U.S. ANTIDRUG PLAN TO AID COLOMBIA IS FACING HURDLES

By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 -- The Clinton administration's $1.3 billion plan
to help Colombia fight drug trafficking and leftist insurgents is
facing skepticism from military and law-enforcement officials
concerned that the United States could be dragged into a long and
costly struggle that may have ultimately little impact on the drug
trade.

The aid plan, which is to be presented in detail to Congress on
Monday, is intended to reduce the booming production of cocaine and
heroin in Colombia, strengthen the government and help it take control
of a large part of its southern territory now dominated by the rebels.

Privately, though, some senior defense officials are decidedly
unenthusiastic about the American military's growing role in the
antidrug effort and worried that it may be dragged deeper into the
civil war that has ravaged Colombia for almost 40 years.

Many drug-enforcement and Coast Guard officials are similarly
concerned, officials said. While the aid package may help Colombia's
army fight the guerrillas, they said, it does not reflect a coherent
strategy to fight illegal drugs.

Virtually none of these complaints have been aired publicly. Officials
said the arguments have been heard repeatedly in the debate over the
aid plan, but that most of the criticisms have been overridden by
administration officials determined to establish a new American
commitment to Colombia's stability.

"Their attitude is, 'We don't really want to do this,' one senior
administration official said of generals in the Pentagon. Referring to
the insurgency, he added: "The last thing they need is another level
of engagement that has the 'I' word in it. That always has stress for
the military -- it has ever since Vietnam."

The White House drug policy chief, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, dismissed
skeptics of the plan, noting that some of the criticism came from
agencies disappointed by their failure to win funding increases under
the Colombia aid package.

"Everybody tried to get aboard this mule," General McCaffrey said in
an interview, referring to the administration's request for $955
million on top of the $330 million already budgeted for Colombia aid
this year. But he added, "There wasn't a huge fight among agencies
over this package."

Senior administration officials said they were confident that the
proposed aid, about two-thirds of which would go to Colombian security
forces, would be approved.

Republicans in Congress have been an important part of the impetus for
greater American assistance, warning that the Clinton White House
risked "losing" Colombia to rebel groups that have been battling the
military with increasing success. A few congressional liberals have
criticized the aid program as militaristic and shortsighted, but they
are unlikely to slow its passage except by attaching conditions meant
to promote greater respect for human rights by the Colombian military.

Still, the package is only a first step in what many United States
officials acknowledge will probably be a huge, years-long effort to
strengthen Colombian institutions and help the government reach a
peace with three leftist guerrilla groups and a number of right-wing
paramilitary forces that operate in different parts of the country.

Both Colombian and American officials continue to say the United
States will not engage the guerrillas directly. Nor, they said, will
they aid the fight against the guerrillas -- except those who hire
themselves out to the traffickers to protect drug fields, drug
laboratories or clandestine airstrips.

"If they are not involved in the business," President Andres Pastrana
said of the rebels in an interview, "they should be confident that
nothing is going to happen to them."

At the same time, though, United States officials are clearly
softening their positions that American aid will not be used for
counterinsurgency.

In a program summary released last month, the White House listed the
primary component of the aid plan as, "Helping the Colombian
Government push into the coca-growing regions of southern Colombia,
which are now dominated by insurgent guerrillas."

Gen. Fred F. Woerner, a former commander of United States military
forces in Latin America, said the statement represented a significant
clarification of the administration's goal.

"How do you push into an area dominated by these guys without having
anything to do with them?" he asked, referring to the rebels. "Anyone
who believes that these counternarcotics battalions will not be
involved in counterinsurgency is naive."

Administration officials said they will argue to Congress that the
situation is dire now because of an explosion in the cultivation of
coca, the raw material of cocaine, in areas of southern Colombia that
the rebels dominate. Their main evidence will be a new study by the
Central Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration
showing that Colombia's coca production over the last two years was
about three times greater than what American analysts had thought.

