MILITARY IS NOT SUITED FOR POLICE WORK

With the delicacy of someone seasoned by much experience near the summit of
government, Donald Rumsfeld has indicated strong skepticism about a policy
from which this country may reap a bumper crop of regrets. Asked about the
$1.6 billion -- so far -- undertaking to help fight the drug war in
Colombia, Rumsfeld said he had not formulated an opinion. But he
embroidered his agnosticism with thoughts antithetical to the program for
which George W. Bush, during the campaign, indicated support.

In his confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld, the next secretary of defense, said
combating illicit drugs is "overwhelmingly a demand problem," and added:
"If demand persists, it's going to get what it wants. And if it isn't from
Colombia, it's going to be from someplace else."

Indeed. In authorizing the aid for Colombia, Congress demanded,
delusionally, the elimination of all of Colombia's coca and opium poppy
cultivation by 2005. That would almost certainly mean a commensurate
increase in cultivation in Colombia's neighbors. One reason Colombia is the
source of nearly 90 percent of the world's cocaine and a growing portion of
heroin is that U.S. pressure on coca and poppy production in countries
contiguous to Colombia, especially Peru and Bolivia, drove production into
Colombia, where coca production has increased 140 percent -- to 300,000
acres -- in five years.

Now pressure on Colombia is pushing production into Colombia's neighbors.
The New York Times reports that cocaine processing labs have recently been
found in Ecuador's Amazon region. This is evidence that local peasants,
who have crossed the border in recent years to work in the cocaine
business, are "returning with the drug expertise they have acquired in
Colombia."

Regarding the use of the U.S. military in policing this region, it is
depressing to have to say something that should be obvious, but here goes:
The military's task is to deter war and, should deterrence fail, to swiftly
and successfully inflict lethal violence on enemies. It is difficult
enough filling an all-volunteer military with motivated warriors without
blurring the distinction between military service and police work.

The $1.6 billion for Colombia will mostly pay for helicopters that
Colombia's military will use to attack drug factories and 17,000 Marxist
guerrillas, who are the world's most affluent insurgents. They use drug
trafficking, taxes on coca production, extortion and ransoms -- grossing
perhaps as much as $900 million a year -- to wage a war now in its fourth
decade. The guerrillas also are opposed by right-wing paramilitary forces
- -- 8,000 strong and growing -- that are increasingly involved in drug
trafficking.

Speaking of narcotics, Colombia has a "peace process" with a familiar
asymmetry: Colombia's government wants to tame the guerrillas with a peace
agreement; the guerrillas want to topple the government. Colombia's
government is creating a second demilitarized zone in the country, this one
for the second-largest guerrilla group to use as a haven during peace
talks. But The Washington Post reports that since the first such haven was
created two years ago for the largest guerrilla group, that group has used
it "to increase drug cultivation, stage military offensives, train new
recruits and hold more than 450 soldiers and police officers captive in
open-air pens."

Kidnapping has become industrialized in Colombia, and assassins can be
hired for "a few pesos" according to Brian Michael Jenkins. Writing in the
National Interest quarterly, Jenkins, an analyst of political violence and
international crime, says Colombia's 30,000 murders unrelated to war
translate into 100 deaths per 100,000 Colombians, a rate which in the
United States would mean 250,000 murders a year (more than 10 times the
actual U.S. rate of recent years).

Colombia, Jenkins says, is a combination success story and tragedy. The
unemployment rate is 20 percent, and will go higher if defoliants and other
anti-drug efforts put small growers and processors out of business. But
Colombia has Latin America's fourth-largest economy and one of its highest
literacy rates. It has 40 flourishing universities and has never defaulted
on its debts. Yet a Gallup poll reveals that 40 percent of Colombians have
considered emigrating and 60 percent know someone who has emigrated in the
past two years.

Colombia's drug-related agonies are largely traceable to U.S. cities.
Although one-third of Colombia's cocaine goes to Europe, America's annual
$50 billion demand is a powerful suction pulling in several hundred tons of
cheaply made, easily transportable and staggeringly profitable substances.
Here is the arithmetic of futility: About one-third of cocaine destined for
the United States is interdicted, yet the street price has been halved in
the past decade of fighting the drug war on the supply side.