PENTAGON QUIETLY SHIFTS DRUG WAR RESOURCES TO TERRORISM EFFORT

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 counter-drug work for
counterterrorism as well.

Congressional Questions

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 J. Goss, R-Fla., 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."

The Pentagon's plans have been couched in indirect terms. They were
signaled this summer in a memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.
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," he added.

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

Thus, some experts believe the Defense Department may be taking advantage
of the war on terrorism to scale back a mission they never wanted.

Lawmakers who support the Pentagon's anti-drug mission have been worried
for some time by what they view as signs that the Rumsfeld team intends to
scale back the effort.

Early last year, top defense officials asked the Pentagon comptroller to
study whether to continue the counternarcotics work and other
"nontraditional" missions. The study recommended paring the program, former
Defense officials say. And some observers note that Rumsfeld has not named
a permanent assistant defense secretary for special operations and low
intensity conflict, who is supposed to oversee the anti-drug program.

In an interview, Pentagon counter-drug 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 if each "is still a
priority mission. The top priorities now are to defend the homeland and to
win the war on terrorism."

Over the years, Hollis said, the counter-narcotics mission has multiplied
into 179 separate sub-programs, a number he called "surreal." He said his
first assignment when he came to the job in August 2001 was to conduct a
"bottom-up review" that would distinguish what the Pentagon does well in
counter-narcotics from "what we shouldn't be doing, or that didn't need to
be done anymore."

In particular, Hollis said, Defense wants to reduce the burden on special
operations forces, which are relatively few in number and in heavy demand
for terrorism-related missions.

And when possible, he said, the department wants to double up on the use of
intelligence-gathering equipment. If, for instance, a National Guard
helicopter is flying along the California-Mexico border "looking for drug
activity, there's no reason why they can't also be looking for terrorists,"
he said.

But a former senior Defense official, who asked for anonymity, said the
counter-drug operations would inevitably get short shrift if forced to
share equipment with anti-terrorism operations.

The Pentagon spent about $1 billion on drug-related operations in fiscal
2002, out of a total federal counternarcotics outlay of $19 billion. The
Pentagon has a bigger anti-drug budget than the Coast Guard, Customs
Service or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and accounts for a
significant share of federal money spent to fight drugs abroad.