YES ON AID TO COLOMBIA

THE REVOLUTIONARY Armed Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym
FARC) have been fighting for power for nearly four decades.

They have little support among Colombia's people, but thanks to payoffs
from the drug producers they protect, the FARC has grown into a 15,000-man
army equipped with the best weapons and communications technology money can
buy--better, by and large, than the Colombian army has. Small wonder, then,
that the FARC now controls nearly a third of the country, including a
Switzerland-sized zone ceded by President Andres Pastrana - a token of
negotiating good faith that the FARC has not seen fit to reciprocate.

Clearly the FARC threatens the stability and territorial integrity of Latin
America's fourth-largest country.

Does that make it a threat to U.S. interests as well? The Clinton
administration says yes; it is proposing a two-year, $1.3 billion aid
package aimed principally at improving the Colombian military's equipment,
mobility and training.

The largest component would be $385 million for 30 new Black Hawk
helicopters to help ferry three U.S.-trained battalions into action.

The administration says that to fight the FARC is to fight drug trafficking
and, by extension, street crime in America. Critics assert that U.S.
military aid portends a counterinsurgency war of the kind El Salvador waged
during the late Cold War, or worse, an Andean Vietnam.

We agree that the anti-drug rationale is a distinction without a difference
- - but we support aid for Colombia nevertheless. Indeed, we wonder why
preventing an unpopular and thuggish army with a long record of kidnapping
and assassination (including, recently, the assassination of three American
citizens) should necessarily be a more suspect objective than breaking up
one of the drug cartels' protection forces.

As always, such an effort must be weighed not only against the undeniable
costs of plunging in but also against the potential costs of doing nothing.

Colombia's armed forces have themselves been corrupt and linked to brutal
paramilitary forces that also protect drug production and kill even more
civilians than the FARC does. Accordingly, the administration has used the
promise of aid as leverage to demand that President Pastrana purge the
worst officers, and has pledged to abide scrupulously by the Leahy
amendment requiring that the U.S.-trained battalions be vetted for
human-rights probity, soldier by soldier.

Mr. Pastrana already has forced some generals into retirement and claims
improvemement in the army's human rights record.

Presumably, if the the army can carry the fight to the FARC, its dependence
on paramilitaries could lessen.

The best reason for the aid, however, is that it will help in the search
for a negotiated settlement to the war, which is the strategic objective of
both President Pastrana and President Clinton. In this respect, critics who
say the administration's proposal would complicate peace talks are falling
for the FARC's bluff.

In fact, the FARC will not bargain in good faith unless confronted with a
credible military threat.

In recent days the FARC has quite visibly emphasized its commitment to
negotiations in ways that include an agreement to meetings with government
negotiators in Sweden. This show of peacefulness, while probably only a
show, is a sign of what the FARC feels obliged to do when confronted with
the mere possibility of American aid to Colombia. An appropriately
conditioned and decisively executed American commitment could make them, at
last, bargain for real.