Sam Farr: “I believe that Colombia has the capacity with our help to win this war on terrorism, to win this war on drugs, and it is…”

“I believe that Colombia has the capacity with our help to win this war on terrorism, to win this war on drugs, and it is the obscene amount of money that drug cartels dumped into the country that is doing it. But you are not going to win that by putting all of the emphasis on the military side, and that is where the mission creep is. We have the most amount of money being spent on the military than we ever have, and we are winning the war. Now we need to spend money on the civilian side, on the economic side. You cannot win this war. What you have to do is win the peace, and the peace will not be won until the investment is in Colombians to do the job for themselves. My job in the Peace Corps was to work myself out of a job, and I think what we have lost track of here or lost sight of is that we are not really emphasizing how do we get these countries to do the job themselves.”