PEACE THROUGH HERBICIDES: BARREN U.S. POLICY IN COLOMBIA.

WASHINGTON - President Clinton's assurances that the United States
will not get involved in the Colombian civil war that the United
States already is involved in (with military personnel, equipment,
training, financing, intelligence) make sense if you think of the
helicopters as farm implements. The 60 transport and attack
helicopters, and most of the other elements in the recent $1.3 billion
installment of U.S. aid, look warlike. However, the administration
says the aid is essentially agricultural. It is all about controlling
crops -- particularly the coca fields that provide upward of 90
percent of the cocaine that reaches the American market.

The law governing U.S. intervention includes this language: "The
president shall ensure that if any helicopter procured with funds
under this heading is used to aid or abet the operations of an illegal
self-defense group or illegal security cooperative, than such
helicopter shall be immediately returned to the United States."
Imagine how reliably this will be enforced.

Conceivably, important U.S. interests are implicated in the Colombian
government's fight with the more than 17,000-strong forces of Marxist
insurgency in the civil war, now in its fourth decade, that has killed
35,000 people, and displaced 2 million in the last 10 years. Political
violence has killed 280,000 since the middle of the 19th century.

Do makers of U.S. policy understand this long-simmering stew of class
conflict, ideological war and ethnic vendettas? They advertise their
policy as drug control through crop extermination. The president,
delivering the money that will buy military equipment, said: "We have
no military objective." And: "Our approach is both pro-peace and
anti-drug." As though the civil war and the anti-narcotics campaign
can be separated when the left-wing forces that control half the
country are getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by
protecting and taxing coca fields.

The U.S. policy -- peace through herbicides -- aims to neutralize the
left-wing forces by impoverishing them. But already those forces are
diversifying. The Wall Street Journal reports: "Armed with automatic
rifles and personal computers, guerrillas often stop traffic, check
motorists' bank records, then detain anyone whose family might be able
to afford a lucrative ransom."

There are an average of seven kidnappings a day, and the Journal
reports that every morning Colombia's largest radio network "links its
169 stations with its stations in Miami, New York, Panama and Paris.
It opens its lines to relatives of kidnap victims who broadcast
messages they hope will be heard by their missing loved ones."

Speaking of diversification, does anyone doubt that, in the extremely
unlikely event that Colombia is cleansed of the offensive crops,
cultivation of them will be promptly increased elsewhere? In spite of
Colombia's efforts, coca cultivation increased 140 percent in the last
five years, partly because the United States financed the reduction of
Bolivia's coca crop. However, the pressure on Colombia's coca growers
is "working": Some of them have planted crops (and the seeds of future
conflicts) across the border in Peru. And guerillas have made
incursions into Panama and Ecuador for refuge. And the price of
cocaine in the United States has plummeted for two decades.

Will the United States ever learn? As long as it has a $50 billion
annual demand for an easily smuggled substance made in poor nations,
the demand will be served. An anecdote is apposite.

A presidential adviser was fresh from persuading the French government
to smash the "French connection" by which heroin destined for America
was refined from Turkish opium in Marseilles.

Boarding a helicopter to Camp David to bring his glad tidings to
President Nixon, the adviser, Pat Moynihan, who then still had
Harvard's faith in government's efficacy, found himself traveling with
Labor Secretary George Shultz, embodiment of University of Chicago
realism about powerful appetites creating markets in spite of
governments' objections. When Moynihan (who tells this story) told
Shultz about his achievement in France, this conversation ensued.

Shultz, dryly: "Good." Moynihan: "No, really, this is a big event."
Shultz, drier still: "Good." Moynihan: "I suppose you think that so
long as there is a demand for drugs, there will continue to be a
supply." Shultz: "You know, there's hope for you yet."

That is more than can be confidently said for U.S. policy in Colombia,
which seems barren of historical sense. "The enduring achievement of
historical study," said British historian Sir Lewis Namier, "is a
historical sense -- and intuitive understanding -- of how things do
not work."

Such a sense should produce policy. Instead, the most that can be
hoped is that U.S. policy in Colombia may, painfully and tardily,
produce such sense.

WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP