On Feb. 12, 2001, Colombian Army helicopters descended on the town of Barrancomina in the Guainia department of eastern Colombia. The assault, known as Operation Black Cat, targeted the 16th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which operated freely in and around the town.

The 16th Front, led by Tomas Medina Caracas, a.k.a. Negro Acacio, was essentially a quartermaster unit for the FARC, handling major arms and narcotics transactions in close cooperation with Brazilian narcotics traffickers. The Colombian soldiers caught the FARC unit completely by surprise, routed them and later captured a major Brazilian drug kingpin who had been hiding in the town.

The importance of Operation Black Cat in the strategic thinking of both the Colombian Army and the FARC cannot be overstated. Barrancomina is deep in the trackless jungles, far from anything of importance and, the FARC believed, beyond the military's reach. Feeling secure, the 16th Front had ceased behaving like a guerrilla unit and had settled down and set up shop. It was a fixed target, fat and happy.

For the Colombian military, Operation Black Cat was a tactical triumph made possible in part by the application of two key resources supplied by the United States: air mobility and intelligence. These allowed the army to identify a key node in the FARC's organization and project force deep into territory the rebels considered secure, achieving the element of surprise and winning both a military and psychological victory.

The operation buttressed the military's claims that it could, with proper support, defeat the FARC on the battlefield and that negotiations and compromise were therefore unnecessary. This victory also established the blueprint for the Feb. 22 offensive into the DMZ and for future combat.

For the FARC, Operation Black Cat was a wake-up call. The rebels had long been unchallenged in Colombia's eastern jungles, both inside and outside the DMZ. But U.S. military assistance allowed Colombia's armed forces to breach the wall of jungle that gave the FARC its sense of security. Moreover, it was an unusual seizure of initiative by the Colombian military – a dangerous precedent for rebels whose tactical and strategic security depended on forcing the military to remain reactive and on the defensive.

The arrival of U.S. technical and intelligence support has fundamentally shifted the battlefield equation in Colombia and will dramatically intensify the conflict. However, that is not to say that current levels of support will allow the Colombian military to win the war. The United States has involved itself in the war enough to increase the pain of FARC guerrillas but not enough to defeat them. Thus, Washington has forced the FARC to deal with the U.S. involvement without denying them the means of doing so.

FARC'S war plan

The FARC is an unusual sort of insurgency: It is not what its rhetoric and reputation seem to indicate.

It is not an ideologically committed communist movement; though it does include self-described communists. It is not a drug cartel; though it is undeniably involved in the narcotics trade. It is not a collection of bandits and local warlords; though its structure contributes to feudal behavior. Despite its deep roots in the peasant struggle for land reform, it is not the pure and selfless vanguard of the peasant masses. It is, in the broadest terms, a flexible and resilient organization whose primary purpose is to continue to exist. This is what has allowed the FARC to endure. The FARC is an organization with a simple goal and the freedom to select complex and varying strategies toward achieving that goal.

At its core the FARC is only the most recent expression of the battle over land distribution that has divided Colombia since Simon Bolivar held power in the early 19th century. The group's founders were Liberal Party members – peasants with a basically agrarian agenda of social reform and land distribution, who first took to the jungles during the decade-long war known as La Violencia that followed the 1948 assassination of Liberal Party leader Eliecer Gaitan. They did not seek to overthrow the government but rather to secure rights for peasant farmers.

The FARC's ranks swelled with the massive population dislocation, unemployment and social upheaval sparked by government policies of the 1970s. The new members saw the group as a means through which to push for social justice in the face of economic hardship and repressive government policies. These members now form the core of the peace camp within the FARC.

Now a new cadre of leaders is rising that sees the 38-year-old organization as an institution – a decent place to make a living. These are pragmatists who have seen the abject failure of attempted participation in government, the collapse of the international Left, the irreconcilability of the paramilitary Right and the profitability of the narcotics industry. This younger generation is also not particularly interested in vying for power, since it has profitable local businesses and power bases in extortion, narcotics, kidnapping and theft.

For Colombia's peasants, the FARC offers a refuge from and vengeance for economic and physical dislocation. It provides recruits with necessities and a salary, the economic incentives of dealing in arms, cash and drugs, as well as prospects for advancement. Like a gang, the FARC represents a defense against the state and provides a social structure that permits upward mobility for the meritorious. It is a way to make a living or to make one's fortune. The group's rhetoric and ideology promote unit cohesion and loyalty as well as link the central command to the Fronts – which are essentially franchises spread across a vast territory with limited communication and transportation.

Boiled down, the FARC is a business and an alternative social framework, grown from the very real and consistent social, political and economic pressures that have ripped Colombia apart for more than a century. This is a critical point to consider when forecasting the outcome of the war. The FARC does not represent an alien ideology seeking to overturn the Colombian order. It is fundamentally rooted in the Colombian order; it is the manifestation of enduring problems.

