MORE THAN ONE ROUTE TO PEACE IN COLOMBIA

If a Nobel committee had visited Colombia before awarding the 2009
Peace Prize, I have no doubt how members of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia would have reacted. They would've greeted the
committee members with open arms, tied them up and held them for
ransom. That's how the FARC talks peace. Just ask former
senator/peace-seeker/hostage Ingrid Betancourt.

One of President Barack Obama's competitors for the Peace Prize,
Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, works tirelessly for the cause of
peace in her country, but she does so willfully blind to the rebel
leadership's long, well-documented history of deceit and betrayal in
the name of peace.

I covered Colombia for this newspaper from 1997 to 2003 and spent
lots of time with the FARC leadership. Colombians were, at first,
ecstatic when newly elected President Andres Pastrana announced his
initiative in 1998 to reach a compromise with the FARC. Colombia had
spent more than four decades at war, and as the FARC absorbed the
drug empire abandoned by the country's two dismantled cartels, the
insurgency had become flush with cash and weapons. The government was
losing the war.

Shortly after his inauguration, the conservative Pastrana carved out a
Switzerland-sized "haven" in a swath of southern Colombia where the
FARC could gather without fear of attack. Pastrana ordered the
Colombian army to stand down in the zone as long as the peace process
was under way.

From the beginning, though, the process was troubled. Pastrana was
ditched by his FARC counterpart, Manuel Marulanda, as the president
waited onstage to inaugurate the peace talks. FARC leaders used
stalling tactics for the next three years to extend their access to
the haven while making no concessions for peace. The FARC refused to
abide by a cease-fire. It brought kidnapping victims to the haven. It
landed a hijacked plane and flew it to the zone, then hijacked another
as it left the zone. It was suspected of using the plane to conduct
drug-trafficking operations and smuggle weapons from Venezuela.

Much as journalists liked the zone for the access it gave us to the
guerrillas, the haven was a joke. And once Pastrana finally realized
this, he went on national television on Jan. 9, 2002, spewing venom as
he furiously railed against the FARC. Pastrana provided detail after
detail of his reasons for ending the peace process with a group that
never really intended to negotiate peace.

Colombians also were fed up. A magazine poll showed that more than 95
percent regarded the rebels as kidnappers, murderers and drug
traffickers and not freedom fighters. Cordoba was beginning her second
term in the Colombian Senate when Pastrana took office. Her liberal
leanings, and her experience being kidnapped by a right-wing
paramilitary group, put her squarely in the camp seeking negotiations
with the communist FARC. Unlike Pastrana, she remains committed to
that path in spite of the FARC's record.

Colombians, by wide margins, disagree with her. The raw experiences of
the Pastrana years remain fresh in their minds. If elections are any
gauge of Colombian sentiment, Alvaro Uribe, a hard-liner who favored a
military offensive over peace talks, won the presidential election in
2002 and was re-elected four years later with 62 percent of the vote.

Pastrana gave the rebels their best opportunity to strike a deal, and
they blew it. At the same time he was giving peace a chance, he also
was working closely with the United States to develop Plan Colombia, a
multibillion-dollar effort to attack drug traffickers and build the
Colombian army into a professional fighting force capable of fending
for itself against the FARC, paramilitary groups and others profiting
from the drug trade. This initiative began well before the 9/11
attacks and, in fact, predated the election of Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela. It's anachronistic and a stretch of logic to suggest that
U.S. involvement in Colombia was somehow a guise to seize Venezuela's
oil assets from Chavez.

The United States forced the Colombian military and police to undergo
a rigorous vetting process, which has left both forces in far more
credible and respectable positions, in Colombian eyes, than they were
before. There is still much room for progress, but Colombia's
transformation provides a model of how the United States can address
other presumed "lost causes" around the world.

The fact that Obama supports efforts to strengthen the military and
open a base for U.S. counternarcotics operations in Colombia doesn't
mean he is betraying the ideals behind the Nobel Peace Prize. It is
simply an acknowledgment of the efforts by the Democratic and
Republican presidents who preceded him that the Colombian government
cannot - and should not - negotiate peace from a position of weakness.