Posted on 03/05/2002 1:16:42 PM PST by Stand Watch Listen
The Taliban regime is gone, but a new one soon may emerge — not in far-off Afghanistan, but in Colombia, a country nearly twice the size and on the front door of the United States.The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), flush with a fortune in drug money and rested after three years of peace talks, is fighting a fierce battle against Colombia's democratic government and threatens to install its own totalitarian, anti-Western regime. If it succeeds, analysts say, the Marxist-Leninist FARC, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, would become the world's newest outlaw regime and even more of a haven for terrorists and drug traffickers.
A Rand Corp. report prepared last summer for the Pentagon calls the Colombian crisis "the most serious security challenge in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s."
Will the United States help the Colombians save their democratic republic and destroy the narcoterrorist FARC? Or will it continue to keep its hands in its pockets and deny Colombia the intelligence, equipment and training needed to defeat the guerrillas on its own — only to have to send U.S. forces to fight another terrorist regime in the future?
President George W. Bush, with his man Otto Juan Reich now the head of the Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, seems not to have chosen yet. He is hamstrung by a Democrat-controlled Senate, where any laws or funding pertaining to Colombia would have to go through the hands of a long-time ally of the Latin American revolutionary left — Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs. Administration sources tell Insight that State is leaning toward a very strong and detailed Pentagon proposal to help Colombia defeat the FARC. The roadblock is on the National Security Council (NSC), where John Maisto — a career Foreign Service officer and Clinton holdover — is urging a cautious wait-and-see approach. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is following Maisto's lead for now, say sources.
Twice the size of France, straddling the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea and bordering mega-oil exporters Venezuela and Ecuador, Colombia is vital to U.S. national and economic security. Its national police force has earned a hard-fought reputation as one of the most professional in the world, and received strong U.S. support (even some from Dodd, in whose state the Colombian police's Blackhawk helicopters are built) in the fight against drug trafficking. But FARC sympathizers and others still traumatized about Vietnam successfully blocked efforts to provide meaningful counterinsurgency assistance to the Colombian military.
During the 1990s, the Clinton administration looked the other way as the FARC grew stronger. In 1995, according to a recent Rand study for the Pentagon, it had 7,000 fighters on 60 fronts; five years later, there were 15,000 to 20,000 FARC combatants on more than 70 fronts. The huge increase was financed with money from American cocaine and heroin users, but the Clinton administration reversed long-standing bipartisan policy and drew a distinction between drug traffickers and guerrillas. On condition of anonymity, a senior State Department official assured Insight with a straight face in 1999 that "there is no such thing as narcoterrorists."
In this spirit, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 73, literally to deny intelligence data to the Colombians lest it help the counterinsurgency, even though the United States would provide similar data to the Colombian police to stop drug trafficking. Both the White House and Congress barred Colombia from using U.S. antinarcotics aid against the FARC in counterinsurgency activity, allowing the equipment to be used only by police battling drug production and smuggling — two key FARC industries, but only tangential to the narcoterrorist hold on the countryside.
The distinction struck many as absurd. "Now does one say aid can be used against narcotics traffickers but not against the guerrillas, when the guerrillas have been the traffickers?" asks Constantine Menges, a former national intelligence officer for Latin America who served on the White House NSC.
The Bush administration appears to agree. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Asa Hutchinson routinely refers to the Colombian guerrillas as narcoterrorists. In a recent public appearance, he stated, "We should understand very clearly today that there is a drugs-to-money-to-terror relationship that is historic, that is current and that is threatening to our future."
"The United States should dispense with self-imposed limitations on the sharing of intelligence," Menges advises. "It should also include permission for Colombian forces to use U.S. military aid against the Communist guerrillas, which are not only the major threat but the major narcotics traffickers."
Intelligence sources say the United States has an unmatched ability to monitor FARC operations and communications from the sky and space, and that sharing real-time data with the Colombian military would allow Colombia to bomb and otherwise strike FARC positions with deadly accuracy, stopping FARC attacks before they could begin.
Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who had staked his presidency on the peace process and gave the FARC its own demilitarized zone (DMZ) the size of Switzerland, came around to Menges' point of view by Feb. 20, when the FARC hijacked a commercial airplane and kidnapped a senator. Colombians as a whole, facing a new presidential election in May, have become increasingly hard line against the FARC and a smaller Communist narcoterrorist group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
The FARC, after 38 years of fighting, was building up impressive momentum to fight the Colombian army head-on and possibly overthrow the government by the end of Pastrana's term, according to the Rand study. That report helped underscore the urgency in the Bush administration to tackle Colombia. Assistant Secretary of State Reich visited Bogotá in mid-February, telling reporters of "a plan to contain and eliminate the violence in Colombia."
