Irregular Warfare Podcast - Institution Building as a Counterinsurgency Tool: The Case of Colombia

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

In 2016, the Colombian government and FARC rebels signed a peace deal, ending over five decades of guerrilla war. What lessons can be gleaned from the case for the irregular warfare community? Former US Ambassador to Colombia Kevin Whitaker and former assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict Caryn Hollis argue that effective US interagency coordination, bipartisan congressional support, and a focus on building institutions and stabilizing the security situation were key ingredients to success in Colombia’s efforts against the insurgency. But more important than anything was that the Colombian government and population owned the commitment to resolve the conflict. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I think it's really important to note this is not about reestablishing government presence. This is about establishing government presence for the first time in 500 years. Are you a drug trafficker or are you an insurgent? Because if you're an insurgent, I can't use these bullets against you. But if you're a drug trafficker, I can. drug trafficker out there. Welcome to episode 19 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am your host, Daphne McCurdy. Today, my co-host Nick Lopez and I examine how Colombia overcame over 50 years of conflict to chart the path towards peace with a specific focus on the U.S. role. Our two guests argue that effective U.S. interagency coordination, bipartisan congressional support, a focus on building institutions and stabilizing

the security situation were key ingredients to success in Columbia's efforts against the insurgency. But more important than anything was that the Colombian government and population owned the commitment to resolve the conflict. Kevin Whitaker served as U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from May 2014 to August 2019, the longest-serving ambassador to that country in a century. Prior to this appointment, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South America in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. Karen Hollis held a number of leadership roles at the Department of Defense throughout her career. These included performing duties of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

for Counter Narcotics and Global Threats, and Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter-Narcotics and Global Threats, and Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and is the lead of the Interagency Partnering Directorate at U.S. Southern Command. This podcast is a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Kevin Whitaker and Karen Hollis. Kevin and Karen, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast, and thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure. Glad to be here. So for those that are interested in issues related to

conflict, Colombia is a really interesting case study. Colombia was on the verge of becoming a failed state nearly 20 years ago. The Marxist-Leninist group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, was waging an insurgency against the government and held significant territory. Other guerrilla and paramilitary groups were wreaking daily havoc on the citizens across the country, and narco-trafficking was booming. But today,

after the peace deal was signed in 2016, which ended over 50 years of conflict, Colombia is considered, for the most part, a success story. And the U.S. certainly played an important role in that, especially through Plan Colombia. Kevin, I'd like to start with you. You were ambassador to Colombia in the lead up and in the aftermath of the peace deal. Could you just set the scene for us about the peace negotiations process and particularly the U.S. role in it? Much as you say, Daphne, we had a situation by the late 1990s where Colombia was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Thanks really to Colombian effort supported and augmented by the United States. But during the period 1999 to 2010, we provided something like $10 billion in assistance. The insurgency had been pushed back in a very significant way,

no longer threatened population centers in a significant way, but it still existed. At that point, President Juan Manuel Santos determined to begin first secret discussions with the FARC, and then later a public version of those discussions, in order to achieve a global settlement. That is to say, to bring the FARC into the legitimate electoral democratic system. That is a tall task when you're talking about an insurgency that's been around for 50 years, that was at that point principally funded by narcotics revenue, was at that point principally funded by narcotics revenue and in a time when the government really didn't have effective control over large parts of the country. Karen, you've worked on Colombia from a functional perspective, both on the counter-narcotics issue as well as the counter-insurgency issue. What would you say makes Colombia relevant for those

who are studying irregular warfare more broadly? Well, the background on this is that Colombia is a partner. Colombia is an implementer. It's about the Colombians. As Kevin said, we gave approximately $10 billion over a long period of time. The Colombians matched it. I think it was sevenfold. And they invested in the Colombian business community. They implemented a tax, wartime tax on businesses that they voluntarily contributed. And I think that's really important. You have to have the will of the population and the people to participate in resolving the conflict. And to me, that was one of the most important factors that distinguishes Colombia from other parts of the world. Somalia,

