U.S. MOVING BLINDLY INTO A QUAGMIRE

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
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. 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 guerrillas 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.

U.S. policy in Colombia 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.