SHADES OF VIETNAM

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 did not truly constitute
intervention, President Reagan argued, because the revolutionaries were not
fighting 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 FARC--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia--are 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
McCaffrey.

The largest component of the military assistance, titled "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 of the 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 is hard to avoid the conclusion that
this is a counterinsurgency strategy packaged as a counternarcotics program.

To Gen. 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 longstanding ties
to the drug-dealing, barbaric paramilitaries that commit more than 75
percent of the human rights violations afflicting that violence-torn
country?

It is 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 or 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.