PENTAGON SHIFTS PRIORITY FROM DRUGS TO TERRORISM

WASHINGTON -- Citing the need to redirect resources to the war on
terrorism, the Pentagon has quietly decided to scale back its effort to
combat international drug trafficking, a central element of the national
"war on drugs" for 14 years.

Officials are still weighing how exactly to pare the $1 billion-a-year
program, but they want to reduce deployment of special-operations troops on
counternarcotics missions and cut back the military's training of anti-drug
police and soldiers in the United States and abroad. And they want to use
intelligence-gathering equipment now devoted to counterdrug work for
counterterrorism as well.

But the military's counternarcotics effort is highly popular among some on
Capitol Hill, where the retrenchment plans could run into trouble. The
plans have not yet been spelled out for lawmakers; however, Defense
Department memos and interviews with current and former officials make the
Pentagon's intentions clear.

Congress ordered a reluctant Pentagon to enter the drug war in 1988, when
surging cocaine traffic from South America sparked a sense of crisis in the
United States. "We should not be relaxing our efforts in the war on drugs,"
said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, chairman of the House Select Committee on
Intelligence and an important advocate for the effort. "Terrorism is the
highest priority, but drugs are still insidious."

T he Pentagon's plans have been couched in indirect terms. They were
signaled this summer in a memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
and distributed to senior uniformed and civilian officials.

He said the department had "carefully reviewed its existing
counternarcotics policy" because of "the changed national-security
environment, the corresponding shift in the department's budget and other
priorities, and evolving support requirements." The Pentagon will now focus
its counternarcotics activities on programs that, among other things,
"contribute to the war on terrorism," Wolfowitz said.

But even before the Sept. 11 attacks, senior officials including Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had bluntly stated their lack of enthusiasm for
the anti-drug mission, which they contend is better handled by civilian
agencies.

Some experts think the Defense Department may be taking advantage of the
war on terrorism to scale back a mission they never wanted.

In an interview, Pentagon counterdrug chief Andre Hollis emphasized that
the Pentagon wants to retain parts of the program that have worked well but
that all the pieces are being examined to determine whether each "is still
a priority mission. The top priorities now are to defend the homeland and
to win the war on terrorism."

Paul Richter is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune publishing
newspaper.