NOW, STATE OF SIEGE, COLOMBIAN STYLE

WASHINGTON -- A Latin American country slides toward chaos. Leftist
guerrillas attack the government, right-wing death squads attack
guerrilla sympathizers, peace talks falter. The economy spirals
downward, scattering thousands of refugees, and fears of instability
sweep through the region. The United States hurries to the rescue with
hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.

With the Colombian Government facing its most serious crisis in years,
Clinton Administration officials confirmed last week that they are
putting together a package of military and economic assistance that
could reach dimensions not seen in the hemisphere since the cold war.
They are also trying to reassure anyone who will listen that Colombia
today really looks nothing like El Salvador once did.

The United States will not be giving Colombia lots of sophisticated
weapons and aircraft, the officials say, nor will legions of Colombian
soldiers be training at Ft. Bragg. American military advisers in
Colombia are to help troops there fight the drug trade rather than
insurgents, except where the insurgents protect the trade. "There are,
in my view, few if any really logical, easy comparisons to make
between El Salvador 10 years ago and Colombia now," said the Under
Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas R. Pickering, who
once presided over the military build-up in El Salvador as the United
States Ambassador there.

Still, there are many in the Administration and many more outside it
who see quicksand in Colombia. The government that Washington is
supporting in BogotE1 is weak and increasingly unpopular. The army it
trains has been ineffective on the battlefield and frequently
complicit in the massacres of civilians by rightist paramilitary
groups. The rebel armies it hopes to bend have held out in the jungles
for decades. The Administration is also on unsteady ground at home:
For domestic political reasons, it has proclaimed a central goal in
Colombia -- curtailing the drug trade -- that will likely mislead
Americans about what it hopes to achieve there.

What has panicked both the Clinton Administration and Congressional
Republicans is not so much the latest turn in Colombia's cocaine
problem as the growing troubles of its new President, AndrE9s
Pastrana. Little more than a year after Mr. Pastrana came to power
with bold concessions intended to bring the biggest rebel army to the
negotiating table, the talks are stalled in the earliest stages, the
guerrillas appear stronger and more recalcitrant and the President is
widely criticized as naEFve. Unrest within the armed forces has
surged and paramilitary killings have continued. The country's
long-buoyant economy, having made it through the regional debt crisis
of the 1980's relatively unscathed, is suffering its most severe
recession in decades.

Whether the United States sinks deeper into Colombia's troubles or
helps to solve them may ultimately depend a good deal on how it
defines its objectives there. Over the last three months, officials
have gone to unusual lengths to reconsider those aims: Working groups
have been set up, strategy papers have been prepared and assistant
secretaries of all sorts have shuttled back and forth to BogotE1. Yet
even as that review got under way, senior officials seemed to limit
its parameters: The center of American policy, they insisted -- "the
spear point," as Mr. Pickering put it -- will remain the illicit drug
trade.

Colombia's drug problem has taken a significant turn for the worse.
Over the last several years, as the authorities in Bolivia and Peru
have made headway in intercepting drug planes and helping poor farmers
supplant crops of coca, the raw material of cocaine, drug producers
have sharply expanded their fields in remote, sparsely populated areas
of southern Colombia. That shift has strengthened both the Colombian
producers and their guerrilla allies, who profit by taxing the coca
fields and hiring out to guard jungle air strips and drug-processing
labs.

Nonetheless, the drug "emergency" that some senior United States
officials have begun to describe does not necessarily threaten new
waves of cocaine washing onto American streets. It is not clear how or
even whether the shifting of coca crops around the region will affect
the availability or price of cocaine abroad. Nor, despite
technological advances in tracking drug shipments through the
Caribbean, can the Administration promise that better-funded
interdiction efforts will seriously reduce the flows of cocaine and
heroin into the United States.

According to several officials, most of the aid proposals being
circulated internally would give relatively short shrift to such basic
(and comparatively inexpensive) solutions as the training of
Colombia's judges and the strengthening of its notoriously porous
prisons. Instead, American "counternarcotics" aid will aim to help the
security forces beat back the guerrillas in southern Colombia so that
crop-spraying and lab raids can proceed. As illogical as the assurance
increasingly sounds, Administration officials continue to insist that
the United States will stay out of the civil war.

In private, at least, such officials are more candid about
acknowledging that a decade after the cold war's end, the drug fight
is the only policy objective likely to win political support for the
$1 billion to $2 billion in aid that they have talked of putting
forward over the next three years. (Even then, a Colombia package will
have to compete in the weeks ahead with foreign-aid proposals ranging
from help for peacekeeping in Africa to support for the
Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.)

It is hardly disputed that the United States has other significant
interests in Colombia, from oil fields to radar stations to the
stability of a democratic ally. In recent months, State Department and
National Security Council officials, in particular, have pressed for
what they call a more "integrated" approach -- one that might include
trade benefits, development aid and human rights programs as well as
military support. But as Colombia's military leaders showed their wish
lists around Washington last week, it appeared that some central
issues remained unresolved: how the beleaguered military might best be
strengthened, how the guerrillas might be drawn into serious talks,
and how those two goals interlock. I N a July 20 letter to Mr.
Pastrana, President Clinton suggested a new point of departure for
American policy, saying, "The hardest step may be the first:
convincing all sides in Colombia that a military solution is not
possible and that all will gain from a negotiated settlement." But
neither Mr. Clinton nor his senior aides have explained clearly how
this might be achieved. Administration officials have begun trying to
recruit other Latin American countries and United Nations mediators to
bring pressure on both sides. In the meantime, the search for a
comprehensive strategy in Colombia continues to resemble a
free-for-all in which different factions of the Administration have
put forward different aid proposals -- many of them with different
implications for how to wage peace.

Some United States officials, including the commander of American
military forces in Latin America, Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, argue that
only significant reverses on the battlefield will bring the rebels to
the bargaining table. But at the pace at which the United States is
now training and re-equipping the Colombian military, officials say it
could take years to start changing the military balance. Critics of
the policy also ask what might happen if Colombia's generals gain
unexpected ground against the guerrillas -- and decide to continue
fighting in order to press for a better deal.

"So far, the thinking has not gone much beyond, 'Let's get some
helicopters in there,' " said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the
Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research group based in Washington.

Viewed from Washington, the greatest difference between Colombia in
1999 and El Salvador in 1979 may be that virtually no one in the White
House now believes Colombia's Government is in any immediate danger of
falling to the rebels. That consensus may make it harder for officials
to argue for a huge "emergency" infusion of American aid. It could,
however, be the basis for an approach to Colombia's problems that
might be sustained even when the flow of illicit drugs fails to
miraculously end.