From the front page of the New York Times, Sunday,February 6, 2000


U.S. Antidrug Plan to Aid Colombia Is Facing Hurdles
By TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 -- The Clinton administration's $1.3 billion plan to help
Colombia fight drug trafficking and leftist insurgents is facing skepticism
from military and law-enforcement officials concerned that the United States
could be dragged into a long and costly struggle that may ultimately have
little impact on the drug trade.

The aid plan, which is to be presented in detail to Congress on Monday, is
intended to reduce the booming production of cocaine and heroin in Colombia,
strengthen the government and help it take control of a large part of its
southern territory now dominated by the rebels.

Privately, though, some senior defense officials are decidedly unenthusiastic
about the American military's growing role in the antidrug effort and are
worried that it may be dragged deeper into the civil war that has ravaged
Colombia for almost 40 years.

Many drug-enforcement and Coast Guard officials are similarly concerned,
officials said. While the aid package may help Colombia's army fight the
guerrillas, they said, it does not reflect a coherent strategy to fight
illegal drugs.

Virtually none of these complaints have been aired publicly. Officials said
that the arguments have been heard repeatedly in the debate over the aid
plan, but that most of the criticisms have been overridden by administration
officials determined to establish a new American commitment to Colombia's
stability.

"Their attitude is, 'We don't really want to do this,' " one senior
administration official said of generals in the Pentagon. Referring to the
insurgency, he added: "The last thing they need is another level of
engagement that has the 'I' word in it. That always has stress for the
military -- it has ever since Vietnam."

The White House drug policy chief, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, dismissed
skeptics of the plan, noting that some of the criticism came from agencies
disappointed by their failure to get funding increases under the Colombia aid
package.

"Everybody tried to get aboard this mule," General McCaffrey said in an
interview, referring to the administration's request for $955 million on top
of the $330 million budgeted for Colombia aid this year. But he added, "There
wasn't a huge fight among agencies over this package."

Senior administration officials said they were confident that the proposed
aid, about two-thirds of which would go to Colombian security forces, would
be approved.

Republicans in Congress have been an important part of the impetus for
greater American assistance, warning that the Clinton White House risked
"losing" Colombia to rebel groups that have been battling the military with
increasing success. A few Congressional liberals have criticized the aid
program as militaristic and shortsighted, but they are unlikely to slow its
passage except by attaching conditions meant to promote greater respect for
human rights by the Colombian military.

Still, the package is only a first step in what many United States officials
acknowledge will probably be a huge effort, lasting for years, to strengthen
Colombian institutions and help the government reach a peace with three
leftist guerrilla groups and various right-wing paramilitary forces that
operate in different parts of the country.

Both Colombian and American officials continue to say the United States will
not engage the guerrillas directly. Nor, they said, will they aid the fight
against the guerrillas -- except those who hire themselves out to the
traffickers to protect drug fields, drug laboratories or clandestine
airstrips.

"If they are not involved in the business," President Andrés Pastrana said in
an interview, "they should be confident that nothing is going to happen to
them."

At the same time, though, United States officials are clearly softening their
positions that American aid will not be used for counterinsurgency.

In a program summary released last month, the White House listed the primary
component of the aid plan as, "Helping the Colombian government push into the
coca-growing regions of southern Colombia, which are now dominated by
insurgent guerrillas."

Gen. Fred F. Woerner, a former commander of United States military forces in
Latin America, said the statement represented a significant clarification of
the administration's goal.

"How do you push into an area dominated by these guys without having anything
to do with them?" he asked, referring to the rebels. "Anyone who believes
that these counternarcotics battalions will not be involved in
counterinsurgency is naïve."

Administration officials said they would argue to Congress that the situation
is dire now because of an explosion in the cultivation of coca, the raw
material of cocaine, in areas of southern Colombia that the rebels dominate.
Their main evidence will be a new study by the Central Intelligence Agency
and the Drug Enforcement Administration showing that Colombia's coca
production over the last two years was about three times greater than what
American analysts had thought.

