 times as large as El Salvador -- roughly the size of
California. The Colombian military has no experience in carrying the
war to the insurgents. What will happen when FARC troops, at home in
jungle and savanna, repel the army and shoot down our helicopters?
Will we then swallow the bitter pill of political-military defeat? Not
if Vietnam and Central America are any guide. Far more likely we will
plunge deeper into the quagmire.

White, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, is president
of the Center for International Policy, in Washington, D.C.