The Communist guerrillas there are determined to take full power. "Now that the president of Colombia has tried political negotiations for three years and the guerrillas have responded with violence, it's time for the United States to provide full political, intelligence and military-assistance support to Colombia so the guerrillas can be defeated and peace restored," says Menges.
Pastrana finally got it by the time the FARC kidnapped the senator. He gave a national speech itemizing 117 terrorist attacks during the previous 30 days, including four car bombings, murders of women and children and poisoning of aqueducts. He echoed President Bush's "with us or with the terrorists" theme. On Feb. 21, he ordered the army into the DMZ under Operation Thenatus to take control of the huge region. With Israeli-made Kfir-C7 and French Dassault Mirage fighter jets, as well as a fleet of turboprop-driven counterinsurgency aircraft, Colombian forces ran some 200 sorties against the FARC in the first day of fighting.
So far, the Bush administration's support for Colombia has been strong in principle but a work in progress. It has not revoked Clinton's presidential directive and has asked Congress only for military assistance to help Colombia guard an oil pipeline that is a frequent target of FARC attacks — a pipeline, by the way, owned in part by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum. Menges argues that the United States can provide Colombia with the necessary training, intelligence and equipment "consistent with efforts to fight international terrorism."
"The guerrillas draw political strength and sustenance from a robust network of supporting organizations, both in Colombia and overseas. Multiorganizational networks aided the insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala and the Sandinistas in the 1980s, but have assumed a larger role with the information revolution of the 1990s, and particularly with the development of the Internet," according to the Rand report. "The FARC and the ELN have developed a wide range of multiorganizational supporting networks both in Colombia and overseas. The strategic objectives of these networks is to restrict the actions of the Colombian state and its agencies and to deny it international support."
That's the big problem for U.S. policy: how to defuse the FARC's instant activist support base in the United States and in Congress. The FARC has a base of pro-Castro and pro-Marxist groups in the United States who use the Internet, as well as traditional grass-roots demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns, to press their cause. They backed Dodd's failed blockage of Reich (see "Smearing Reich," Aug. 5, 2001).
One of the main activist groups opposing U.S. assistance to Colombia is the New York-based International Action Center (IAC). Headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark, the IAC is staffed by veteran leaders of the Workers World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist fringe group with a history of street theater going back to the Vietnam War and the Attica Prison uprising. The IAC openly supports an array of terrorists, cop-killers and even convicted communist spies on its Website (see "Domestic Front in the War on Terror," Jan. 7).
On Feb. 22, the day after Pastrana launched Operation Thenatus, the IAC held "emergency protests" in front of the Colombian Mission to the United Nations in New York City and the Colombian consulate in San Francisco. The IAC is planning nationwide militant demonstrations against U.S. aid to Colombia and against the U.S. war against terrorism in general on April 27.
Pastrana could buckle without strong U.S. backing. Angel Rabasa, a Rand analyst who coauthored the Pentagon report, tells Insight the Colombian government could go in either of two directions. "One is to make the recapture of the [demilitarized] zone part of a military strategy that would break the logistical and military axis of the guerrillas and decisively change the military balance." That, however, would be costly for the country and could provoke international opposition. "The other alternative is a more or less peaceful occupation of the zone, supposing the guerrillas would permit it," Rabasa says.
That would permit Colombian forces to take over the local towns and the FARC could retreat into the countryside. "The government could say it acted in a decisive manner, but in reality without much substantial change," Rabassa adds, because the FARC would remain intact.
The FARC, however, is vulnerable. "The organization has some critical weaknesses, notably its linkage to criminal elements and its lack of support among the population at large. Opinion polls estimate overall FARC support at about 5 percent of the population," according to the Rand report. "In the areas where it predominates, the FARC has endeavored to institutionalize popular support by setting up political support groups, but it enforces its rule through selective terror and intimidation."
Says Menges, "This is the time to defeat them."
J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight.
The knee-jerks on FR are focused exclusively on Muslims. They are ignoring the danger right in our own backyard as it were.
I keep posting these kinds of articles and they get maybe 3-4 responses, that's all.
You won't get any play on this subject until the U.S. embassy there is bombed.
I am thrilled with Otto Reich.
Colombia Heats Up, And There's No 'Plan B'
Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer; Published: March 3, 2002;
Author: Elizabeth SullivanColombian Drug War Escapes U.S. Notice, But Fuels Its Habit
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Published: | March 3, 2002;
Author: Richard Foster
The National Mobilization on Colombia - April 19-22, 2002 Washington, DC
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