Afghanistan, there isn't that same will, there's a dependency that Colombia did not have. Colombia was, we were partners, we didn't leave them to do it. So I think that's one important message. Yeah, I think I think if I could just add on to that, I mean, Karen's got it exactly right. It you know, our assistance in the first event was focused on counteracotics. Counterinsurgency was included after that. And especially in the early days, our assistance was primarily hard side. That's kind of a hard to define term, but it was it was more on the military side than otherwise. But but really what we were doing was helping Columbia to build resilient and effective institutions. And that was really the critical component. component, more than developing a lethal and effective armed forces, although that happened,

and more than merely getting after the narcotics problem, although that certainly happened as well. It was about institution building. So, Kevin, in terms of institution building, and for our listeners, can you explain exactly what that is and what goes into it? The first thing that comes to my mind is a significant degree of interagency collaboration in order to make sure everything's aligned and the support is synchronized across U.S. government. You have to kind of divide it into two parts, what we did and what they did. And both are interesting and innovative and useful. You know, certainly turning the Colombian armed forces into a more professional outfit was a critical component. And that had to do, it had to do with equipment and things like that. It had to do with U.S. training. You know, I always like to cite the statistic that when Plan Colombia started,

Colombia had about a dozen helicopters that worked. And we're talking about a country that's the size of Texas and California put together. And so this is a very large country with very little mobility, very poor roads as a general matter. When I left, Colombia had about 190 helicopters, most of them American made.

And so the ability of the armed forces to get out and do things was greatly increased. What we struggled with and we continue to struggle with in Colombia is the ability to bring the other components of government to areas which had traditionally been excluded from government control. I think it's really important to note this is not about reestablishing government presence. This is about establishing government presence for the first time in 500 years in some cases. And so this is really simple stuff. It's not very complicated. What people want are roads, schools and health clinics.

If one can deliver that to people, you kind of got them. That's very easy to say and very hard to do as a practical matter. You know, from the U.S. perspective, Karen, you know, has a lot of experience in this work from the Washington side. On the U.S. side, I'd just like to cite the very profound significance of the country team model. You know, I worked in the interagency. Karen did as well back in Washington. And after you have a meeting, everybody goes back in their corner and talks about what a bunch of jerks the other people are. In the embassy, everybody works for the ambassador.

And every day you're seeing all of your counterparts from DOD, the SDO, the senior mill group guy, the DEA, etc., etc., etc. And so it makes as the partner director for a couple of years and basically starting an interagency group to work within the Department of Defense, specifically U.S. Southern Command. Karen, can you talk to us a little bit about the challenges you encountered in starting that department and sort of getting away from that jerk mentality that Kevin mentioned? It was quite controversial, actually. It was not easily accepted because in the normal context, the State Department has the lead on our foreign outreach with defense and support. with defense and support. When Admiral Stavridis, James Stavridis, took over Southern Command, he asked me to come down there with him and to help set up and establish an interagency collaborative mechanism

for implementing projects and activities in the hemisphere. It was well-received by many, State Department especially. They put in like 12 junior officers within Southern Command to help assist with this and also to spy on us. FBI, I went all over town here in Washington, calling on CHIPS, trying to get people to come down to South Com so that we could organize and implement activities in support of the country teams throughout the hemisphere. It had its ups and downs, but we did have a pretty successful go. It started out with about nine people. And when I left two years later, there were

52 people in the directorate that came from all over the government. Karen, I'm curious, did this interagency coordination lead to better integration and outcomes on the ground? One of the things we had done earlier before prior to my stay at South Com was actually in Columbia, where we set up a integration system. This was under President Uribe, and it was in the back of the presidential palace where we set up, South Com built a interagency coordination center for them, and they set up a system called social action for, I guess that's a good translation. I guess that's a good translation. And that was trying to get them to have their social services and the military services, legal services,

all together in one place to talk to one another. It was somewhat successful. We tried to do that. You talk about Project Omega, Task Force Omega. Up in Macarena, we built another fusion center for them so that they could get the services out to the countryside. Working with SCRS, Stabilization and Reconstruction at State, and DOD, we tried to organize to get people to talk to one another. The problem was, as Kevin says, you go up into the MAC and the Macarena, there's nothing

up there. And it was very difficult and challenging to get anyone from the Colombian side, the civilian sector, to go into these zones to try and implement these programs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that point is so important. And the acción social, the social action, and what they called the effort in Meta Macarena was the consolidation, consolidación. And it was just a whole government effort. I'm just briefly stated, it was about

putting the national government, putting pressure on the health ministry and the education ministry and others to have a presence out in these areas. And there are two big problems that continue to come up. One was it's dangerous out there. And even if you had a permanent and rather large military presence, there would continue to be security challenges. to be security challenges. Secondly, none of these government agencies saw it as their principal mission to engage in these activities. And if you look at it from their perspective, it actually makes perfect sense. Your goal as health minister is to deliver the best possible health to 100% of the population, and you're being asked to devote disproportionate resources to a place where

