The Washington Post                                             February
8, 2000

CLINTON & COLOMBIA: SHADES OF VIETNAM

        by  Robert E. White

        Although President Clinton seems unaware of it, the $1.6 billion
he is requesting to fight coca production in Colombia amounts to
intervention in another country's civil war. Neither the president nor
the secretary of state has given the American people any coherent
explanation of what is at stake in Colombia or of how massive
military assistance can do anything but make matters worse.
        Americans have always been skeptical about the wisdom of
intervening in the civil wars of other countries. Although our
diplomatic history is studded with lapses, the doctrine of
nonintervention still carries considerable weight--enough to require
that those advocating military excursions be able to justify them in
terms of global threats to national security.
        Our intervention in El Salvador's struggle did not truly
constitute intervention, President Reagan argued, because the
revolutionaries were not fighting in their own cause but as hirelings
of Moscow and Havana. The rationale for involving the United
States in Colombia's civil war rests on the equally specious ground
that the FARC--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--are
not an authentic insurgency but an armed drug cartel that fights to
protect illicit profits--"narco-guerrillas" to quote from the charged
vocabulary of the White House drug policy adviser, Gen. Barry
McCaffrey.
        The largest component of the military assistance, titled "Push
into Southern Colombia," calls for $600 million to train two
additional special counternarcotics battalions with 30 Blackhawk
helicopters and 33 Huey helicopters so the army "can access this
remote and undeveloped region of Colombia." Some of the funding
would "provide shelter and employment to the Colombian people
who will be displaced." Although there is $145 million for crop
substitution, the emphasis will continue to be on aerial spraying of
herbicides to destroy the coca leaf. It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that this is a counterinsurgency strategy packaged as a
counternarcotics program.
        To Gen. McCaffrey, with a thin background in foreign policy
and a mandate to win the war on narcotics, it must seem logical to
reduce complex political, economic and social forces to one
manageable target and attack it with military force. But is it too
much to hope that experienced diplomats will grasp the elementary
proposition that an insurgency that has acquired the strength and
cohesion necessary to dominate 40 percent of the national territory
represents something authentic in the history of Colombia,
something not adequately explained by references to illicit
commerce?
        Has it truly escaped senior administration aides that the
Colombian civil war is more about massacres of civilians and
selective assassinations than armed confrontation? Does it really not
matter that to declare war on the FARC puts us in league with a
Colombian military that has longstanding ties to the drug-dealing,
barbaric paramilitaries that commit more than 75 percent of the
human rights violations afflicting that violence-torn country?
        It is curious that a government as sophisticated as ours should
cling to the naive belief that spraying with herbicides can do
anything but drive the campesino cultivators deeper into the jungle.
The campesinos grow coca not just because it commands bonanza
prices but because the traffickers' planes land nearby and pay cash
on the barrelhead.
        Alternative production--rubber and palm oil, for example--could
compete because their prices, while lower, are more stable. But the
isolated farmers cannot get their crops to the city. The $1.3 billion
in the Colombia aid package for war could be more constructively
used to build farm-to-market highways that would peacefully carry
the government's authority into this remote zone.
        Nowhere in the official statements on Colombia will Congress
find any discussion of risks vs. rewards or any measurement of
objectives in relation to resources. Recall that in El Salvador, our
bloody, divisive 12-year pursuit of military victory proved fruitless.
We finally settled for a U.N.-brokered accord that granted the
guerrillas many of their demands.
        The FARC-controlled territory that this program casually
commits us to reconquer is 20 times as large as El Salvador--
roughly the size of California. The Colombian military has no
experience in carrying the war to the insurgents. What will happen
when FARC troops, at home in jungle and savanna, repel the army
and shoot down our helicopters? Will we then swallow the bitter
pill of political-military defeat? Not if Vietnam and Central America
are any guide. Far more likely we will plunge deeper into the
quagmire.
                                _______

The writer, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, is
president of the Center for International Policy.