Just say no to this drug war.

"Plan Colombia" promises to escalate an intractable and brutal conflict.

SEEKING TO DISRUPT THE U.S. COCAINE MARKET while stabilizing Colombia's increasingly shaky government, President Bill Clinton and his Colombian counterpart, Andres Pastrana, succeeded over the summer in squeezing $1.3 billion in aid from the usually stingy U.S. Congress.

The lion's share of this package will be spent on training and provisioning Colombia's military and police--an effort that will put U.S. military advisors in harm's way and 63 Blackhawk and Huey helicopters into the hands of a military notorious for human rights abuses. The package also includes a large-scale herbicide spraying program meant to deprive Colombia's rebels and paramilitaries of the coca they rely on to finance the mayhem in the countryside.

The package has been sold to the American public as simply an extension of the war on drugs, not the beginning of another misguided U.S. intervention into another nation's civil war. But, with U.S. military advisors already among the war dead and television accounts of helicopter gunboat attacks on jungle guerrillas beaming into U.S. living rooms, it is difficult to ignore the parallels to America's divisive experience in Vietnam.

The U.S. support is the first installment of "Plan Colombia," a $7.5 billion program meant to end nearly four decades of conflict and chaos in Colombia. Pastrana has had no success in securing additional military aid from Europe, and the fiscally bereft nation is not likely to come up with the rest of the money on its own. Be prepared for the next administration to return to Congress for more cash. But funneling more military hardware into this deeply troubled patch of South America is bad news for Colombians and bad policy for the United States.

Colombia's civil war is the brutal manifestation of a complex socioeconomic and historical confrontation between its middle- and upper-class landowners and a beaten and disenfranchised peasantry. Billions more in aid would not suffice to end this conflict, nor even to undertake an eradication program that has any realistic hope of eliminating coca from the 2 million square miles of Colombian soil where it can be grown.

Instead of spending millions on crop spraying that may succeed only in poisoning the Colombian countryside or on "professionalizing" a military force already deeply entwined with right-wing paramilitaries and death squads, a truly comprehensive and rational Plan Colombia, say both U.S. and Colombian Catholic bishops, must move away from military solutions. They argue that limited spending on military training aimed at reducing human rights violations along with social investments meant to encourage real economic development in the countryside offer the best hope for reaching a negotiated peace in Colombia.

But even this less-lethal alternative to an escalated drug war would be doomed to failure without a more lucid and compassionate drug policy here in the U.S. that includes decriminalization and more treatment opportunities. America's $50 billion annual drug habit will not change even if the current Plan Colombia is successful. It's more likely, as Colombia's neighbors already worry, that cocaine production would simply shift to adjoining territories.

American losses during the drug war pale in comparison to the suffering endured by Colombians because of the developed world's cocaine addiction. We owe it to them and our other South American neighbors to face up to our own drug problem first before forcing a military "solution" on them.

The Colombian people might consider coming up with a solution of their own. How about a $ 1.3 billion aid package--not for Colombia, but the U.S.? Colombians could put together rapid response teams of their best addiction counselors, treatment specialists, and medical storm troopers and dispatch them to cities and suburbs throughout the United States, beginning a relentless campaign of medical intervention in the U.S. communities most devastated by the chaos and violence generated by drug use and trafficking.

Of course, accepting aid from one of the poorest nations on the planet might be too embarrassing for the world's only superpower. But worse than a little wounded national pride is inflicting a simplistic plan that can only lead to more bloodshed on a neighbor that already has suffered too many casualties in this hemisphere's bullheaded war on drugs.

KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.