0.2% of the population lives. And, you know, the problem is, of course, that that part of the country spins off problems which affect the whole nation. But if you're not providing healthcare to 90 or 95 or 97% of the population, then you're viewed as a failure. 90 or 95 or 97% of the population, then you're viewed as a failure. So I wanted to pick up on this issue of security. If it's difficult for Colombians to access some of these areas, then it's even more difficult for Americans who are working there too. And Kevin, I know that as ambassador, you got to some places that were neglected and often not visited by previous ambassadors as the violence waned. And I just wondered if you could talk a bit about how that allowed you to do your job more effectively and whether there are some broader takeaways as we

hopefully shift away from bunker diplomacy that's been, I think, an acute challenge, particularly in the wake of Benghazi. It's true. I was able to go to places where ambassadors hadn't gone for 30 years. One of the things that we were able to do while I was in Colombia is I actually drove from Medellin to Bogota, which is pretty cool. It was fun. And, you know, which is pretty cool. It was fun. And you know, it's as the crow flies, probably 120 miles it takes because of mountains and bad roads and whatnot takes, it takes really two days to get it done, but it would have been impossible before because of security concerns. It's not that I'm a particularly courageous guy or that we, you know,

laid on a huge military presence in order to accompany me. It's that the situation in the countryside had changed. And so my travels out there, I hoped, sent a signal about the changing nature of security in the Colombian countryside. And I think that that was the import of it. I think it's also very important for senior American leaders, including the ambassador, to go out to places where there are problems. And we had plenty of that as well. So on this point of problem areas, this brings up the issue of how we as the U.S. government, but then also the host nation, determine where we're going to provide assistance and which areas we consider to be strategic. You know, there's always this tension between picking the areas that are unstable and that are exacerbating violence in the rest of the country, and then trying to find the areas

where the security situation is stable enough where you can actually do good work. And so you've touched on this briefly, but I wondered if you could just expand on this point and how you balance that tension between finding the places where the operating environment was contusive to programming and yet problematic enough that it still required attention from both the host government and U.S. policymakers. Yeah, those are actually really central questions. So for context, in the Peace Accord, one of the things that the Colombian government was required to do is provide solutions to rural areas that had been ignored, where they were affected by the insurgency, by the coca economy, and by a lack of government attention.

The government determined that in order for them to live up to the spirit of the accord, they needed to attempt to do everything, everywhere, all at once. And this is, you know, another, I said Texas and California put together. Another way of thinking about this is Columbia consists of about 1,100 municipalities. Municipalities, think of them like counties. And the most conflictive municipalities that had coca or FARC or some combination of nastiness, probably 200 of them. So 200 municipalities were where this was going on. And so what the Santos administration did, understand, I don't intend for this to be interpreted as a criticism, because I feel like they felt they had an obligation based in the accord to apply resources evenly, equitably all around the country.

But as a practical matter, what that meant was, one, the peanut butter doesn't go that far. There's only so much that you can do. And two, there was attention and resources being paid to municipalities that weren't particularly conflictive, that didn't particularly have that level of problems. What our suggestion to them was, was to focus on five specific areas. And, you know, obviously it doesn't make sense for all of them to be the most difficult, nor the easiest. And so we, you know, we did Goldilocks, right? I mean, there were a couple of municipalities that were a little bit easier, two that were really awful, you know, really difficult

in terms of lots of coca, lots of conflict, lots of post-accord violence, which was a thing. And then one that we had our highest hopes for that was kind of in the middle. It wasn't an enormously problematic area, but neither was it a, you know, an easy area, so to speak. And the particular advantage we had there, and I'm speaking about the Bajo Cauca, Antioquia, in the middle part of Antioquia department, was a deep commitment on the part of the private sector in the department of Antioquia. They're very committed to working with us. I also leaned on them a lot to be very committed to work with us. And, you know, I wish I could tell you that, you know, we were able to achieve great things there,

but in fairness, we didn't achieve all that we wanted to. That does not lead me away from the conclusion that a focus on key areas in the first event in order to demonstrate the viability of the project and show a success was a smart approach in opposition to trying to get that peanut butter all over Texas and California at the same time. I think also you might, the extent of kidnapping throughout the Colombian countryside, almost every wealthy family or even middle-class families were affected by kidnapping. And so the security situation was so grave that you have these competing forces that were struggling and fighting with one another. It was a very delicate situation whereby nobody was really in charge. So there were competing factions.

