A Terrorist Regime Waits in the Wings***The Taliban regime is gone, but a new one soon may emerge - not in far-off Afghanistan, but in Colombia, a country nearly twice the size and on the front door of the United States. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), flush with a fortune in drug money and rested after three years of peace talks, is fighting a fierce battle against Colombia's democratic government and threatens to install its own totalitarian, anti-Western regime. If it succeeds, analysts say, the Marxist-Leninist FARC, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, would become the world's newest outlaw regime and even more of a haven for terrorists and drug traffickers.
A Rand Corp. report prepared last summer for the Pentagon calls the Colombian crisis "the most serious security challenge in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s." Will the United States help the Colombians save their democratic republic and destroy the narcoterrorist FARC? Or will it continue to keep its hands in its pockets and deny Colombia the intelligence, equipment and training needed to defeat the guerrillas on its own - only to have to send U.S. forces to fight another terrorist regime in the future?***