WHAT KIND OF WAR FOR COLOMBIA?

History Repeating Itself?

In 1958, the United States sent a CIA team to assess conditions in
Colombia, where, over ten years, a low-grade civil war known as La
Violencia had brought more than 200,000 deaths.

The CIA's agents concluded that the country, due to its predilection for
violence, the absence of state authority in rural areas, inequitable land
distribution, and widespread lawlessness and poverty, risked "genocide or
chaos." Although it doubted that the local elite would agree to major
reforms, the CIA team recommended a comprehensive nation-building package
to U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter and the new Colombian
president, Alberto Lleras: Washington would help Bogota strengthen its
judiciary, implement significant land reform, and eliminate the rural
guerrilla insurgency, which at the time numbered between 1,200 and 2,000
members.

Only the security-related recommendations were adopted, however.

The conflict never really ended, and thanks to the same gross inequality
and culture of violence that existed 50 years ago, a large-scale war over
drugs and oil is moving from simmer to boil. Washington and Bogota now face
a fateful choice: dirty war, or less dirty war. But the United States must
not repeat the mistakes of the past by once more limiting its role to the
military sphere.

The direction chosen by these two countries will have far-reaching
consequences, for Colombia, the Andean region, and the United States.

In August of this year, Colombia inaugurated a new president: Alvaro Uribe,
an independent, Oxford- and Harvard-trained former mayor and governor whose
father was killed by the rebels and who has himself survived four
assassination attempts.

Uribe was elected with an unprecedented first-round majority after
Colombia's four-year-old peace process collapsed earlier this year.
Sweeping into office on a hard-line platform, the president-elect promised
to provide Colombians with "democratic security" -- meaning a frontal
assault on the country's two leftist guerrilla groups and, perhaps, its
right-wing paramilitaries as well.

Stopping these rebels will not be easy. Colombia's new president faces
three main opponents: an 18,000-strong drug-financed insurgent group, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym,
FARC); a 12,000-body paramilitary umbrella group, the United Self-Defense
Groups of Colombia (AUC), also financed by drug money; and a dwindling
leftist insurgency, the National Liberation Army (ELN), that still boasts
3,500-5,000 guerrillas.

All three groups appear on the State Department's list of terrorist
organizations. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard Colombia's
conflict as only a terrorist or drug problem.

Nor should it be considered a classic Marxist insurgency or
counterinsurgency. It is, rather, a mix of all these elements.

The FARC, the AUC, and the ELN fight not just the Colombian state, but also
each other and the country's civil society.

All three groups are also, in a sense, criminal gangs: the FARC and the AUC
support themselves primarily through the coca and poppy industries and
ancillary kidnapping, extortion, and assassination rackets; the ELN
specializes in kidnapping and also regularly targets Colombia's other major
resource, oil.

The basic statistics of the conflict have become sadly familiar. Colombia
is now the world's homicide capital.

Annual noncombatant deaths from the fighting reached more than 4,000 last
year and have exceeded 30,000 in the last ten years.

Colombia has the third-highest number of internal refugees in the world
(after Angola and Sudan) and bristles with weapons imported from all over
the globe.

More than 3,000 Colombians and foreigners were kidnapped in the country in
2001. Meanwhile, some 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United
States and Europe comes from Colombia, as does most of the heroin found on
the U.S. East Coast.

Between drugs, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and a collapsing state,
Colombia's condition is steadily worsening.

A purely military approach to the crisis, however, will not resolve the
country's deep-seated structural flaws, any more than it has in the past.
Nor can more fighting permanently end the violence.

Unfortunately, a military approach seems to be just the kind of strategy
that Uribe seems intent on pursuing.

And Washington, with its new resolve to fight terrorism around the globe,
seems fully determined to help him execute it.

Back To The Bad Old Days

Not long ago, counterinsurgency had been practically written out of
Washington's political dictionary, thanks in part to the lingering memories
of President Ronald Reagan's support for a "contra" war against the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua and a brutal campaign against rebels in
El Salvador. Now President George W. Bush seems ready to accompany Uribe as
he delivers the drastic crackdown that he promised voters against the FARC,
the AUC, and the ELN. In the blink of an eye, the U.S. Andean counterdrug
policy has started to morph into a counterterror and counterinsurgency
strategy.

Why The Shift?

