Overdose.

• Author: THOMPSON, NICHOLAS
• Position: US policy in Colombia needs reconsideration due to drug traffic and paramilitary organization activities

Why Clinton's Colombia policy needs rehab

IN THE NORTHERN COLOMBIAN TOWN OF El Salado in mid-February, a band of paramilitaries allegedly drank and hooted as they slaughtered almost 30 peasants they suspected of being sympathetic left-wing guerrillas. One man was allegedly killed in a church; others had their heads sliced off on a basketball court. The paramilitaries may have been connected to the Colombian military in some way; they may not have been. Still, nobody in the United States seemed to notice. Mass murder in Colombia seems almost commonplace and when Reuters finally put the story on the wire a few days later, only one major American paper picked it up. Just one more massacre that had something to do with drugs and politics.

In the Dirksen Senate Office Building a week later and several thousand miles away, Senator Jeff Sessions lit into Gen. Barry McCaffrey, America's drug czar, and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, for being doves on Colombia. It wasn't enough that McCaffrey and Pickering had shown up to defend a Clinton administration plan to triple military aid to Colombia, a country that receives the third most United States security assistance of any nation on earth. To Sessions, the United States needs far more radical steps to help our southern neighbor. "We used to have a strong will and now we don't!" he thundered. Pickering tried to explain the complexities of the situation and McCaffrey insisted that we are making progress. But Sessions, turning redder and redder, would have none of it: "The nation will not prevail until there's progress on the battlefield!"

There was definitely something in what the senator said. If you go to war, you want to win battles; and to win battles, you've got to be committed. But there was also something deeply unnerving: If you're going to win battles, you've got to know who you're fighting and, in Colombia, it's really not clear. Everybody's hands seem a little bit bloody and every corridor seems a little bit dark. Clinton's proposal would give aid to the government, ostensibly, to fight drug production. So are we just going to war against the drug runners who are supplying America's cities with cocaine and heroin? Or are we also going to war with the leftist guerrillas fighting the government and often allied with the drug runners? Are we going to be fighting on the same side as the paramilitaries responsible for the El Salado massacre--international pariahs and public-enemies who have their own ties to the drug trade but oppose the guerrillas?

The Clinton administration has a serious plan and there's a good chance it will pass. But before it does, we should stop and think about what Senator Sessions seemed to be saying. If you're going to wade into a mess like this with guns-a-blazing, you'd better know who and what you're fighting for, and you'd better be sure you're willing to pay the price it's going to take to win.

Jungle War

Mention of Colombia almost immediately brings analogies to Vietnam. One week after Sen. Sessions' outburst, Sen. Ted Stevens demanded of Gen. Charles Wilhelm the commander in chief of the United States' Southern Command: "Who's going to be there when this blows up? Tell me this isn't Vietnam." In recent months, every media outlet seems to have drawn the comparison and The Washington Post and The Financial Times even chose an identical headline for different articles: "Shades of Vietnam."

This is not surprising. Much of our foreign policy is conditioned by a visceral fear of repeating the disasters of the war in Southeast Asia. But the mistake we have to avoid in Colombia isn't sending troops into jungle action without full public commitment; the White House and Congress have emphatically declared that troops aren't going south and there's almost no chance that the Colombian end-game will see American soldiers dying in the jungle while flags burn at home.

But the mistake we are in danger of repeating in Colombia lies in our decision-making process. Our Vietnam policy was crafted by highly intelligent people with legitimate strategic concerns who thought they were acting in the country's best interests. The problem was their lack of information: They underestimated the North's tenacity, overestimated our allies' competence, and misjudged the public's endurance for war. We didn't look the situation squarely in the eyes, we didn't hedge our bets enough to offset the complexities of that war, and we didn't listen closely to people on the ground who considered the war hopeless.

With Colombia, we need to put a heavy burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of those who urge increasing our military aid. There are reasons to charge into Colombia--a country in quasi-anarchy whose drugs are pouring across our borders--but we shouldn't unless we know our goals and exit strategy, unless we know it's clear that we won't end up directly or indirectly massacring innocent Colombians, and unless we know the benefits conclusively outweigh the costs. Unfortunately, this burden is far from being met.

The Problem and the Plan

Just a few hours south of Miami by plane, Colombia produces about 80 percent of the cocaine used in this country and more than half of the heroin. Farmers grow their coca crop deep in the jungle or in the mountains and sell it to traffickers. The traffickers then process it in mobile laboratories and smuggle their product across our border with elaborate networks of traffickers organized by cell phones, the Internet, and good old machine guns. Once here, the drugs offer quick buzzes and destroy lives. Over 50,000 people suffer drug-related deaths in the United States each year and Gen. McCaffrey continually emphasizes...