The question loomed over the Obama administration's review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which concluded with the president's recent decision to dispatch thousands of additional troops, eliminate insurgent sanctuaries and internationalize a conflict that is increasingly viewed as America's problem.
But there is a more apt -- and more successful -- model than Iraq. And you'll find it much closer to home. If you want to roll back a homegrown insurgency inflamed by a pesky neighbor, millions in drug profits and a weak central government, Colombia offers a far better classroom for learning how to beat the Taliban.
I lived and worked in Colombia as a correspondent for The Post from 2000 to 2004. At the time, only the capital, Bogota, was spared the horrors of a war marked by massacres with machetes, machine guns and even stones that made it one of the most gruesome conflicts I've witnessed. Today, assisted by billions of dollars in U.S. military and development aid, the Colombian government has pushed a Marxist insurgency deep into the jungles where it was born four decades ago. Isn't that what Obama wants to accomplish in Afghanistan?
The conflicts in Colombia and Afghanistan share far more similarities with one another than either does with Iraq, which I covered in 2003 and 2004. The Taliban have caves and Colombian guerrillas their triple-canopy jungle and mountain hideouts -- terrain far more useful to insurgencies than Iraq's desert. Afghanistan's opium poppies fund the Taliban, just as coca fuels Colombia's guerrillas. As Pakistan does for the Taliban, Venezuela and Ecuador provide sanctuary to Colombia's insurgents.
Perhaps the most important parallel, though, is the lack of a strong central government. Colombia's government has rarely held sway beyond Bogota's nearly two-mile high plateau, and the frail Karzai administration in Kabul has a similarly short reach. As a result, Colombia has relied on brutal paramilitary forces to support a weak army, alienating much of the population in the process. In Afghanistan, that role is played by U.S. forces, which, although by no means as savage as the Colombian irregulars, have cost Afghanistan's government support among a people famously hostile to foreign invaders.
The parallels extend even to the U.S. ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, and the outgoing ambassador to Afghanistan, William Wood. Both previously headed the embassy in Bogota. And during a visit to Colombia last month, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that some of that country's lessons are applicable "specifically to Afghanistan."
Colombia still produces tons of coca. Yet it is far more stable than it was when I covered the war there. President Álvaro Uribe, inaugurated in 2002, turned the tide. How he did it offers four key lessons for Obamain Afghanistan.
First, a surge of U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan may be less useful than further increasing the number of military trainers being deployed to help build a viable Afghan army. Second, the administration should focus less on stopping the heroin trade and more on establishing functioning state institutions -- from schools to health clinics. Third, efforts to seal off border sanctuaries do not work and divert military resources from the central job of protecting civilians. The fourth lesson is a stark one: It will take time. The Colombian effort has taken nearly a decade and counting.
Like the Taliban, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the guerrilla group better known by its Spanish acronym FARC, is made up mostly of young recruits of varying degrees of ideological devotion. The guerrillas grouped their military divisions into "fronts." Most of the committed Marxists belonged to those in the north and west. Those in the drug-producing southern jungles, however, were motivated more by greed. It was easy to guess what front a guerrilla belonged to by how many gold rings he wore with his camouflage uniform.
Starting earlier this decade, the Colombian government began to lure the less faithful away with promises of cash and job training, a "reinsertion" program that Uribe has expanded significantly. The flood of guerrilla defectors in recent years is proof of how loosely many of the young men and women pressed into the insurgency held their Marxist convictions. The 18,000-strong guerrilla army of my time there is now half that size.
But Uribe didn't stop there. The change that proved most important in reducing violence and undermining the guerrillas was his decision to disarm the paramilitaries.
For years, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, as the main paramilitary group was known, battled the guerrillas with tacit government approval. Carrying out massacres of villagers and reaching deep into the thriving drug trade, the paramilitaries accumulated power through a campaign of terror rivaled only by the guerrillas' own.
The government publicly condemned the paramilitaries' actions to preserve U.S. aid. But every Colombian colonel in charge of remote military bases knew that working with the paramilitaries was the only way to keep the guerrillas away.