Until the last few years, nearly all the world's coca was grown in Bolivia
and Peru. But with the introduction of new varieties of the coca plant,
Colombia has more than made up for major reductions of coca growing in the
neighboring countries. Moreover, intelligence officials said that new
refining techniques are enabling Colombian traffickers to produce more
cocaine from their crop than ever before.

While the C.I.A. said last year that Colombia grew 182 tons of coca in 1998,
officials said the new study would show that it actually grew a staggering
480 tons, or more than half the worldwide total. That total, however, is not
expected to rise significantly.

"We do not see any signs of an explosion," one official said. He added that,
despite a surging cocaine market in Europe and the former Soviet Union, "at
some point, there has to be an issue of supply and demand."

American military officials agree that the Colombian military should be
strengthened. But many of them are reluctant for the United States to get
more involved in that process -- both because more trainers would represent a
bigger American target for the rebels and because of the stress that their
deployment would put on Pentagon resources.

Many Defense Department officials fear being drawn more deeply into
Colombia's civil war.

"It depends on who you talk to; I am personally concerned about that," one
senior military official said. But he added: "Here's the dilemma: Do you just
let them go down the tubes? It is far preferable for us to try to train them
and equip them than it is for American troops to ultimately have to be
there."

In the first major draft of the administration's aid plan, put forward last
fall, officials proposed nearly three years of intensive United States
training to create six new special Colombian Army battalions to operate
against drug traffickers and insurgents who support them.

After objections by senior American military officials, the proposal was
scaled back to the creation of two new battalions over about eight months,
administration officials said. A first battalion has already been trained,
and the number of United States military trainers in Colombia will not be
significantly increased, they said.

Some Pentagon officials said they were also concerned about the single
biggest piece of the aid package: 30 sophisticated UH-60 Blackhawk
helicopters being provided to the Colombian military at a cost of more than
$400 million. The aircraft, which will remain State Department property, are
not only very expensive but will also require extensive pilot training and
cost tens of millions of dollars to operate each year, officials said.

Law enforcement officials, for the most part, have more strategic concerns.

Drug enforcement officials argue essentially that the push into southern
Colombia -- intended to destroy coca-processing laboratories and secure
growing areas from guerrillas -- is important, but not that important. Under
the administration's plan, that campaign is to cost about $600 million, or
nearly half the $1.28 billion to be spent on the package.

By contrast, officials say, successful Drug Enforcement Administration
programs to train and support special Colombian police teams that work
against the country's biggest traffickers cost only a few million dollars a
year.

Other officials assert that Washington should start by pressing the Colombian
government to make important policy changes that would cost almost nothing.
Those may include increasing prison sentences for drug offenses, reorganizing
the judiciary, and taking cellular telephones away from jailed traffickers so
they cannot operate from prison.

"Many of the changes that are required there could be made overnight," one
American official said. "And they would require no or nominal amounts of
money."

United States Coast Guard officials also argued for a bigger piece of the new
package, officials said. With its own cocaine seizures booming, the agency
sought new funding for innovating programs to detect drug shipments and
deploy armed helicopters against high-speed drug boats in the Caribbean.

Administration officials said that while they had not included any new money
for those programs in the proposed Colombia package, they had agreed to ask
for about $17 million for the helicopter program next year, $7 million more
than in the current year. But some money for other high-priority Coast Guard
drug programs has already been denied, officials said.

Last year, administration debate over the aid plan was mainly between
officials who sought greater support for the Colombian military and those who
argued strongly for a bigger complement of social and economic programs.

Now, administration officials said funding would rise most sharply of all for
nonmilitary programs like crop-substitution efforts, strengthening human
rights and economic development.

"This was a case in which we really said to people, 'How fast can you spend
money?' " one budget official said, referring to United States economic
development officials. "It gets to a question of what is achievable; almost
none of these programs are in place in Colombia now."