The issues of land distribution and agrarian policy that fueled La Violencia remain unresolved today. Poverty and population displacement continue to generate new recruits for the FARC, as do the semi-condoned paramilitary violence and the eradication of high-value coca crops, without the provision of adequate substitutes. Combat may shatter the FARC as an organization, but government success on the battlefield will not eliminate Colombia's underlying problems nor eradicate the recourse to arms and rebellion.

Strengths

The FARC's main strengths are the flexibility of its structure and agenda, its geographic distribution and its access to the narcotics trade. These are also the sources of its weaknesses. The FARC's extremely resilient structure is best described as "distributed centralism." Local fronts are allowed a great deal of tactical autonomy: They handle their own recruitment and financing but remain bound by a strict chain of command and financial obligations to the central command. The FARC is a meritocracy, with clearly established chains of command and lines of succession. It is a segmented and redundant organization, with few irreplaceable individuals or specialized units.

The FARC's flexible ideology and limited agenda have allowed it to grow organically and adapt to Colombia's changing political, military and economic landscape. It was not undermined by the collapse of the Soviet Union, since it never received much support from Moscow. Because of the group's limited political aspirations and rural focus, a full-scale war to eradicate the FARC was never a cost-effective priority for the government.

Though distributed nationwide, the FARC's geographic base is in the jungles of southeastern Colombia and the Andean foothills. It was to the eastern jungles and plains that the peasant refugees of La Violencia fled, since these areas were relatively devoid of development and government presence. Thus the FARC did not so much capture eastern Colombia as arise from it. The jungles of eastern Colombia provide shelter and, until recently, a sense of security for the FARC. They are vast, empty and difficult to traverse and so have proved easy to defend – or at least to melt back into when routed.

The FARC's entry into the narcotics trade in the 1990s – first taxing coca producers, then selling protection services for drug refiners and traffickers and finally going into business itself – has provided the group with a substantial indigenous financial base. It has also tied the group for the first time to outside networks of arms and materiel suppliers.

Weaknesses

The same segmented and self-sufficient front-based structure that contributes to the FARC's resiliency limits its effectiveness. Since fronts are responsible for their own recruitment and financing, they tend to be relatively immobile, tied to familiar terrain. This hinders concerted offensive military action and defensive reinforcement and redeployment. The FARC began to seriously develop multi-front and mobile combat operations only in the late 1990s, and these operations are still confined primarily to the southern and eastern regions under FARC control.

The group's ideology and limited aspirations have alienated urban leftists, other more committed revolutionaries such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the international Left. This long isolated the FARC from outside resources and has complicated its rare forays into urban areas. The FARC and the more urban-oriented ELN rarely cooperate, and then only for temporary and tactical gain.

Many FARC fronts are also, of necessity, forward-deployed into government-controlled territory. It is only in the more populous mountain and coastal regions that the FARC can find grounds for lucrative criminal activity, as well as keep the government on the defensive and therefore control the tempo of conflict. This forward deployment stretches the lines of communication between the fronts and the central command, and it leaves the FARC's base of operations in the east relatively unguarded and vulnerable.

The isolated jungles that shelter the FARC also stifle its mobility and thus its military effectiveness. The rivers that provide east-west movement in the jungles hinder north-south movement, making reinforcement and maneuver-warfare difficult. A similar problem affects FARC units in the Andean west, where north-south movement is easy, but east-west movement is blocked. The absence of communications infrastructure impacts the group as well, since it forces them to rely on easily intercepted and jammed radio communication.

Finally, the narcotics revenues that have allowed the FARC to burgeon in size and scope have also placed the rebels in the crosshairs of the United States. Moreover, the international networks the FARC has accessed through this trade are fickle partners – as willing to work with the right-wing paramilitary United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) as with the rebels.

Aims

U.S. support for the Colombian offensive has upset what was a relatively stable situation - by Colombian standards. Politically and militarily, the FARC finds the United States, the Colombian military and the paramilitaries lined up against it. Each is strong and growing stronger. The paramilitaries are growing in number and advancing into territory the FARC thought was secure. The United States has fully accepted the equation of the FARC with the narcotics trade and is growing more vocal in its commitment to destroying the rebels. And the Colombian military – emboldened by U.S. political support and reinforced by key U.S. military assets that target the FARC's main weaknesses – is using the paramilitaries as an anvil to its hammer.

U.S. intervention confronts the FARC with the first prospect in a long time of a serious reversal in fortunes. It has reached its peak in terms of territorial control and, quite possibly, manpower. The FARC would prefer a return to the status quo circa 1998, but that is not going to happen. Therefore, the FARC will fall back on its prime directive: Adapt and survive. Ironically, the government decision to escalate the war may force the FARC to aspire to more than it has ever attempted. The FARC may have no choice but to launch a total war.

Strategy

Negotiation is now out of the question. The military has finally been unleashed and enjoys the backing of the United States. Its terms for negotiation are surrender. The guerrillas remember the experience of the Union Patriotica and M-19, whose members were quickly assassinated after they attempted to enter mainstream society. The paramilitaries remain intact and are growing, and they would not accept the peaceful reintegration of the FARC into society. And at the root of it all, Colombia's social and economic problems remain unaddressed. Even if FARC leaders surrendered, the rank and file would have to continue to run their fronts as bandit gangs or petty narcotics syndicates.

Nor can the FARC now afford to take the defensive. Absent the air mobility and intelligence assets provided by the United States, the Colombian Army and the FARC are relatively evenly matched. Both are predominantly light infantry forces, and in jungle warfare the FARC might even hold an edge. But the fact is, the government does have the ability to identify targets remotely and to project force to strike them.

The guerrillas cannot long survive such a war of attrition, especially since they lack an external sponsor to keep them supplied with arms and equipment. The FARC must continue its economic activity or evaporate, and it cannot easily manage the drug trade on the run. The group's aversion to static defense can be seen in the DMZ, where the Colombian army has met little resistance. The FARC has reportedly been evacuating the DMZ for weeks, husbanding resources for battle on its own terms.

That leaves one option for the FARC. It must launch a counteroffensive. It must retake the initiative on the battlefield. It has two basic target sets.

First, the FARC could strike directly at the Colombian military. The military has won the debate inside Colombia over how to deal with the insurgency, but that could change if the FARC could undermine public confidence in the military's ability to win the war. To achieve this, the FARC can attempt to score a few crushing defeats of Colombian military formations, but with U.S. intelligence assets in place, staging such an attack is much more difficult now than it was in 1998. Furthermore, FARC victories might only stiffen U.S. support for the Colombian military.

The guerrillas also could take the war to the cities, bringing the pain of battle to Colombian citizens and forcing them to recalculate the costs and benefits of the war. The FARC has recently been increasing its attacks on infrastructure, and there is no question that the rebels will continue this campaign. Recent evidence indicates the FARC has been studying urban warfare and bomb-making under the tutelage of foreign advisors – particularly some from the Irish Republican Army. But the cities are still foreign to the FARC, and carrying out an effective destabilization campaign would require them to mend fences with the ELN. There may not be time.

The prime target for the FARC, and the center of gravity for the Colombian military, is the United States. Washington contributes the most to the effectiveness of the Colombian military, but of all involved the U.S. is the least committed to the war. The FARC's strategic priority will be U.S. assets in Colombia – especially the intelligence and transportation personnel and assets that serve as force multipliers for the Colombian army.

Additionally, the FARC will try to raise the overall pain of involvement in Colombia beyond what the war is worth to the United States. The FARC will attempt to strike U.S. advisers on the ground at Colombian military bases, exposing their involvement in the war and destroying military assets as well. The United States continues publicly to reject active participation in the Colombian war, since the idea – always controversial – is even more dubious at a time when the public believes U.S. security priorities lie in the Middle East.

Besides military targets, the U.S. has economic assets in and around Colombia, not the least of which are in neighboring Venezuela, where the FARC is known to operate with the assent of embattled President Hugo Chavez.

In sum, the FARC can be expected to strike quickly and repeatedly against Colombian infrastructure and cities. At the same time, the FARC will place maximum priority on destroying Colombian military transportation and intelligence assets and U.S. military advisers. Finally, the FARC will likely strike U.S. commercial assets inside Colombia and possibly in neighboring states.

The Colombian army war plan

When President Andres Pastrana took office on Aug. 7,1998, resolving to end the war with the FARC through negotiation, the Colombian military was reeling from a series of major defeats. Starting with the decimation of the military base at Las Delicias two years previously, the FARC had staged a series of multi-unit attacks against fixed military installations and large mobile forces. These included the ambush and crushing defeat of a 153-man column of elite counter-guerrilla soldiers at El Billar in March 1998 and a 1,200-man raid that wiped out police and military bases at Miraflores only days before Pastrana took office.

Apparently unable to counter the new rebel combat doctrine, the military was hard-pressed to argue against negotiations. Pastrana realized that Colombia is effectively two countries: The bulk of the population and economy is based in the mountains and coastal regions of the west and north, while to the east – with the exception of oilfields along the foothills of the Andes and in Arauca, and of course coca – there is little of value. If not for the drug war and nationalism, Colombia could be divided rather easily. That was apparently Pastrana's intent – some form of de facto acceptance of FARC authority in the jungles in exchange for the peace necessary for economic development in the cities.

However, military officers and nationalists in the Colombian government, appalled at the apparent plan to surrender eastern Colombia to the rebels, took their case to Washington. They argued that the guerrillas and the narcotics industry were inseparably meshed and that any plan that surrendered sovereignty over Colombia's jungles essentially amounted to surrender in the war on drugs.

The appeal resonated in Washington, which began increasing its aid to the Colombian military and counter-narcotics forces. The United States provided crop-dusters for drug eradication with special forces on training missions nearby to keep an eye on them. Washington funded the formation, training and equipping of elite counter-narcotics units and, most important, it began providing intelligence and transport helicopters.

The first indication of the force-multiplying potential of U.S. intelligence aid came in 1998. Evidence suggests that the U.S.-piloted RC-7 reconnaissance aircraft was used to vector Colombian military troops to interdict mobile FARC columns and to thwart major attacks on at least two occasions – once against Bogota and once against the mountain headquarters of AUC commander Carlos Castano. Following the crash of the RC-7 in southern Colombia in July 1999, the FARC was again able to carry out large-scale multi-unit actions, surprising and wiping out the Marine garrison at Jurado in December of that year. The reconnaissance is scheduled to be replaced under the U.S. aid package to Colombia.

Strengths

The Colombian military is, on the whole, unimpressive. Roughly half its forces are conscripts with less training than many FARC guerrillas. Even elite Colombian units have fallen victim to the FARC, as was the case at El Billar in 1998. The army has some towed artillery and light armored vehicles, but these are of little use against small mobile guerrilla bands. For the most part, the Colombian army is a light infantry force on a level with the AUC and the FARC.

The military's real strength is the support it receives from the United States. The ability to airlift forces rapidly to identified targets is quite literally what elevates the Colombian army above its foes.

Weaknesses

Without U.S. aid the Colombian military is capable of maintaining the status quo in Colombia but not of defeating the guerrillas. Absent air mobility, it suffers the same geographic handicaps as the FARC. Without good signals and image intelligence, it is again susceptible to FARC ambushes.

More importantly, if it loses the capacity for measurable battlefield success, the military will again lose the debate to those who argue for negotiated settlement with the FARC. It is for this reason that the FARC will do all in its power to strike hard and quickly at both the U.S. support infrastructure and the public impression of the military's competence.

Finally, one of the reasons for Washington's hesitance to back fully the Colombian military is the close ties between the Colombian military and rightist paramilitaries. Before it regained U.S. military support, the government tacitly and sometimes actively supported the paramilitaries, who were more effective against the FARC than the Colombian Army could hope to be. The paramilitaries were, and remain, successful against the rebels because they were ruthless and extremely brutal in taking the fight to the FARC on its own turf. This did not sit well with international observers nor did the paramilitaries' adoption of narcotics trafficking as a source of financing. Washington has gone so far as to brand the AUC a terrorist organization, alongside the FARC. Continued ties between the military and paramilitaries will undermine foreign support for Colombia.

Aims

Having secured U.S. support and won the debate in Bogota, the military will now attempt nothing less than the complete destruction of the FARC as an organization. This offensive is not a negotiating ploy. The military will try to maintain the initiative through a steady series of focused operations in order to deter a FARC counteroffensive. The military also will try to keep the paramilitaries from moving into FARC territory in its wake – both to avoid public relations disasters and to stop the next major threat to the regime in Bogota before it becomes entrenched.

Strategy

Tactically Operation Black Cat was a test case for the current operation in the DMZ. The Colombian military encircled the target area in hopes of nabbing fleeing rebels, then airlifted troops into the heart of the DMZ – to San Vicente del Caguan, which had served as the FARC's headquarters in the region. The United States' fondness for strategic bombing is also apparent in the current operation, with the Colombian air force mimicking the recent U.S. Afghan campaign.

Strategically the Colombian military will target the FARC Secretariat and other senior commanders of blocs and fronts. The goal will be to sever the command, control and financing networks that unite the FARC. If the military can eliminate those responsible for the FARC's arms imports and multi-front operations planning, it will render the guerrilla army a shattered collection of independent fronts. These could theoretically be identified, targeted, surrounded and eliminated in a series of police actions at a later date.

The U.S. involvement in Colombian defense planning is quite evident, incorporating lessons of Washington's recent wars in Afghanistan and against al-Qaida. It remains to be seen whether these precedents are appropriate to apply to Colombia and whether the FARC will retain its amazing ability to evolve to meet new challenges. Finally, it is unclear that Washington can maintain such an obvious hand in the Colombian offensive without either having the hand ripped off or the rest of the military body pulled in.

Note: Latest developments point to lengthy, costly involvement.

Source: WorldNetDaily (US Web)
Published: February 25, 2002
Copyright: 2002 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
Contact: letters@worldnetdaily.com
Website: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/

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