A TERRORIST REGIME WAITS IN THE WINGS

The Taliban regime is gone, but a new one soon may emerge - not in far-off
Afghanistan, but in Colombia, a country nearly twice the size and on the
front door of the United States.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), flush with a fortune in
drug money and rested after three years of peace talks, is fighting a
fierce battle against Colombia's democratic government and threatens to
install its own totalitarian, anti-Western regime. If it succeeds, analysts
say, the Marxist-Leninist FARC, which is on the State Department's list of
terrorist groups, would become the world's newest outlaw regime and even
more of a haven for terrorists and drug traffickers.

A Rand Corp. report prepared last summer for the Pentagon calls the
Colombian crisis "the most serious security challenge in the Western
Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s."

Will the United States help the Colombians save their democratic republic
and destroy the narcoterrorist FARC? Or will it continue to keep its hands
in its pockets and deny Colombia the intelligence, equipment and training
needed to defeat the guerrillas on its own - only to have to send U.S.
forces to fight another terrorist regime in the future?

President George W. Bush, with his man Otto Juan Reich now the head of the
Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, seems not to
have chosen yet. He is hamstrung by a Democrat-controlled Senate, where any
laws or funding pertaining to Colombia would have to go through the hands
of a long-time ally of the Latin American revolutionary left - Sen.
Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs. Administration sources tell
Insight that State is leaning toward a very strong and detailed Pentagon
proposal to help Colombia defeat the FARC. The roadblock is on the National
Security Council (NSC), where John Maisto - a career Foreign Service
officer and Clinton holdover - is urging a cautious wait-and-see approach.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is following Maisto's lead for
now, say sources.

Twice the size of France, straddling the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea
and bordering mega-oil exporters Venezuela and Ecuador, Colombia is vital
to U.S. national and economic security. Its national police force has
earned a hard-fought reputation as one of the most professional in the
world, and received strong U.S. support (even some from Dodd, in whose
state the Colombian police's Blackhawk helicopters are built) in the fight
against drug trafficking. But FARC sympathizers and others still
traumatized about Vietnam successfully blocked efforts to provide
meaningful counterinsurgency assistance to the Colombian military.

During the 1990s, the Clinton administration looked the other way as the
FARC grew stronger. In 1995, according to a recent Rand study for the
Pentagon, it had 7,000 fighters on 60 fronts; five years later, there were
15,000 to 20,000 FARC combatants on more than 70 fronts. The huge increase
was financed with money from American cocaine and heroin users, but the
Clinton administration reversed long-standing bipartisan policy and drew a
distinction between drug traffickers and guerrillas. On condition of
anonymity, a senior State Department official assured Insight with a
straight face in 1999 that "there is no such thing as narcoterrorists."

In this spirit, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision
Directive 73, literally to deny intelligence data to the Colombians lest it
help the counterinsurgency, even though the United States would provide
similar data to the Colombian police to stop drug trafficking. Both the
White House and Congress barred Colombia from using U.S. antinarcotics aid
against the FARC in counterinsurgency activity, allowing the equipment to
be used only by police battling drug production and smuggling - two key
FARC industries, but only tangential to the narcoterrorist hold on the
countryside.

The distinction struck many as absurd. "Now does one say aid can be used
against narcotics traffickers but not against the guerrillas, when the
guerrillas have been the traffickers?" asks Constantine Menges, a former
national intelligence officer for Latin America who served on the White
House NSC.

The Bush administration appears to agree. Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) chief Asa Hutchinson routinely refers to the Colombian guerrillas as
narcoterrorists. In a recent public appearance, he stated, "We should
understand very clearly today that there is a drugs-to-money-to-terror
relationship that is historic, that is current and that is threatening to
our future."

"The United States should dispense with self-imposed limitations on the
sharing of intelligence," Menges advises. "It should also include
permission for Colombian forces to use U.S. military aid against the
Communist guerrillas, which are not only the major threat but the major
narcotics traffickers."

Intelligence sources say the United States has an unmatched ability to
monitor FARC operations and communications from the sky and space, and that
sharing real-time data with the Colombian military would allow Colombia to
bomb and otherwise strike FARC positions with deadly accuracy, stopping
FARC attacks before they could begin.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who had staked his presidency on the
peace process and gave the FARC its own demilitarized zone (DMZ) the size
of Switzerland, came around to Menges' point of view by Feb. 20, when the
FARC hijacked a commercial airplane and kidnapped a senator. Colombians as
a whole, facing a new presidential election in May, have become
increasingly hard line against the FARC and a smaller Communist
narcoterrorist group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The FARC, after 38 years of fighting, was building up impressive momentum
to fight the Colombian army head-on and possibly overthrow the government
by the end of Pastrana's term, according to the Rand study. That report
helped underscore the urgency in the Bush administration to tackle
Colombia. Assistant Secretary of State Reich visited Bogota in
mid-February, telling reporters of "a plan to contain and eliminate the
violence in Colombia."

