JUNGLE CRASH, POLICY CLASH

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-guerrilla policy that is going on between the
American and Colombian governments on one side and the House 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. To 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 anti-drug 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 Andres 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.