A new look at Colombia

A scantly remarked but crucial aspect of the war on drugs is that it engages the United States in the internal affairs of countries with weak institutions and a strong nationalist streak. This requires Washington to temper its impatience on drugs with an awareness of internal complexity and national feeling. Nowhere, with the possible exception of Mexico, is this more important than in Colombia, a country torn by insurgency, violence and corruption and the source of most of the cocaine and heroin entering the United States.

Colombia's newly elected president, Andres Pastrana, a former journalist with a reputation of honesty, has been in Washington seeking help for his country's drug dilemma without upsetting its political equilibrium. He is pursuing a policy of opening up a political space and giving a military free pass to draw in guerrillas of the left, undertaking military and judicial reform to reduce paramilitaries of the right, and meanwhile taking on the drug traffickers, who have their own connections on the two flanks.

To Washington's conservatives, taking on the traffickers means shooting up their infrastructure and spraying peasant coca and poppy fields. The Republican Congress showed its muscle by inserting several hundred million dollars' worth of unsought drug fighting military aid into the omnibus budget bill. Mr. Pastrana sees how such tactics as applied in Peru drive coca cultivation into Colombia. He believes that crop substitution in a framework of national development is the more effective strategy for Colombia.

That leaves the question of what is the more effective U.S. strategy. As the center of global demand, the United States has its own responsibilities in interdiction and law enforcement and, even more, in development, education and treatment. Colombia and other drug sources lack the weight to shape U.S. policy the way it can influence theirs. This makes for an unequal relationship, and Americans must tend to it.

-- The Washington Post