The Communist guerrillas there are determined to take full power. "Now that
the president of Colombia has tried political negotiations for three years
and the guerrillas have responded with violence, it's time for the United
States to provide full political, intelligence and military-assistance
support to Colombia so the guerrillas can be defeated and peace restored,"
says Menges.

Pastrana finally got it by the time the FARC kidnapped the senator. He gave
a national speech itemizing 117 terrorist attacks during the previous 30
days, including four car bombings, murders of women and children and
poisoning of aqueducts. He echoed President Bush's "with us or with the
terrorists" theme. On Feb. 21, he ordered the army into the DMZ under
Operation Thenatus to take control of the huge region. With Israeli-made
Kfir-C7 and French Dassault Mirage fighter jets, as well as a fleet of
turboprop-driven counterinsurgency aircraft, Colombian forces ran some 200
sorties against the FARC in the first day of fighting.

So far, the Bush administration's support for Colombia has been strong in
principle but a work in progress. It has not revoked Clinton's presidential
directive and has asked Congress only for military assistance to help
Colombia guard an oil pipeline that is a frequent target of FARC attacks -
a pipeline, by the way, owned in part by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum.
Menges argues that the United States can provide Colombia with the
necessary training, intelligence and equipment "consistent with efforts to
fight international terrorism."

"The guerrillas draw political strength and sustenance from a robust
network of supporting organizations, both in Colombia and overseas.
Multiorganizational networks aided the insurgencies in El Salvador and
Guatemala and the Sandinistas in the 1980s, but have assumed a larger role
with the information revolution of the 1990s, and particularly with the
development of the Internet," according to the Rand report. "The FARC and
the ELN have developed a wide range of multiorganizational supporting
networks both in Colombia and overseas. The strategic objectives of these
networks is to restrict the actions of the Colombian state and its agencies
and to deny it international support."

That's the big problem for U.S. policy: how to defuse the FARC's instant
activist support base in the United States and in Congress. The FARC has a
base of pro-Castro and pro-Marxist groups in the United States who use the
Internet, as well as traditional grass-roots demonstrations and
letter-writing campaigns, to press their cause. They backed Dodd's failed
blockage of Reich (see "Smearing Reich," Aug. 5, 2001).

One of the main activist groups opposing U.S. assistance to Colombia is the
New York-based International Action Center (IAC). Headed by former attorney
general Ramsey Clark, the IAC is staffed by veteran leaders of the Workers
World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist fringe group with a history of street
theater going back to the Vietnam War and the Attica Prison uprising. The
IAC openly supports an array of terrorists, cop-killers and even convicted
communist spies on its Website (see "Domestic Front in the War on Terror,"
Jan. 7).

On Feb. 22, the day after Pastrana launched Operation Thenatus, the IAC
held "emergency protests" in front of the Colombian Mission to the United
Nations in New York City and the Colombian consulate in San Francisco. The
IAC is planning nationwide militant demonstrations against U.S. aid to
Colombia and against the U.S. war against terrorism in general on April 27.

Pastrana could buckle without strong U.S. backing. Angel Rabasa, a Rand
analyst who coauthored the Pentagon report, tells Insight the Colombian
government could go in either of two directions. "One is to make the
recapture of the [demilitarized] zone part of a military strategy that
would break the logistical and military axis of the guerrillas and
decisively change the military balance." That, however, would be costly for
the country and could provoke international opposition. "The other
alternative is a more or less peaceful occupation of the zone, supposing
the guerrillas would permit it," Rabasa says.

That would permit Colombian forces to take over the local towns and the
FARC could retreat into the countryside. "The government could say it acted
in a decisive manner, but in reality without much substantial change,"
Rabassa adds, because the FARC would remain intact.

The FARC, however, is vulnerable. "The organization has some critical
weaknesses, notably its linkage to criminal elements and its lack of
support among the population at large. Opinion polls estimate overall FARC
support at about 5 percent of the population," according to the Rand
report. "In the areas where it predominates, the FARC has endeavored to
institutionalize popular support by setting up political support groups,
but it enforces its rule through selective terror and intimidation."

Says Menges, "This is the time to defeat them."