MILITARY DISTRACTED BY DRUG-WAR ROLE

Americans are soon going to be getting more bang for their defense bucks.

The Pentagon last week decided to reduce its role in the drug war in order
to concentrate on the war on terrorism. While some will see this as a blow
to the nation's anti-drug efforts, it reinforces the role of the military:
defense of the country from attack.

It's important to recall from time to time that the military is not merely
a police force with secret high-tech gear and heavy weapons. Its troops are
trained to fight and defeat a physical enemy, not one that does its damage
in small, insidious ways.

Although admittedly we're no fans of the drug war, a person would have to
be unconscious not to see that drugs can do harm to users. But that doesn't
mean fighting them is the role of the military, especially when our troops
are needed for a real, rather than a metaphorical, war.

That's the reason the Pentagon is scaling back its participation in the
drug war. With troops fighting in Afghanistan, training the Philippine army
in counter-terrorism and preparing for a possible invasion of Iraq, the
United States needs every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine it has to
prosecute the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon got involved in the drug war in 1988 when Congress ordered
military leaders into action to try to stem the flow of cocaine from South
America.

Fourteen years and billions of dollars later, almost every young person in
America knows someone who knows someone who can sell you cocaine. That
doesn't sound like a very successful war.

Anyone with a grasp of simple economics is familiar with the law of supply
and demand: when the supply of a product is high, the price goes down and
vice versa. If the drug war, for all its ballyhooed drug confiscations,
were successful, the prices would be so high as to be out of the reach of
most users. Were that the case, our courts and jails wouldn't be full of
people whose problems include drug use.

One of the most expensive Pentagon missions in the drug war is training the
Colombian army to battle the leftist rebels that sell protection to that
country's drug lords. We hope that reducing our involvement there keeps us
from becoming further entangled in a long civil war that has claimed
thousands of lives and shows no signs of abating.

Decisions by the Bush and Clinton administrations threaten to embroil the
United States in that conflict - a civil war and drug war which often
overlap, and have the same players. How are American soldiers supposed to
discern the difference between the two?

With the Pentagon reducing the military's role in the drug war, we hope
they don't have to try.