And you also had EPL, the other insurgency, and the matter of social mobilization. And that has continued today. Not the paramilitary so much. They did disarm to an extent. But this brings in the counter-narcotics effort. The profits from the drug trade were so high and so great that there was no alternative for a lot of the peasants and for a lot of these insurgencies. They used the profits from drugs to address their needs and their requirements. And it made it a situation where you couldn't offer alternative development. It's really a difficult challenge in Colombia because there's no way to get products to market. So you have whereby wheat could possibly be a substitute.

You can't get it to market because there weren't enough roads. And if you could get on the roads, the roads weren't secure. Just to jump in here, Karen, I mean, this was one of my obsessions when I was down there as ambassador, is just the critical nature of what they call in Colombia, tertiary roads, or we call them farm to market roads, or there's lots of different terms for them. But in a country like Colombia, these roads largely don't exist. And so what we found was that that connectivity, which actually didn't need to. I mean, you didn't need to talk about a hundred kilometer road or a thousand kilometer road. We were building some five kilometer roads that made an enormous difference in the life of people who live there. If you build a road that everybody knows, including the bad guys,

that the army or the police can get out to that place very quickly. And so it makes it less attractive for the criminals. We went to the ends of some of these five-kilometer pipe stem roads that we had built in Antiochia. And the local people there told us that as soon as the roads were built, the coca moved away. It was actually like kryptonite for the coca. But it also has the effect from another positive perspective. So you build the road and that means that your kids can get to school. That it's, you know, it's an hour on a bus or 30 minutes on a bus instead of an impossibility

because it's a, you know four-hour slog through the mud to get to the school. You can get your kids to a health clinic if they become ill. Just the function and desirability of tertiary roads is just absolutely essential as a counterinsurgency tool. So listening to you both talk about the economic factors, whether that's the ring roads or the cash crops, makes me think of the issues facing security forces in development efforts in other conflicts, primarily in Afghanistan. So in eastern Afghanistan, the big initiative was not only the ring road, but secondary and tertiary road systems into the valleys to get access to isolated populations, which is very similar to what you all described in Columbia. Also with the issue

of cash crops, if you go after the cash crops in counterinsurgency efforts, these farmers then have nothing to fall back on. So you have to make sure that you're substituting it with something so you don't just take away the one thing that brings them their way of life. So, Karen, I want to turn to you, given that you've experienced counterinsurgency efforts in both conflicts. To what degree were our coin strategies similar or even some of our coin strategies in Afghanistan or Iraq extracted from lessons learned in Colombia? I don't think it was extracted from Colombia. I will say that when I looked at the insurgency manual, it actually was the Marine Corps manual from 1948, is it? Their counterinsurgency manual,

they just, it looked to me like they did a hunt and peck and replace, you know, Afghanistan with whatever word they wanted to do at the time. Because it basically was the same tactics we've used in insurgency across the globe for years and years and years. But some of the challenges we had in Afghanistan and in Colombia, they were very similar. And it's all a matter of what I was

saying about crop substitution. You can't just do it in isolation. Initially, when we were doing counter-narcotic support in Colombia, we couldn't use counter-narcotic, we couldn't use the forces that we were paying for or the helicopters that we were paying for to go against the counterinsurgency issue. So what fascinates me, especially working a very dynamic problem set like the counterinsurgency or supporting the Colombian government, there has to be some flexibility with authorities and what troops you can use and the colors of money you can use. Can you tell us a little bit about how you made that work with Congress and getting to yes, using the right authorities and basically making the

policy work and implementing it down into strategy. So those in Columbia and the country team can basically execute, whether that's within DOD or other agencies. We were very closely scrutinized. What happened with the counter-narcotics is this. In 1989, I think it was, the Congress decided that it was time for DOD to get involved in the drug war. And so they allocated $300 million for DOD to, and they gave them the authority to do counter-narcotics. And the DOD said, thank you very much, took the money and did nothing. So then in 1991, they went, the Congress wrote out specific legislation that authorized the DOD to use money for counter-narcotics. And that was when the office that I, it had a different name then, but it was when they set up, stood up the office, and then it started to do counter-narcotics assistance.