For one thing, there is now a widespread consensus that drug eradication in
Colombia, long the centerpiece of American narcotics policy, has failed.

Since Congress first appropriated $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia in 2000,
coca cultivation in Colombia has actually increased. And coca has begun to
return to Peru and Bolivia as well, where, in the last decade, successful
eradication programs inspired premature confidence that such programs would
work in Colombia.

Meanwhile, attempts to give coca farmers another way to earn a living have
also failed -- at least in Colombia's southern department of Putumayo, once
a stronghold of the FARC, now also of the paramilitaries, and a geographic
focus of Plan Colombia. Although thousands of families signed agreements
with Bogota to abandon coca cultivation in exchange for government
retraining assistance, Washington has decided to redirect funds to building
infrastructure instead. This move may create some jobs, but it also limits
the potential for long-term employment.

As a result of these failures, many observers have begun objecting to
Washington's tendency to view Colombia's crisis through the drug lens
alone. In the months prior to September 11, a chorus had begun to clamor
for developing a deeper understanding of the country.

The whole idea of Colombia as a functioning nation, critics argued, was a
fiction. Unless Colombia were reinvented and new institutions were created
from scratch, the nation risked collapse.

It is no accident that Colombia lacks a state apparatus or effective
institutions outside its principal cities.

Neglecting such development was a conscious decision by the country's
ruling class, which realized long ago that limiting the reach of the army
and the police was the best way to guarantee that the elite could exploit
the country's riches. Free of state interference, for example, a handful of
families in the nineteenth century were able to "colonize" great swaths of
land for coffee cultivation, expelling small farmers and planting coffee
for the booming export market.

The paid vigilantes who provided muscle to the coffee industry in this
period were the ancestors of today's paramilitaries. Their brutal,
take-no-prisoners methods are now employed to protect large rural business
and agrarian interests, to keep the Colombian drug industry prosperous, and
to fight the rebels.

Anyone alleged to be a sympathizer of the FARC or the ELN is killed, and
thousands of others have been deliberately displaced. Yet because the FARC
and the ELN also treat innocents brutally, and because the paramilitaries
get support from the army, the AUC has grown in strength.

Due to the protection it provides to drug lords, landowners, terrorized
peasants, and poor people, the AUC is increasingly viewed as a political
force in Colombia, dispensing its own rough vigilante justice and, like the
FARC, providing a modicum of social order in the areas it controls.

The fact remains, however, that paramilitaries are responsible for the
majority of human rights violations in Colombia. Last year alone, according
to Human Rights Watch, the paramilitaries were linked to the deaths of 3
journalists and 11 human rights monitors.

In addition, the AUC was responsible for the majority of the 201
assassinations of trade unionists last year -- the highest death toll among
labor organizers in the world.

Whereas the paramilitaries target the individuals and institutions that
make democratic civil society functional and vibrant, the FARC tends to
attack representatives of the state itself -- mayors, senators,
presidential candidates, cops, soldiers, police stations, municipal
buildings, electrical grids, dams, oil pipelines, and more recently,
commercial buildings and patrons of upscale restaurants in Bogota. This
strategy is part of the FARC's total war approach, meant to cripple the
state and force a settlement on the FARC's terms.

In the long term, however, it is the paramilitaries, who aim to take over
key territories and sectors of the police, military, and Congress, that
pose the greatest threat to Colombian democracy and U.S. interests.

If the AUC succeeds in its drive for control, the United States and
Colombia's neighbors could soon face a country ruled by right-wing,
drug-financed, extreme nationalists.

Remarkably, for all its troubles, Colombia remains a democracy for the time
being -- at least if judged by standards such as freedom of the press and
regular open elections.

The country has a market economy and is adopting the kind of tough fiscal
reforms many other Latin American countries resist, and until the late
1990s it consistently posted one of the highest growth rates in the region.

Colombia boasts cosmopolitan, urban middle and upper classes, a vibrant
intellectual community, talented businesspeople, world-class artists, and
spectacular natural resources.

It exports not only drugs, but Latin America's top-selling soap opera.

But Colombia is a place where democratic practices coexist with the mass
murder of hundreds of thousands of citizens, especially outspoken activists
and thinkers, and this schizophrenic national life is becoming more and
more difficult to sustain.

Six years ago the country went into a recession.

The middle and upper classes have begun an exodus out of Colombia, kids and
capital in tow. To make matters worse, the FARC is now preparing for urban
warfare.

