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/
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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.
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