The Department of Defense was not real crazy about that. I mean, it's really not a DOD mission to do counter-drug, but it is a mission to provide support for our partners and allies. So that's when we began training the Colombian counter-narcotics battalions back in the 80s. And these counter-narcotics battalions were created to do counter-drug activity. Now, what skills do they have? They're the same skills you use for infantry. It's the same skills that you use in a counter-insurgency. So they would rotate troops through these counter-narcotics battalions and then rotate

them out and then put in another group so that we would be training. We trained most of the Colombian Army in counter, it's basically counter-insurgency tactics, but using them and focused on counter-narcotics. And after the September 11th attacks, we got the authority through Congress to go against a unified campaign plan. And that was when we got the authority to do counterinsurgency in Columbia. Prior to that, we could. I used to laugh and say, are you a drug trafficker or are you an insurgent? Because if you're an insurgent, I can't use these bullets against you. But if you're a drug trafficker, I can.

I definitely appreciate that, Karen. Those insurgent bullets just don't work on the narco-terrorists. Kevin, I'd like to turn to you. Can you talk a little bit more about the intersection of counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency from your perspective in the context of Colombia? The FARC did not represent an existential threat to Colombia until it gained access to the incredible resources of the drug trade. And if that component were removed from it, that is to say, you know, by magic, we could

pull those resources away from the FARC, it would not represent an existential threat to Colombia. It most likely would be, you know, I don't mean to sound overly flip about this, but, you know, six dozen knuckleheads in the most remote and distant part of Colombia, which is not a good thing and needs to be addressed at some level, but it's not an existential threat to the elected democratic government of Colombia. Drugs remains a continuing issue and and it's for the reasons that i mentioned there actually is there's as much coca in colombia as there ever has been you know 1999 a lot of coca a lot of eradication went down so 200 000 hectares more or less at by the early 2000s by By 2009, 2010, it was down to about 70,000 hectares. We're all the way back up to like 220,000 hectares now. So this has gone in the wrong direction from that perspective.

So I'd like to continue with this point because on the one hand, from what you're both saying, the counterinsurgency problem and the counter-narcotics problem are inextricably linked, the counterinsurgency problem and the counter narcotics problem are inextricably linked, right? But then the peace deal resolved the counterinsurgency problem, at least to a certain degree, but it did not resolve the counter narcotics problem. So could you explain why that's the case? So having won a reelection in 2014, President Santos decided to release the drafts of three of the chapters of the accord, including the counter-narcotics accord, the counter-narcotics chapter. And that chapter made clear that coca-lata families, families that were involved in the production of narcotics,

would be identified and reimbursed in order not to grow coca. And what that did inevitably was cause an explosion in coca production because people wanted to arrange to be a part of a payday that would take place down the road. If you know that when this accord is finally signed, I'm going to get paid if I have coca, then you're going to plant coca. And it was all manner of nefariousness that took place there, including, importantly, the FARC itself encouraging individuals who were not previously in the narcotics game to plant coca in order that they could get a payday, which they would then be beholden to the FARC, or they would be grateful to the FARC politically for having arranged this payday. Additionally, and sort of compounding the problem, was that there were components of the FARC that were not down with the accord.

And they had already made the decision to arrange to continue their narco-trafficking activities, regardless of what happened with the Accord. But part of the challenge with the Accord was that it was being negotiated by the old senior leadership of the FARC. So these were people who were mostly in their 50s and 60s. They had been at war for a very long time. And in addition to all of the other motivations, including some very positive ones, why they might seek peace, the reality was the great effectiveness of the Colombian armed forces in its high value target strategy put into the minds of these FARC senior leaders that their time on this earth was limited. on this earth was limited, that they may be under continuing threat of being on the wrong end of a precision guided munition at some point. So that's fine. That's a motivation. I understand it's part of the global motivation, but if you're a mid-level commander, and I always use this example,

maybe you're a 30-year-old guy and you've been in the business for 15 years because these guys come in early. And now you're at the peak of your earning potential. You have maximum power. You travel around the country in fast cars. You've got guns. You can have women. You can have anything you want. And a bunch of old guys in Havana are saying, yeah, but it's going to be fine. You get to be a concierge or an Uber driver or something like that. And it simply wasn't an attractive enough package to those individuals. I'm not sure that I have a solution to that, but the reality was that you left people in a position where they actually saw peace not as the greater good, but maintaining the criminal lifestyle that they had been accustomed to and that they had sought for a decade and a half of their lives.

So this is really interesting because there are obviously a lot of motivations for violence, but I guess I sort of assume that the ideological motivations would be the hardest to address. But it sounds like what you're saying actually is that the adventure and prestige aspects of this sort of enterprise are also really attractive and need to be taken into account when trying to disarm militants. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, different generations of FARC leadership

saw the prospect of peace in different ways. Now, if you want to talk about the rank and file people, I'm confident that a lot of them would have been pleased to get out of this business. They were held under military discipline. In other words, you walk away from a FARC camp and that's, you know, the death penalty would be the solution for that. One separate but I think related comment on this. Sure, you know, there are different motivations with different generations. The attractiveness of illicit economies, whether it be coca or illicit mining, human smuggling is a thing as well. So, you know, any kind of way to make money, they're going to try to figure out how to do it.