Colombian intelligence recently reported that the FARC has inserted
10,000-15,000 agents into and around Colombia's cities.

Since the collapse of the peace process, Bogota's electrical grid has
become a routine target.

The capital's bomb squad defuses explosives on a regular basis; recent near
misses included the city's main commercial district, the street across from
the presidential palace, and the offices of the U.S. Agency for
International Development.

It is probably only a matter of time before a U.S. target is hit. Already,
the September 11 terrorist attacks have greatly influenced the American
debate on Colombia. As Washington has resolved to fight terror around the
globe, Bogota has started pushing hard to have Colombia's conflict viewed
as part of the antiterror campaign.

Meanwhile, Colombia's strategy may also come to be influenced by the U.S.
experience in Afghanistan, which demonstrated the potential for American
airpower when combined with local proxies and limited U.S. ground forces.

With U.S. special forces having already been deployed to Georgia and the
Philippines, moreover, the next 12 to 24 months could well see the start of
a debate on whether to provide such aid and more air support to the
Colombian military.

Washington may be tempted by Bogota's entreaties and by its own new
counterterror focus to view Colombia's conflict primarily through that
lens. Doing so, however, would be a costly military, political, financial,
and diplomatic mistake -- just as it was a mistake to regard all social
conflict in Latin America during the Cold War through anticommunist lenses.

A Plan Comes Together

Since the first Bush administration, American officials have wrestled with
balancing the overriding U.S. interest in drug eradication against local
efforts to combat domestic insurgencies in Latin America. Washington
believed that Andean governments could not be expected to expend resources
stamping out narcotics unless they received technical, financial, military,
and intelligence assistance to bring their domestic rebellions under control.

This thinking seemed to be borne out in the early 1990s, when Peru, for
example, wiped out its drug trade and eliminated the Shining Path
insurgency -- albeit at great cost to democracy and its civilian
population. Bolivia also virtually eliminated coca cultivation, although it
is now experiencing a politically destabilizing backlash from unemployed,
impoverished peasant coca farmers.

By the mid-1990s, as coca production and cultivation migrated to Colombia,
Congress began to increase its scrutiny of the Colombian military's human
rights abuses and of the explosion of drug revenues into the coffers of
Colombia's armed groups.

During this same period, Colombia's principal drug cartels were broken up,
and "boutique," or baby, cartels emerged to run the business.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, drug lords purchased vast tracts of
fertile agricultural and cattle ranches from Colombia's traditional landed
elite, in what is now known as the "counter land reform."

Into this climate stepped President Andres Pastrana and his extraordinarily
able diplomatic representation in Washington. Voted into office in 1998 on
a "peace ticket" with broad support from Colombian civil society, which had
mobilized against the kidnappings, assassinations, and human rights
violations of the past few years, Pastrana called on Colombia, the United
States, Europe, and the international community to contribute a total of
$7.5 billion to a new "Plan Colombia" for development, rebuilding the
judiciary, crop substitution, coca eradication, and assistance to the
internally displaced -- much as the CIA team had recommended 40 years earlier.

Pastrana also announced his intention to engage in a peace process with the
FARC and the ELN and to fight the growing paramilitary threat.

In a dramatic and controversial sign of good faith, the president granted
the FARC de facto control of a demilitarized area in southeastern Colombia
the size of Switzerland, known as the despeje.

He also promised the FARC that he would make it "state policy" to combat
the AUC. The initial U.S. response to Pastrana's proposal was positive.

In fact, the United States offered to play a supportive low-profile role in
the peace process, even sending State Department officials to Costa Rica to
meet with FARC commanders. But the FARC's deliberate execution of three
American indigenous-rights activists in 1999 effectively ended Washington's
support for talks with the FARC and strengthened those in the U.S. Congress
and military who wanted a more aggressive policy against the rebels.

outside actors have tried to address the conflict but also has used the
promise of foreign military assistance as an excuse to avoid spending
Colombia's resources. It is no accident that of all the vulnerable
countries of the Andean region, only Colombia has completely lost control
of more than half of its territory and permitted three virulent rebellions
to flourish. Incompetence, corruption, and accommodation have kept
Colombia's masters from accepting the reality of the disaster they helped
create.

