COLOMBIA'S TERRORIST 'THREAT'

For the past several weeks the Bush administration has attempted, none too
subtly, to blend the drug war in Colombia into the general gumbo of
American anti-terrorist efforts worldwide.

On May 1, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced the indictment of the FARC,
one of Colombia's guerrilla groups, and six of its leaders, for the 1999
murder of three Americans. "Just as we fight terrorism in the mountains of
South Asia, we will fight terrorism in our own hemisphere," Ashcroft told
reporters. Previously, the administration had added the FARC, a second
guerrilla organization and Colombia's illegal paramilitary army to the
official U.S. list of "terrorist" groups.

Also on May 1, the State Department certified that the government of
Colombia had met congressionally mandated requirements to prosecute those
guilty of human rights abuses, a prerequisite to disbursing approximately
$104 million in pending American aid.

This is all building up to a very bad proposal pushed by the administration
and tucked away in a $27.1 billion anti-terrorism supplemental
appropriations bill up for a vote this week in the U.S. House.

One section of that bill would pump an additional $35 million in military
aid into Colombia and lift virtually all restrictions on how the money may
be used. Previous aid has been earmarked exclusively for fighting drug
trafficking and has required that the government prosecute human rights
abusers in its ranks.

If the phrase "slippery slope" still resonates in Washington, the House
will strip the Colombia provisions off the appropriations bill and push to
de-escalate the U.S. campaign there.

More funds to Colombia would follow the resoundingly ineffective, $1.3
billion Plan Colombia launched by the Clinton administration, and the
Andean Counterdrug Initiative, the Bush administration's $1 billion sequel.

Both plans sought to reduce the flow of narcotics into the U.S. No such
thing has happened. Drug cultivation has spread to neighboring Peru--where
it had been arrested--and the availability and street price of cocaine and
heroin in the U.S. remain roughly the same.

But instead of backing away from a failed policy, the Bush administration
is pushing more of the same, this time under the line item of "anti-terrorism."

The war in Colombia is the very definition of "quagmire." Two murderous
bands of guerrillas are fighting the government. Paramilitary killers fight
the guerrillas. They all finance their operations through kidnapping,
robbery and drug trafficking.

The official army--which is supposedly the U.S. ally--turns a blind eye to
the operations of the paramilitary units, which Human Rights Watch
estimates are responsible for 78 percent of the human rights atrocities.
U.S. assurances that the human rights picture in Colombia is gradually
coming into focus have been met with wide skepticism.

There is no advantage to the U.S. getting deeper into the 40-year-old
Colombian civil war. Money spent on drug interdiction there would be much
more productively used for treatment of addicts here. And more American
military aid is hardly going to advance chances of a political solution to
this multi-headed conflict.

This failed foreign policy can't be salvaged--certainly not by pouring good
money after bad. The House has an opportunity to put a stop to this.