The large number of known drug-trafficking organizations currently active in Colombia complicates the political equation for U.S. policymakers seeking to increase military aid to the country. Members of Congress may ask whether it's worth appropriating billions to assist Colombia in a long, drawn-out campaign against the FARC if no significant reduction in narcotics production and export is likely.

It's possible that the Bush administration will seek to expand U.S. counter-drug assistance to Colombia's National Police to wage a

more intense parallel effort against the biggest and most dominant of the 162 new drug gangs identified by the Colombian government. Asa Hutchison, a former Republican congressman who is now director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, visited Bogota March 24 to review existing bilateral counter-drug cooperation and discuss more effective measures for interdicting narcotics and dismantling the gangs.

However, taking down the new generation of Colombian drug traffickers likely will prove to be a more difficult and time-consuming task than Washington has previously encountered in that country.

Joint investigations by Colombia's National Police and the Department of Administrative Security have determined that many new drug-trafficking organizations were spin-offs created from different remnants of the Medellin, Cali and Atlantic Coast cartels. However, the new groups are much smaller than the old cartels that controlled the drug trade from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, and many of their leaders and members are better educated, smarter, more sophisticated in legal and technical matters and obsessed with maintaining low profiles to evade arrest and stay in business.