Although American addicts have certainly provided an endless supply of
revenue to the drug lords, the fact that 40,000 illegal armed combatants
have flourished also necessarily implies a degree of complicity, direct and
indirect, by Colombians themselves. The judiciary is so weak and corrupt,
for example, that upward of 95 percent of crimes are never prosecuted. Tax
collection in this relatively wealthy but highly unequal country hovers at
approximately 10 percent of GDP, half the U.S. rate. Despite promises over
the years, no president has been able to change the conscription laws to
oblige children of the elite to fight in the army; only poor kids without
high school diplomas shoulder that patriotic duty. And the defense budget,
which averaged a mere 1.35 percent of GDP in the 1990s, remains
significantly lower than in other countries in conflict and other Latin
American countries at peace.

With the AUC commanding the support of 20 to 30 percent of the new
Colombian Congress elected last spring, it is hard to imagine how the new
government will be able to increase the funds used for fighting the
paramilitary forces or to push for political and rural reforms.

Uribe has at least one arrow in his quiver, however.

Asset-forfeiture laws passed by the government of former President Ernesto
Samper (which, ironically, turned out to have its own ties to the narcotics
trade), could allow the government to seize millions of acres in fertile
agricultural lands from drug lords who purchased them in recent years. This
would allow Uribe to implement a significant and desperately needed land
reform package, either as an independent initiative or to give himself
leverage and popular support during future negotiations.

It is uncertain, however, whether Uribe's hard-line credentials will be
sufficient for him to sustain the political backlash that would follow such
a step. His incoming government has already announced it will seek tough
antiterrorist legislation from the Colombian Congress. A new "cooperation"
law is intended to strictly limit and monitor international assistance to
civil society.

But it remains unclear whether the military, police, and intelligence
forces will be able to pursue their enemies while leaving innocents unscathed.

Here the Colombian government would do well to learn from Peru, a country
that is just now straining to rebuild its democratic institutions, which
were practically destroyed in the civil war against the Shining Path rebels
and coca growers.

Making matters worse, Colombia lacks the capacity to make effective use of
foreign development assistance. And on the eradication side, the fumigation
policies pushed by the United States have been too politically and
ecologically controversial for most Colombians to stomach. Nor have they
reduced cultivation. Targeted farmers just move and plant again.

Senior Colombian police, once known as less corrupt than the military, have
recently been accused of pocketing more than $2 million in American aid.
And now that all of the helicopters granted under Plan Colombia have
arrived, the pilots Colombia committed to train for drug eradication have
failed to materialize. What will the United States gain by putting more
resources into this mix, other than becoming a party to endless war?

Letting Money Talk

After September 11, the Bush administration asked Congress to demolish the
firewall erected by Plan Colombia that restricts U.S. intelligence,
training, and equipment extended to Colombia from being used for anything
except counternarcotics. If Congress complies, Bogota will get a green
light to use all current and future U.S. aid for counterinsurgency or
counterterror operations. Congress is now considering a new aid package
that includes the broad Andean Regional Initiative, which includes $439
million for Colombia, balancing counternarcotics funds with social and
development assistance; a $35 million grant to support an antikidnapping
police effort; and a $98 million package to train a brigade that would
protect the Colombian- Occidental pipeline in the department of ArAUCa,
where paramilitaries now openly operate with the army's tacit blessing.

This last measure would bring Colombian troops into direct confrontation
with both the AUC and the ELN. Thanks to the ELN's nearly daily hits on the
pipeline, Colombia currently loses as much as $430 million per year in oil
revenues, and the pipeline protection proposal, if approved, would help
secure this important source of revenue.

It would also represent a significant departure from current U.S. practice,
which provides help for counternarcotics operations alone.

And whereas Plan Colombia limits American military and civilian personnel
on the ground to 800, the cap may not cover the new programs under
consideration.

Colombia is already the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, after
Israel and Egypt. Even so, establishing a state presence where illegal
groups now hold sway will require far more resources than the United States
can or should provide.

Counterinsurgency specialists contend that to eliminate or significantly
weaken rebel groups, the government should be able to field 10 soldiers for
each guerrilla.

In Colombia, this would mean 350,000 troops.

Today, however, although Colombia's armed forces number 117,000, only
52,000 are professional soldiers (the rest are conscripts). And only 35,000
can be deployed in the field for direct combat; most are dedicated to
protecting fixed targets or are firmly tied to desks.