In disbanding them starting in 2004, Uribe began the process of replacing the state's brutal proxy with the state itself. The United States helped, ramping up its training of Colombia's army and supplying billions in hardware and Blackhawk helicopters. But national symbolism mattered, too: Twine bracelets of red, gold and blue -- the colors of the Colombian flag -- became standard accessories for everyone from the president to peasant farmers. They were a vote for the state. And Uribe's move won more converts to the government's side than any new health clinic, road project or other aid program.
By then, I'd watched the paramilitary movement expand to the point where it controlled vast amounts of Colombian territory, had seized the guerrillas' drug smuggling networks and had elected dozens of sympathetic local and national politicians. The Bush administration kept the money flowing to Colombia's army despite evidence of its complicity in paramilitary massacres.
The argument at the time, always made privately, was that the paramilitaries provided the force that the army did not yet have. The group served as a placeholder for the more professional U.S.-trained force that would come along years later.
The situation did appear dire. The guerrillas had encircled the capital and held a large share of the national territory, similar to the Taliban position today. Guerrilla roadblocks on highways sliced the country into isolated regions, blocking farmers from markets and tourists from Caribbean resort cities. But most Colombians didn't want the paramilitaries or the guerrillas. Everywhere I traveled I heard the same refrain from the farmers, priests, mayors and school teachers: Where's the state?
Too often the government was present only in the form of U.S.-backed aerial herbicde spraying of coca crops, designed to eliminate the guerrillas' main funding source. But it just ended up impoverishing the peasant farmers who grew the coca, as well as killing the small plots of food crops they planted alongside the drug-producing ones. So Uribe, despite U.S. opposition, scaled back spraying, too.
Opium poses the same problem in Afghanistan. The Obama administration seems to have learned that anti-narcotics efforts alienate the civilian population and pledged in the policy review paper to focus on "higher level drug lords." If Colombia is a lesson, the money would be better spent on military training, which last year resulted in the spectacular jungle rescue of three U.S. Defense Department contractors from a Colombian guerrilla camp.
The sanctuaries on Colombia's borders have always been a headache. A top FARC commander was killed last year in a Colombian air strike inside Ecuador, and a laptop recovered at the guerrilla camp indicated that Venezuelan officials close to President Hugo Chávez may have helped secure money and weapons for the FARC.
Similarly, the Pakistani intelligence service has been implicated in helping coordinate Taliban attacks, and the Obama administration has made the Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas a primary target of the military effort.
But sealing off a vast mountainous region to deny Taliban or al-Qaeda supplies or staging areas may not be achievable, if Colombia's efforts to police its own rough borders are any guide.
I left Colombia in April 2004 and didn't go back until last November. The capital was nothing like the one I remembered. Land values in Bogota were skyrocketing, because the guerrillas were no longer there. Kidnapping was nearly non-existent. Club Nogal, a tony athletic club for Colombia's elite that the guerrillas had bombed in 2003, has reopened. Colombia is far from ideal, but a corner has been turned.
The parallels between Colombia and Afghanistan are hardly perfect. And a lot suggests that succeeding in Afghanistan will be harder and take longer. Afghanistan is a pre-modern society, while Colombia's population, even in the countryside, is well-educated, and the country boasts one of the most innovative business classes in South America. It is the land of García Márquez, Botero and Shakira, not the graveyard of empires.
Uribe, meanwhile, embodies the importance of competent local leaders. Although reports of his close association with the paramilitaries mar his human rights record, Uribe has largely succeeded in disbanding them and extraditing their leaders to the United States. President Hamid Karzai and his family in Afghanistan, including a brother with connections to the opium trade, have failed to impress their American patrons to the same degree.
In detailing his plan for Afghanistan, Obama said that he has "no illusions that this will be easy" and that he will not "blindly stay the course." If his venture fails, he may want to look south rather than east in charting a new course.
Its 4 Months old, but still good. Using Colombia as a Model for Afghanistan
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