Pubdate: Mon, 25 Mar 2002
Source: Insight Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2002 News World Communications, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.insightmag.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1107
Author: J. Michael Waller, a senior writer for Insight.

A TERRORIST REGIME WAITS IN THE WINGS

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 Bogota 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."
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