DRUG WAR

The crash of a U.S. military plane looking for drugs over Colombia raises
the question: How far are we willing to go to fight narcotics?

The War on Drugs has been raging for more than a decade, and as in other
conflicts, it's been hard to clearly see which side is winning and which is
losing.

The latest drug war casualties appear to be U.S. military personnel aboard a
plane that crashed July 23 in Colombia. It is thought to be the first time
that members of our armed forces have been killed in Colombia while fighting
the production of narcotics.

But they were not the first Americans in Colombia to die in the drug war. In
the previous two years, three American civilian crop dusters, hired with
U.S. government dollars, have died when their planes crashed while spraying
crops intended for drug production.

It may be surprising to the average American that Colombia ranks third
(behind Israel and Egypt) in terms of U.S. military aid. Much of this money
is spent to help the Colombian government reduce illegal drug production.

This strategy is not without merit: To cut down on the number of people
using drugs, eliminate their supply. The question becomes: How deeply are we
willing to commit members of U.S. armed forces to this type of work?

Soldiers as police officers has been a recurring theme in the 1990s -- in
Haiti, in Somalia, in Kosovo. But what about soldiers as drug agents? Is it
the role of a member of the U.S. armed forces to guard our borders, spy on
foreign drug lords (as the five servicemen in Colombia were doing) or train
foreign troops?

And how do you make sure that U.S. drug war dollars aren't funding
countries' other military operations? Assurances on behalf of the United
States and Colombia have been made.

"So long as I am president of Colombia, I will never accept nor permit the
intervention of other countries in the internal problems of our nation,"
Columbia's Andres Pastrana said recently

On Monday, drug czar Barry McCaffrey described the U.S. role as providing
"support in a regional crisis," only for counter-drug operations, not for
counterinsurgency efforts, and always "in absolute deference to the national
sovereignty of our partners."

These statements are hard to reconcile when considering that Colombian
rebels, who are funded by drug money, control about half the country and
have been fighting with government troops for more than a generation.

The rebels' opponents, Colombian army troops, will deploy a U.S.-trained,
950-soldier "anti-narcotics battalion" late in 1999. This marks a shift from
U.S. aid given to the Colombian national police force to dollars given to
the army. That is the same army that in the past has had a poor human rights
record.

By some standards, this means there is no way the United States can involve
itself `only' in a war on drugs in Colombia.

Many U.S. soldiers in Colombia are called `advisers,' a Vietnam-esque word.
The lessons of escalating conflict where U.S. troops and money are involved
are worth remembering by U.S. leaders at the highest level in this war on drugs.

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