CONFUSED BY COLOMBIA

The crash of a U.S. military reconnaissance plane with seven aboard in the
jungle of southern Colombia has produced the first American casualties in
the violence there.

The loss is bound to exacerbate the struggle for the control of anti-drug
and anti-guerillla policy that is going on between the American and
Colombian governments on one side and the U.S. House of Representatives on
the other.

The Colombian government, supported by Washington, takes as its first goal
domestic peace -- a resolution of a 40-year-old government-guerrilla
struggle that has a latter-day anti-drug edge but that exists apart from
it. For the House, however, the first goal is the war against drugs.

House Republicans have used their power to reach into Colombia and to
select a particular official, the commander of the national police, as the
favored recipient of American military aid, and to give it to him for
policy purposes apart from what has been approved by the U.S. government,
for different hardware and in larger sums.

The House policy does not lack appeal.

It addresses what most troubles Americans about Colombia: its anarchic
state in which the government cannot contain the flow of cocaine and heroin
to the United States. The Clinton administration addresses that antidrug
purpose but by way of first addressing ' the peace purpose of the Colombian
government.

But it is bizarre, even interventionist and offensive, to exploit another
country's distress in order to snatch from it a sensitive part of its
internal apparatus and then to apply that part to a strategy that is not
shared by the host government. The policy is almost certainly bound to fail
as Colombians resist this provocative theft of their sovereignty from the
inside.

There is no sure good policy for Colombia. That is what prompts impatient
drug fighters in the House to reach out in this rash manner.

But there is a policy that is perhaps a little better, and it is a variant
of President Andre Pastrana's attempt to temper military action with
political reconciliation and to move beyond crop eradication to crop
substitution. That policy goes poorly at the moment, thanks particularly to
the bad faith of the drug trafficking guerrillas, who recently used a
government-granted -demilitarized zone-to launch an offensive.

But such a policy, capably conducted, promises to earn from international
as well as Colombian sources the kind of support a workable policy must enjoy.