Until the last few years, nearly all the world's coca was grown in
Bolivia and Peru. But with the introduction of new varieties of the
coca plant, Colombia has more than made up for major reductions of
coca growing in the neighboring countries. Moreover, intelligence
officials said that new refining techniques are enabling Colombian
traffickers to produce more cocaine from their crop than ever before.

While the C.I.A. reported last year that Colombia grew 182 tons of
coca in 1998, officials said the new study will show that it actually
grew a staggering 480 tons, or more than half the worldwide total.
That total, however, is not expected to rise significantly.

"We do not see any signs of an explosion," one official said. Despite
a surging cocaine market in Europe and the former Soviet Union, he
added: "At some point, there has to be an issue of supply and demand."

American military officials agree that the Colombian military should
be strengthened. But many of them are reluctant for the United States
to get more involved in that process -- both because more trainers
would represent a bigger American target for the rebels, and because
of the stress that their deployment would put on Pentagon resources.

Many Defense Department officials fear being drawn more deeply into
Colombia's civil conflict.

"It depends on who you talk to; I am personally concerned about that,"
one senior military official said. But he added: "Here's the dilemma:
Do you just let them go down the tubes? It is far preferable for us to
try to train them and equip them than it is for American troops to
ultimately have to be there."

In the first major draft of the administration's aid plan, put forward
last fall, officials proposed nearly three years of intensive United
States training to create six new special Colombian army battalions to
operate against drug traffickers and the insurgents who support them.

After objections by senior American military officials, the proposal
was scaled back to the creation of two new battalions over about an
eight-month period, administration officials said. A first battalion
has already been trained, and the number of United States military
trainers in Colombia will not be significantly increased, they said.

Some Pentagon officials said they are also concerned about the single
biggest piece of the aid package: 30 sophisticated UH-60 Blackhawk
helicopters being provided to the Colombian military at a cost of more
than $400 million. The aircraft, which will remain State Department
property, are not only extremely expensive but will require extensive
pilot training and cost tens of millions of dollars to operate each
year, officials said.

Law-enforcement officials, for the most part, have more strategic
concerns.

Drug-enforcement officials argue essentially that the push into
southern Colombia -- which was intended to destroy coca-processing
laboratories and secure growing areas from guerrillas -- is important,
but not that important. Under the administration's plan, that campaign
is to cost about $600 million, or nearly half the $1.28 billion to be
spent on the entire package.

By contrast, officials say, successful Drug Enforcement Administration
programs to train and support special Colombian police teams that work
against the country's biggest traffickers cost only a few million
dollars a year.

Other officials assert that Washington should start by pressing the
Colombian government to make important policy changes that would cost
almost nothing. These might include increasing prison sentences for
drug offenses, reorganizing the judiciary, and taking cellular
telephones away from jailed traffickers so they cannot operate from
prison.

"Many of the changes that are required there could be made overnight,"
one American official said, "and they would require no or nominal
amounts of money."

United States Coast Guard officials also argued for a bigger piece of
the new package, officials said. With its own cocaine seizures
booming, the agency sought new funding for innovating programs to
detect drug shipments and deploy armed helicopters against high-speed
drug boats in the Caribbean.

Administration officials said that while they had not included any new
money for those programs in the proposed Colombia package, they had
agreed to ask for about $17 million for the helicopter program next
year, $7 million more than in the current year. But some funds for
other high-priority Coast Guard drug programs have already been
denied, officials said.

"It's very frustrating for us," one official said. "We have
demonstrated that these things work, but we still cannot get the funding."

Last year, administration debate over the aid plan was mainly between
officials who sought greater support for the Colombian military and
those who argued strongly for a bigger complement of social and
economic programs.

Now, administration officials said funding would rise most sharply of
all for nonmilitary programs like crop-substitution efforts,
strengthening human rights and economic development.

"This was a case in which we really said to people, 'How fast can you
spend money?' " one budget official said, referring to United States
economic development officials. "It gets to a question of what is
achieveable; almost none of these programs are in place in Colombia
now."