IN COLOMBIA, REMEMBER: FOREIGNERS CANNOT WIN A CIVIL WAR

PARIS - The most important lesson of the Vietnam war was its demonstration of a fundamental truth: Foreign intervention doesn't win a civil war.  Local people have to win it.

Washington today is edging towards another intervention in an internal conflict in another country, in Colombia.  This time there is no intention of introducing combat troops.  A quasivisceral fear of ground intervention exists among American politicians and among American military commanders.

U.S.  forces in Colombia would remain in training and supervisory functions - although that is the way it all began in Vietnam.  It was to protect that initial military investment in training and advising South Vietnamese forces that the war was escalated.

Colombia is a country that has suffered extraordinary and persistent violence for a half century.  A brutal civil war went on from 1945 to 1965, known as La Violencia.  A new struggle by leftist guerrilla forces -- fighting "imperialism and the unjust and oligarchic national state" -- began in the 1960s.

Drugs entered the picture in the 1980s, after a U.S.  sponsored campaign to poison illegal coca plantations in Bolivia and Peru drove drug shippers into Colombia.  The country now accounts for an estimated 90 percent of the world's cocaine supply, which in turn furnishes a sizable part of Colombia's GNP.  The consumers, of course, are in the United States.

Drug producers and shippers in southern Colombia are both protected and taxed by the guerrilla groups, which largely control the region.  In northern districts of the country the revolutionaries fight with the government and with paramilitary groups, which were first set up to protect important people, including drug barons, from the kidnappings that are another way the guerrillas finance themselves.

The popularly elected government has fought the guerrillas, tried to negotiate or compromise with them and effectively ceded a large piece of territory to them 18 months ago as a peace gesture, as yet unreciprocated.  It also has tried to control the paramilitaries and prosecute war crimes, all to no great effect.  A guerrilla offensive last year came within striking distance of Bogota itself.

That persuaded Washington to act.  Colombia is now the third-largest recipient of U.S.  foreign and military aid, after Israel and Egypt.  The Clinton administration proposes to give the country $1.5 billion in direct assistance over the next three years, four-fifths of which would be military equipment and support.  In theory, the arms and money will fight the drug trade, not the civil war.

But more than drugs are involved.  Influential' supporters of the aid program include Boeing and Sikorski, makers of the helicopters that American aid money will purchase.

Further complication is supplied by Occidental Petroleum - for years a major contributor to Al Gore's political career together with other American oil companies making new energy investments in Colombia.  Three years ago the U.S.  National Security Council declared Colombia and neighboring Venezuela zones of "vital American interest" because of their oil resources.

At the U.S.  Military Academy these days, cadets study America's Vietnam defeat, perplexed ( according to a recent newspaper report ) by how "the most powerful nation on the face of the earth" could "be defeated by a second-rate agricultural third-world country."

Both military and political responses are sought by instructors.  The real answer surely is that the Vietnamese were determined to win whatever the cost, and moreover they knew what the war was about.  It was their war.  The United States dealt with the war as China's war, or Russia's war, or "world Communism's" war.

It was just Vietnam's war, fought by two Vietnamese forces.  The insurgents, for whom Marxism was the mobilizing doctrine, but who were fundamentally nationalists, defeated France and then took on the U.S.  when it intervened.  The government wanted to defend the country against a revolutionary movement - - and was willing to collaborate with foreigners to do so.

The former proved stronger than the latter.  The American intervention eventually led the U.S.  virtually to take the war over.  That was fatal to its Vietnamese allies.

The fundamental lesson was that if a government is incapable of controlling its territory and mastering an insurrection through its own resources and political determination, even after it has been given material assistance that puts it in an equal or better material situation than the insurgents, then foreign intervention won't help it.

It literally does not deserve to win - however admirable its cause may be.

Foreigners can kill thousands, even millions, poison the landscape, occupy the country -- but they cannot win a war that authentic native political forces have lost.  That was the political truth demonstrated by the war in Vietnam.

In the end, Colombia's problems will only be solved by Colombians.  As Washington deepens its engagement in that country, it had better understand that.