The principal problem, however, is that current security aid provided by the United States is not targeted in a way that will best contribute to Colombia's peace and reconciliation. Indeed, even though Colombia is the third major recipient of U.S. security assistance in the world (following Israel and Egypt), there are few signs of any guiding strategic concept. Instead, the $1.3 billion aid package approved for Colombia last year - the U.S. contribution to the more wide-ranging, multi-year, $7.5 billion "Plan Colombia" - is, as noted above, a mostly military, anti-drug program. The policy responds less to Colombian realities than to U.S. domestic political realities and pressures. To the extent that the aid has any connection to the key goal of helping the Colombian state protect its citizens, it is largely indirect and mainly a rationalization to justify going after the piece of the Colombian puzzle the majority of US officials care most about -- drugs.

Current assistance to Colombia emphasizes the standard U.S. anti-drug formula: eradication and interdiction. It is doubtful that such a formula will have any positive effect in helping, even narrowly, to reduce the flow of drugs to the U.S.. But it also appears clear that focusing aid on buying expensive helicopters and training a few anti-narcotics battalions to secure the coca fields in southern Colombia is far from the best way to turn around the country's rampant lawlessness and continuing deterioration. Indeed, there is ample and convincing evidence that fumigation is often counterproductive, helping push coca growers into the hands of lawless forces, on the right or the left.

U.S. assistance is misguided and needs to be substantially reframed and reformulated. In order to change the narrow focus on drugs and help Colombians deal with their urgent problem of public order, the strategic emphasis of U.S. policy toward Colombia should instead be, in the short-term, to promote professionalization of the country's security forces. Professionalization transcends the counterdrug/counterinsurgency dilemma that frequently comes up in policy debates on Colombia. Critics often charge that what drives U.S. policy is military defeat of the guerrillas, using the fight against drugs largely as a pretext. But reorienting U.S. policy in a way that puts greater emphasis on enabling the Colombian state to reassert authority in a democratic context would be a welcome shift - and something quite different from either a counterdrug or counterinsurgency approach. In order to undertake such a professionalization effort, the U.S. should focus less on providing military hardware, and more on training, military restructuring, intelligence gathering, and establishing effective monitoring mechanisms.

More importantly, professionalization would be a necessary step in strengthening the Colombian state, which would help the country move towards a peace settlement to the decades-long conflict. Security forces behaving with greater professionalism - increased capacity and, crucially, full adherence to human rights norms of conduct - could very well change the dynamics of the conflict, altering the calculations of the FARC and making them more inclined to negotiate in good faith.

Of course, from 1996 to 1999, the U.S. cut off assistance to the Colombian military because of reported human rights abuses and widespread corruption. Instead, support was directed to the Colombian National Police for counterdrug purposes. But such support, still mistakenly geared towards fighting drugs, proved inadequate to deal with the country's underlying problem of spreading lawlessness.

The overall objective of U.S. Colombia policy should be, rather, to increase the capacity of the security forces to restore and maintain public order as well as to improve soldiers' discipline and enhance accountability for their actions.