Pubdate: Fri, 19 Jan 2001
Source: Duluth News-Tribune (MN)
Copyright: 2001 Duluth News-Tribune
Contact:  424 W. First St., Duluth, MN 55802
Website: http://www.duluthnews.com/
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Author: George Will

FIGHTING A SUPPLY-SIDE WAR ON DRUGS IS EXERCISE IN FUTILITY

With the delicacy of someone seasoned by much experience near the summit of 
government, Donald Rumsfeld has indicated strong skepticism about a policy 
from which this country may reap a bumper crop of regrets. Asked about the 
$1.6 billion -- so far -- undertaking to help fight the drug war in 
Colombia, Rumsfeld said he had not formulated an opinion. However, he 
embroidered his agnosticism with thoughts antithetical to the program for 
which George W. Bush, during the campaign, indicated support.

In his confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld, the next secretary of defense, said 
combating illicit drugs is "overwhelmingly a demand problem,'' and added: 
"If demand persists, it's going to get what it wants.

And if it isn't from Colombia, it's going to be from someplace else.''

Indeed. In authorizing the aid for Colombia, Congress demanded, 
delusionally, the elimination of all of Colombia's coca and opium poppy 
cultivation by 2005. That would almost certainly mean a commensurate 
increase in cultivation in Colombia's neighbors.

One reason Colombia is the source of nearly 90 percent of the world's 
cocaine and a growing portion of heroin is that U.S. pressure on coca and 
poppy production in countries contiguous to Colombia, especially Peru and 
Bolivia, drove production into Colombia, where coca production has 
increased 140 percent -- to 300,000 acres -- in five years.

Now pressure on Colombia is pushing production into Colombia's neighbors. 
The New York Times reports that cocaine-processing labs have recently been 
found in Ecuador's Amazon region.

This is evidence that local peasants, who have crossed the border in recent 
years to work in the cocaine business, are ``returning with the drug 
expertise they have acquired in Colombia.''

Regarding the use of the U.S. military in policing this region, it is 
depressing to have to say something that should be obvious, but here goes: 
The military's task is to deter war and, should deterrence fail, to swiftly 
and successfully inflict lethal violence on enemies.

It is difficult enough filling an all-volunteer military with motivated 
warriors without blurring the distinction between military service and 
police work.

The $1.6 billion for Colombia will mostly pay for helicopters that 
Colombia's military will use to attack drug factories and 17,000 Marxist 
guerrillas, who are the world's most affluent insurgents. They use drug 
trafficking, taxes on coca production, extortion and ransoms -- grossing 
perhaps as much as $900 million a year -- to wage a war now in its fourth 
decade.

The guerrillas also are opposed by right-wing paramilitary forces -- 8,000 
strong and growing -- that are increasingly involved in drug trafficking.

Speaking of narcotics, Colombia has a ``peace process'' with a familiar 
asymmetry: Colombia's government wants to tame the guerrillas with a peace 
agreement; the guerrillas want to topple the government. Colombia's 
government is creating a second demilitarized zone in the country, this one 
for the second-largest guerrilla group to use as a haven during peace talks.

But The Washington Post reports that since the first such haven was created 
two years ago for the largest guerrilla group, that group has used it "to 
increase drug cultivation, stage military offensives, train new recruits 
and hold more than 450 soldiers and police officers captive in open-air pens.''

Kidnapping has become industrialized in Colombia, and assassins can be 
hired for "a few pesos'' according to Brian Michael Jenkins. Writing in The 
National Interest quarterly, Jenkins, an analyst of political violence and 
international crime, says Colombia's 30,000 murders unrelated to war 
translate into 100 deaths per 100,000 Colombians, a rate which in the 
United States would mean 250,000 murders a year.

Colombia, Jenkins says, is a combination success story and tragedy. The 
unemployment rate is 20 percent, and will go higher if defoliants and other 
anti-drug efforts put small growers and processors out of business. But 
Colombia has Latin America's fourth-largest economy and one of its highest 
literacy rates.

It has 40 flourishing universities and has never defaulted on its debts.

Yet a Gallup poll reveals that 40 percent of Colombians have considered 
emigrating and 60 percent know someone who has emigrated in the past two years.

Colombia's drug-related agonies are largely traceable to U.S. cities. 
Although one-third of Colombia's cocaine goes to Europe, America's annual 
$50 billion demand is a powerful suction pulling in several hundred tons of 
cheaply made, easily transportable and staggeringly profitable substances. 
Here is the arithmetic of futility: About one-third of cocaine destined for 
the United States is interdicted, yet the street price has been halved in 
the last decade of fighting the drug war on the supply side.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens