THE WRONG WAR

Our Guns and Tanks Won't Bring An End to Colombia's Civil Strife

There are many bad ways to conduct foreign policy, but surely one of the
worst is to take a complex challenge and reduce it to a single issue.
Colombia is not just the place that feeds America's voracious appetite for
illegal drugs. It is a country almost three times as large as California
with 40 million people and a tangled, brutal history.

Over much of the last half century, democratic governance has failed to
provide minimal standards of equity, stability and justice for the
Colombian people. The violent and massive expulsion of campesinos from
their lands over the past 30 years gave rise to a rural insurgency known as
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Although today the
FARC controls about 50 percent of the nation's territory, White House drug
policy adviser Barry McCaffrey dismisses the FARC as "narco-guerrillas" and
proposes equipping the Colombian army and police to overcome the
guerrillas--to the tune of $550 million in new U.S. military assistance.
This is a sizable amount--enough to engage U.S. prestige and power in
another country's civil war.

If McCaffrey has his way, Colombia will become the world's third-largest
recipient of U.S. military aid. Yet the Colombian military is implicated in
the drug trade. Colombians often refer to their blue-clad air force as the
"blue cartel"--a term usually reserved for powerful drug rings in Medellin,
Cali and so on. In November 1998, when the aircraft of the chief of the
military air transport command landed in Miami, the Drug Enforcement
Administration found more than a half-ton of cocaine on the plane.

What ails the Colombian military is beyond the power of the United States
to remedy. McCaffrey has referred to the Colombian soldiers who die
battling guerrillas as heroes--and so they are. But morale in the armed
forces is low and the desertion rate high. Draftees with high school
educations are exempted from combat. The sons of workers and campesinos who
have been deprived of education may be semi-literate but they understand
that in the Colombian army, as in Colombian society, the system is rigged
against them.

Under the apparently infinitely elastic guidelines of fighting the drug
war, the United States already has 300 to 400 military and civilian
personnel in Colombia. They operate five radar systems, train army and
police battalions, monitor internal communications, fly spy missions over
guerrilla territory and provide intelligence on insurgent activity to the
Colombian military. In July, a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane either
crashed or was shot down, killing five Americans and two Colombians. Since
these programs began, Colombian exports of cocaine have more than doubled.

There is another way, one that was recognized by the war-weary Colombian
electorate when in 1998 it elected a courageous president, Andres Pastrana,
to negotiate with the insurgents. From the outset, Pastrana has rejected
the characterization of the FARC as "narco-guerrillas"; to him they are
revolutionaries who seek political power through force of arms, but who are
open to negotiations and compromise. The escalating U.S. military
involvement has done serious harm to Pastrana's strategy of peace and
reconciliation. Speculation that Washington would soon increase its
military presence reached such a pitch in response to McCaffrey's recent
statements that Pastrana called a news conference last month to declare,
"As long as I am president there will be no foreign military intervention
in Colombia."

It reminded me of a similar pledge, in 1981, by El Salvador's president
Jose Napoleon Duarte when I was U.S. ambassador to that country. The Reagan
administration sent military advisers and stepped up aid to El Salvador
soon thereafter, arguing that the Salvadorean rebels fought not for their
own cause, but rather were hirelings of Moscow and Havana. Today,
Washington must look elsewhere to justify its penchant for military
involvement in the internal conflicts of other nations. In the case of
Colombia, some members of the Clinton administration have seized on the
anti-drug program as the camouflage necessary for taking sides in the civil
war.

Pastrana's peace effort is a little more than a year old, and it has
already achieved one signal success. In May, his government signed a
potentially far-reaching agreement clearing the way for formal negotiations
with the FARC. Known as the Common Agenda, it implicitly recognizes that
the revolutionaries took up arms in a just cause and commits both parties
to negotiate profound economic and social reforms through political
compromise. Among other measures, the Common Agenda calls for an end to the
cultivation of illicit drugs and demands the confiscation and
redistribution of the huge estates purchased with drug profits. It also
requires the Colombian army to fight against the paramilitary forces that
are funded by large landowners involved in the production and trafficking
of cocaine and heroin. These shadowy figures have a vested interest in a
violence-torn, fragmented Colombia without law or justice.

In order to give the FARC a sense of security and to convince the group of
the government's good faith, Pastrana took the controversial step of
granting the FARC temporary dominion over a territory the size of
Switzerland. In June, I flew to this remote zone with a group that included
Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.). As soon as our plane landed, we set out on
the jolting drive along a rutted dirt highway to FARC military
headquarters. At various checkpoints, FARC banners proclaimed "Welcome! We
are people of peace," and "Welcome to the laboratory of peace."

As I gazed at the neglected countryside, my mind went back more than 20
years to when, as a diplomat in Bogota, I had traveled to other remote
regions of Colombia. Then as now, there were few signs that the government
had ever invested a peso in education, health care or farm-to-market roads.
Back then, I gave talks to rural communities assuring them that the U.S.
and Colombian governments remained committed to the Alliance for Progress
reforms of President John F. Kennedy. But successive Colombian governments
reneged on promises of reform, including a pledge to extend the rule of law
into the countryside. And Washington, in the ideological grip of the Cold
War, concentrated its major funding on counterinsurgency programs that I
believe strengthened the violent extremes in Colombia and elsewhere in the
region.

Our delegation and Victor G. Ricardo, the Colombian government's peace
envoy, arrived at revolutionary headquarters. We met for two hours with
Raul Reyes, the veteran FARC leader and member of its seven-member ruling
council. Delahunt spoke eloquently of peace and asked for the FARC's help
against the drug trade. Reyes spoke favorably of Pastrana and of the U.S.
program of substituting legal crops for coca, the plant from which cocaine
is made. He pledged that the FARC would cooperate with the program, cited
FARC concessions in the talks and promised more. "The FARC is the best ally
the United States could have against drugs," he said.

I cannot state with any certainty that the FARC leader meant what he said.
In recent weeks, the revolutionaries have launched a series of ferocious
attacks against the Colombian army that eroded popular confidence in the
president's peace strategy. But before the United States sets itself up for
another Central America-style failed military intervention, the FARC's
offer of cooperation should be put to the test. Colombians are fortunate to
have a leader who understands that foreign arms and foreign advisers will
only complicate and impede his strategy of renewing the Colombian nation
through dialogue and compromise.

As if to reassure Pastrana that someone in the Clinton administration
grasps the complexities of the Colombian challenge, Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last
month, "After 38 years of struggle it should be clear that a decisive
military outcome [in Colombia] is unlikely." She properly condemned the
outrages regularly committed by the guerrillas, yet avoided dismissing all
of them as "terrorists" or "criminals." She also noted the barbarity of the
right-wing paramilitary forces that carry out, often in collusion with
local Colombian army units, massacres of unarmed campesino families.

Despite Albright's statement, U.S. policy remains ambivalent, torn between
increased U.S. involvement in search of a military solution to the civil
war and an unequivocal backing of Pastrana's strategy of a negotiated
peace, which President Clinton has endorsed. The first course of action
would result in the weakening of elected civil government. While the logic
of Albright's analysis would not exclude sufficient assistance to ensure
that the guerrillas do not gain militarily by stretching out the
negotiations, it would emphasize diplomatic and economic support to build
momentum for peace.

As long as the administration's words and actions project confusion and
disarray, the situation in Colombia will continue to deteriorate.

Robert White, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, is president
of the Center for International Policy in Washington.