What can the United States expect, therefore, if it invests in helping
Colombia build a state where one barely exists?

There is a widespread sense in the Bush administration that it is far
easier to export material assistance than to reinvent an entire country or
instill a commitment to the common good. American officials remain hard
pressed to articulate U.S. security objectives in Colombia beyond
acknowledging that since no morally or politically sustainable military
solution is possible, the best the United States can do is help level the
military playing field for an eventual return to negotiations. The flaw in
this analysis, however, is that it assumes that the FARC, like the leftist
rebels of the Farabundo Mart' National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El
Salvador, will eventually demobilize and participate in democratic
politics. The United States spent ten years and several billion dollars in
El Salvador and never came close to defeating the FMLN. Colombia is 53
times the size of El Salvador, and the FARC, the ELN, and the
paramilitaries are made up of seasoned fighters.

Moreover, the FARC has had a very different experience from that of the
FMLN: more than 3,000 of the FARC's members were killed by government death
squads during one peace effort in the 1980s, and its ideology has been
diluted by drug revenues. Of Colombia's three major insurgent groups,
therefore, the FARC will probably be the last to lay down its arms -- if it
ever does.

Defending and rebuilding the Colombian state and bringing the country back
to a viable negotiation process will require at least a decade- long
commitment of major diplomatic pressure and weapons, airlift, intelligence,
advisers, and large-scale development and humanitarian assistance.
Washington, however, must not make such a commitment without satisfying two
crucial conditions. First, it must establish benchmarks for granting aid
that require Uribe and his successors to Moreover, the FARC insists that
negotiations include social and political reforms and objects to any
negotiation with the paramilitaries, which would legitimize the AUC. As for
the AUC itself, it now demands the release of several hundred of its
soldiers from Colombian jails before it will start talking.

Finally, although ripe for a settlement, talks with the ELN in Havana broke
down in May and real negotiations are unlikely to resume soon. Internally
divided, threatened by the FARC and the paramilitaries, the ELN does not
look ready to sustain serious discussions with the government.

It remains to be seen which of the three groups -- or the government --
will prevail militarily and therefore frame the terms under which they
return to peace talks.

For the time being negotiations seem to be but one element of each party's
preparation for war, and a period of all-out combat seems to lie ahead.

Still, the option to hold talks should be left on the table and an
international and un presence in the country should be maintained. And
although U.S. support for talks is not sufficient to guarantee their
success, remaining aloof from the process would delay progress, and U.S.
opposition to a negotiated solution would guarantee its failure.

Long before negotiations resume, there are several gestures that the United
States should make. First, as President Bush and senior members of his
administration have indicated, Washington needs to conduct a serious debate
over how to decrease demand for drugs in the United States. Colombia's
problems will not be solved while U.S. consumption continues to fuel a
massive narcotics industry.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department should enforce the financial sanctions
that apply to the FARC, the AUC, and the ELN as groups on the State
Department's terrorist list, seizing their bank accounts and other assets.

Likewise, the American private sector should declare a moratorium on paying
bribes to grease the wheels of investment in Colombia and throughout the
Andes. And the United State should appoint a bipartisan figure as a special
envoy to begin the process of knitting together support and participation
from Colombia's neighbors, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank,
the International Development Bank, the EU, Canada, and Mexico into a
comprehensive regional diplomatic initiative.

The United States should also use its now substantial leverage on Colombia
to push it in the right direction.

Bogota, for example, should create two new army battalions and special
police units with U.S. training and dedicate them to capturing paramilitary
leaders.

This tactic worked well against the drug cartels; it should therefore be
made a condition of further U.S. aid. Washington should also insist that
the human rights division of Colombia's attorney general's office be
rebuilt (it was destroyed by the Pastrana government after the unit had the
temerity to raid paramilitary banks and offices, exposing their deep ties
to business and political leaders).

If clear and tough demands are not put on the Colombian military and
political elite -- to double tax revenues, double the defense budget, cut
ties to the paramilitaries, send their sons to fight, return the internally
displaced to their homes, and to enact other reforms -- Colombia's
precipitous decline will only continue.

It is therefore time to review U.S. policy toward the country -- before
unalterable choices are made and events impose conditions Washington will
not want to face. Hard questions, long deferred, need to be asked and
answered -- for the sake of Colombia, the Andean region, and the long-term
interests of the United States.