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Terrorism, and the risk of terrorist attacks, was of concern to the United States long before the Sept. 11 attacks. The State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, compiles a list of terrorist groups every two years, called Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).
On Sept. 10, 2001, the day before the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Colombia's main paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), was officially added to this list. AUC is the third Colombian guerrilla group to be added to the 29-member list, joining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla groups. All three are involved in Colombia's ongoing civil war and are notorious for engaging in terrorist activities including murder, kidnappings and bombings. All three groups are inextricably linked to the drug trade.
As President George W. Bush describes the effort to stamp out terrorism globally, some Colombian officials fear that such efforts may alter current aid programs to Colombia including "Plan Colombia" and the Andean Regional Initiative (For an explanation of these programs see "U.S. Plans Huge Colombian Aid Package," by Rachel Stohl, Weekly Defense Monitor, Jan. 20, 2000), since the country houses more than 10 percent of the terrorist groups on the U.S. list. But Colombia's situation differs greatly from Afghanistan and other terrorist-harboring countries.
In Bush's Sept. 20 address to Congress, he stated that the U.S. effort to stamp out terrorism "will not end until every group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." It is this very distinction — global reach — that protects Colombian aid programs. Al Qaeda is a terrorist group of global reach; it targets the U.S. government and civilians worldwide. The Colombian "terrorist" groups are concerned with political power within Colombia, their actions are not of a global dimension. Because Americans within U.S. borders are not direct targets for the Colombian groups, U.S. foreign policy is designed to fight the drug war rather than terrorism per se. (However, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on ABC's "This Week" on Sept. 23, "we have designated three groups in Colombia alone as being terrorist organizations, and we are working with the Colombian government to protect their democracy against the threat provided or presented by these terrorist organizations.")
While Colombia is a formal democracy, its society is beset with violence and corruption fueled by the drug trade. Illegal profits have permeated every side of armed conflict in Colombia: drug traffickers, guerrilla groups, the police, the military, and paramilitary forces. The United States has been pouring almost half a billion dollars a year of military aid into Colombia to strengthen the country's fragile socio-political system.
To that end, the current U.S. counter-narcotics program, called "Plan Colombia," embraces the idea of supplying arms to Colombian police and special military forces to curb insurgency and support herbicidal spraying of coca fields. "Plan Colombia" has achieved mixed reviews, and has been criticized for its poor record in support of human rights, the potential for further escalation of the conflict, and the failure of fumigation as a drug policy. The U.S. plan is centered around a counter-narcotics strategy based on the fumigation of fields. A negative externality of this spraying is that not only the coca plants are affected, but legal sustainable crops, livestock, and people are being harmed. These health and economic effects have sparked discontent among the peasant farmers, leading them to disavow "Plan Colombia" and support the guerrillas. Further, by taking away the peasant's way of making a living in neglected rural areas, they are forced to relocate and end up growing coca somewhere else, resulting in an increase in the amount of coca grown in Colombia.
As such, the rebel groups within Colombia have created an environment where their political demands are taken seriously. They are not amorphous groups of "cells", but rather are well-organized, national-level institutions, with the support of tens of thousands of members. FARC and ELN are on the brink of achieving political legitimacy and regularly communicate with the government, and even have had territories of land turned over to them. The government has granted the groups political status, and has sought to negotiate peace with them. (The government also agreed to a FARC demand that military forces be pulled from five FARC-dominated municipalities in southern Colombia; it is in this zone where peace talks have taken place.) These characteristics set them apart from al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Colombian government reaction to the three Colombian "terrorist" groups has differed greatly from the response of the Taliban. The Colombian government is eager to resolve the ongoing civil war in the country that results in domestic terrorist acts, whereas the Taliban remains a silent supporter of Osama bin Laden and his associates. The Bush administration would be well served to support the peace process within Colombia and also seek other diplomatic solutions to fight terrorism, as is currently being pursued through the freezing of financial assets of terrorist groups. Moreover, because the drug trade doesn't operate in a vacuum, U.S. policy should address the conditions that permit it to prosper and continue — particularly the huge U.S. demand for drugs.
While the situations in Colombia and Afghanistan differ greatly, the U.S. government reaction, in some respects, has been similar. In both cases, the Bush administration has favored providing U.S. weapons to support an end to the ongoing conflict. Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, and that aid is only estimated to increase in the short term, even though such efforts have been met with mixed results. The Bush administration has currently proposed lifting arms restrictions to India and Pakistan to assist with the efforts to hunt down the terror networks in the region. Further, recent discussions have considered arming the Taliban resistance group, the Northern Alliance, to defeat the Taliban and catch bin Laden.
Denying aid is not the answer, but the current programs and proposals need to be modified or at least expanded. Colombia and South Asia are already saturated with U.S. weapons. A more effective course would be to reallocate assistance — to invest much more in economic and social development, the strengthening of democratic institutions and the protection of human rights.
In any circumstance, military aid alone — no matter how extensive — will not eliminate either the drug trade or terrorism. Supporting and arming groups that temporarily serve Washington's foreign policy interests is not necessarily the right answer. Continuing to supply Colombia with arms is likely to create a stockpile that could be used in the future to destabilize the government or violate human rights. Likewise, supplying Afghanistan's neighbors with massive amounts of weapons in order to combat terrorism could well be counterproductive. It is not too late to refocus U.S. policy in either hemisphere to include a broader set of policy tools, aimed at long-term as well as short-term consequences.
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