Pubdate: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 Source: Miami Herald (FL) Copyright: 2000 The Miami Herald Contact: One Herald Plaza, Miami FL 33132-1693 Fax: (305) 376-8950 Website: http://www.herald.com/ Forum: http://krwebx.infi.net/webxmulti/cgi-bin/WebX?mherald Author: Carol Rosenberg SOUTHCOM WON'T PUT GENERAL IN COLOMBIA Faced with bureaucratic and diplomatic obstacles, the Southern Command has suspended a plan to post a one-star army general in Bogota to oversee portions of Congress' $1.3 billion Plan Colombia anti-drug package. Last August, Pentagon leaders began to consider the idea of posting Army Brig. Gen. Keith M. Huber to Colombia, a measure that would significantly raise in-country military supervision above and beyond the military group headed by a colonel at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia. Since then, said Southcom spokesman Col. Ron Williams, ``we're not doing anything about it,'' calling the idea the results of ``preliminary discussion here at headquarters that did not leave Southcom headquarters.'' He added that any decision to move military personnel would ultimately be up to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. ``It's the ambassador's call.'' After a week of inquiries, embassy spokesman Robert Hughes said Ambassador Anne W. Patterson was unavailable to discuss the Huber matter and declined to clarify her position. ``There are currently no plans to assign Gen. Huber to Colombia; I'm not prepared to go beyond that,'' he said. In Washington, congressional sources said several factors served to defeat or at least paralyze the deployment of what would have been the U.S. military's only general in South America: THE REASONS By congressional mandate, the military has a defined number of ``billets'' for general officers. Huber's Bogota position potentially would have created a new slot because one popular idea in August was to assign another general to his job as director of operations at Southcom's Doral headquarters. But to do that, Southcom or the Pentagon would have to eliminate a general's billet elsewhere -- or seek congressional approval to add a slot. The plan took Patterson by surprise. It was published on Aug. 30, the same day President Clinton traveled to Cartagena on a one-day mission to underscore U.S. support for President Andres Pastrana's $7.5 billion package to prop up the insurgency-riddled country. Patterson had only a month earlier arrived in Bogota from her previous posting as ambassador to El Salvador, and Southcom authorities had not yet consulted her. The ambassador in a given country is the highest-ranking American on the ground and any military member ultimately serves there at his or her pleasure. Her predecessor, fellow career foreign service officer Curtis W. Kamman, had kept a tight control on U.S. military forces in the country, at times banning troops from talking to the media in Colombia. UNEASY RELATIONSHIP The Huber stalemate illustrates the uneasy relationship between the military and civilians over Plan Colombia, the most ambitious U.S. security foray into the Americas in more than a decade. To harness any U.S. expansion ambitions in the drug war, which overlaps with an anarchic independent insurgency, the State Department and other civilian agencies have taken the lead in implementing Congress' $1.3 billion aid package. But, because both the Colombian national police and army benefit from the plan, the U.S. military must have some role. Implementation has so frustrated some on Capitol Hill that one-time proponent Rep. Ben Gilman, the Republican chairman of the International Relations Committee, recently wrote Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, to criticize the plan. WHO IS IN CHARGE? It is also unclear on our side who is in charge of military assistance -- the State Department or the Defense Department,'' Gilman wrote Nov. 14 in the letter to McCaffrey The Southern Command headed by Marine Gen. Peter Pace is the Pentagon's command-and-control center for U.S. military operations in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Defense Department officials have yet to weigh in for or against the idea of a Huber deployment. ``No decisions have been made,'' said Army Lt. Col. George Rhynedance, a Pentagon spokesman, ``with respect to assigning anyone from Southcom permanently to Plan Colombia.'' The concept first surfaced at Southcom this summer during the waning days of Pace's predecessor, Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, to at least temporarily base Huber in Bogota to oversee the military portion of the $1.3 billion. Huber's official biography reads like a 25-year prep course for directing a counter-insurgency strategy. A 1975 West Point graduate, he has a background in Special Forces, a bronze star and served as a brigade field advisor in 1987 in El Salvador, the United States' most high-profile counterinsurgency effort of the past 20 years. GULF WAR POSITION Since then, he was operations director with the 101st Airborne during the Gulf War and subsequently spent 10 months as the 101st's G-5, running the civil operations staff that has traditionally been tasked with winning the hearts and minds of a foreign population. At Southcom, Huber had been Wilhelm's operations director since July, and for 20 months before that was Wilhelm's executive officer. He spent a year as commander of Joint Task Force-Bravo at the Soto Cano air base in Honduras, a staging point for military operations in Central America. Huber also was operations chief for the U.N. Mission in Haiti in 1995. - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck