Declaraciones del expresidente Álvaro Uribe a Foreign Policy

Declaraciones del expresidente Álvaro Uribe a Foreign Policy

Plan Afghanistan Can Work

Colombia's former president says that the U.S. counterterrorism model from Latin America can work in Central Asia -- but only if the civil sector gets involved.

BY ALVARO URIBE VÉLEZ | DECEMBER 13, 2011

In a recent piece in Foreign Policy, Paul Wolfowitz and Michael O'Hanlon advocate the "Colombia model" as a potential long-term strategy for Afghanistan. They note similarities between the ongoing security challenges in Afghanistan and those that Colombia dealt with over the past few decades. Like Afghanistan today, Colombia faced a multi-decade terrorist threat fueled by radical ideologies, drug profits, hostile neighbors, forbidding terrain, and a weak central government. Colombia, they argue, was able to beat back the threat though "a combination of brave actions by the Colombian military, some $7 billion in U.S. assistance, a relatively small number of U.S. military advisors and, particularly, the strong leadership of President Alvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2010."

There is much to recommend in the argument. Comparisons between countries as different as Colombia and Afghanistan are necessarily imperfect, but ongoing events have only strengthened the parallels between the two situations. The mission in Afghanistan suffers from the same pessimism and waning confidence that afflicted Colombia's counterterrorism efforts. By the late 1990s, many in the international community concluded that the Colombian government was incapable of ever dealing with narco-terrorism and several international agencies even assessed that Colombia was on the brink of becoming a failed state. 

The current reconciliation talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban seem to be heading in the same direction as the peace process that the Colombian government initiated with FARC insurgents from 1999-2002. So long as the Colombian government proved incapable of securing key population centers and addressing terrorist sanctuaries, neither the FARC nor its far-right counterparts were willing to negotiate in good faith or agree to a ceasefire. The same is likely to be the case with the Taliban, Haqqani network, and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

Wolfowitz and O'Hanlon rightly credit improvements in traditional security capabilities, military and civilian assistance from the United States, and effective presidential leadership for Colombia's turnaround. But these factors alone could not have achieved the degree of progress the country witnessed. By 2010, for example, kidnappings were down 90 percent, the homicide rate fell by half, and tens of thousands of fighters were disarmed and demobilized, with some of the deadliest kingpins extradited to U.S. prisons.