A TERRORIST REGIME WAITS IN THE WINGS
J. Michael Waller, a senior writer for
Insight Magazine (US)
Mon, 25 Mar 2002
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.
snip-
Read Complete Article Here
