REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Southern Terror Front
Why is the State Department hindering the war on narcoterrorists?
Donald Rumsfeld's recent visit to Colombia is a welcome signal of solidarity toward America's most reliable Latin American ally in the war on terror.
"The Colombians are in every sense holding up their side of the partnership against narcoterrorism, and so we are always trying to find ways that we can be helpful," the Secretary of Defense said in an interview en route to Bogota. Perhaps even some holdouts in the State Department will now get the message.
As noted in a new terrorism index by the World Markets Research Center, Colombia is the most likely country in the world to experience a terrorist attack. The U.S. is fourth on the list, but Americans have not suffered anything like what Colombians have endured for decades. President Alvaro Uribe was elected in 2002 on a forceful anti-terror platform and it is in the U.S. interest that he succeed.
Colombia's terrorists are drug-running Marxist rebels--known as the FARC and the ELN--with little popular support. They plant land mines and once bombed a church full of civilians. A favorite tactic is kidnapping a family and forcing one of its members to deliver a car bomb as a precondition to freeing the others. The bomb is then detonated with the driver still at the wheel.
This threat is all the more difficult to defeat because of sanctuary provided by neighboring Venezuela. Numerous Venezuelan campesinos have told visitors that the guerrillas are there with the approval of Hugo Chavez's anti-American government. The Journal's Jose de Cordoba reported in April that one former FARC soldier claims that he was present when a FARC commander "worked out a deal with a local Venezuelan National Guard lieutenant."
So it was good to see Richard Myers, chairman of the Pentagon joint chiefs, call Caracas on the carpet during his visit to Colombia last week. "I think there is more to learn with respect to Venezuela, and we're going to have to continue to explore that." General Myers pointedly raised what he called the "Iraqi analogy," comparing any Venezuelan help to FARC to "countries like Syria" allowing "foreign fighters to come into Iraq to kill coalition members."
Another problem is that some in Washington are better friends to Mr. Chavez than to Mr. Uribe and Colombia. At the State Department, the habit has been to pull the U.S. visas of Colombia's best generals and demand they be fired. The official justification is typically on human rights grounds, but the charges against them are often made by sources sympathetic to the FARC. This has weakened the Colombian army and made the civilian population more vulnerable to terror.
A second obstacle--imposed by State at the behest of liberals in Congress--is limits on the Colombian use of U.S. Blackhawk helicopters. Colombian commanders must get the approval of the Narcotics Affairs section at State for every helicopter use involving the rebel war. This makes using perishable intelligence to surprise a rebel column next to impossible. It's useless to have actionable intelligence if the military cannot act on it. No U.S. military commander would accept such constraints.
The U.S. has been quiet about the purpose of the Rumsfeld and Myers visits, but we hope it was to scout facts on the ground and see what more the U.S. can do to help. President Bush rightly put the Pentagon in charge of security in post-Saddam Iraq, and it wouldn't hurt to do the same for U.S. efforts to assist Colombia. President Uribe is on our side, even if some American diplomats don't want to believe it.