What we don't have in Colombia are tribes. And you all had referenced the experience in Afghanistan. It's very interesting how that would affect this equation. But what you do have in Colombia are what they call familias farianas. And so what this is, these are areas of the country where the FARC has been present and really the government in de facto government in these areas. And these people who live in these areas only hear what the FARC tells them. And it's not just the FARC coming in and telling these things. This is generation after generation. It's really two or three full generations.

generation after generation, it's really, you know, two or three full generations. These areas are, they solidly believe in the ideology of the FARC, that Colombia is a fundamentally corrupt country, that the oligarchy runs everything, that the imperial U.S. government is really what's behind all of the, you know, the narrative, the political narrative of the FARC. That is a component which is going to take longer to wash out because it's part of their intellectual formation. So I think we've got time for one more question. And I'd like to close by hearing what you both think are the key takeaways for what made Colombia a success, both from the U.S. perspective, but also from the Colombian government's perspective. You both talked about the importance of interagency collaboration as one, but what were some of the other key things that

stand out? You can't think about the success of Columbia without recognizing that this was all done on a bipartisan basis for 20 years. And dissecting that is hard to do. But I think, you know, maybe the most important part of it is how much people were brought in at the beginning. You know, I always used to say you can't throw a rock in Washington without hitting somebody who says they were the father or mother of Plan Columbia. And that's a good thing that, you know, you have this huge buy in. throw a rock in Washington without hitting somebody who says they were the father or mother of Plan Colombia. And that's a good thing that, you know, so you have this huge buy-in. Greg Meeks, John Kerry, I've heard it from President-elect Biden on a number of occasions. And so you have people on both sides of the aisle agreeing that this is a positive thing. As I mentioned at the top, this was not merely about making the

Colombian military more effective and efficient or having them develop better intelligence or pushing the FARC around or eradicating COCA. Fundamentally, this was about increasing the institutionality of Colombia and making sure that those institutions worked better. This goes to this question, which I think is a very important one, is the replicability of the Colombian experience, which is a tough one. I mean, my experience is in Columbia, but it does seem to me that the question of human capital and human engagement in Colombia was really unique. You have a lot of very well educated and committed and motivated people who were willing to work towards the goal of a better, more institutional, less corrupt, less violent Colombia. I think you touch on something really

important, which is that it requires both the capacity and the will of the host government, right? And oftentimes we're working in contexts in which both are lacking and we help build the capacity, but it's really hard for us to build the will. So the fact that that exists is, I think, a key part of what made this a success. One thing I'll add is just about the will. I had this long conversation with Sergio Jaramillo one time. When was it that Colombians decided to take back their country? When Colombians go out of the country for education, and they do, they go to universities in the United States, in England, Spain, but they all go back. They go back to Colombia.

There are expatriates, but for the most part, they go back and they work for their country. And that, I think, is a key difference in the spirit of Colombian, because they fight for their country, but there is a sense of pride and a sense of nationhood that a lot of countries just don't have. Sergio told me that he was in the university, and they were told they couldn't go out because the park was going to attack. They all got together and said, hell no, we're not we're not doing this. We're going to we're going out. We're going to have a life. And they fought back. And I think that is really an important factor about how Colombians struggled and decided they were going to take back their country.

You know, we provided $10 billion. It's actually north of $11 billion now. But the way that I always said it is that that amounts to more or less about 4% of the total investment in Plan Colombia. So one way to look at this is Colombians provided 95% of the money and 100% of the blood. This is their achievement. And it was really a great honor to be by their side for a little part of that. Well, I hate to end the conversation because there's still so much we could talk about and learn from the Columbia example. But thank you so much for both coming on today. And also thank you for injecting such optimism into our podcast series, because we oftentimes end these episodes with only failures and challenges. And to hear from you,

the amazing relationships that you formed with Columbia's during your tenures there is really uplifting. Thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss this important issue with you. It was a great pleasure to be here with you today. Many thanks. Thank you for listening to Episode 19 of the Regular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Kyle and Andy will discuss Australia's approach to regular warfare with Andy Maher and David Kilcullen. After that, Shana and Daphne will explore congressional views on Irregular Warfare. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast

so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again. We'll see you here next time.