A stunning rescue in Colombia

The plan was bold: An infiltrator persuades rebels to bring together their most prized hostages and march them 90 miles through Colombia's wilderness. A month later, commandos disguised as international humanitarian aid workers land in a Russian-built helicopter and trick the rebels into handing them over.

The mission was to rescue three U.S. military contractors, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and 11 others held captive in the Colombian jungles.

Its success hinged entirely, planners in Bogota said Thursday, on a near-total breakdown in communications between the isolated guerrilla jailers and their commanders -- the net result of years of intense U.S.-Colombian military cooperation that has seriously weakened Latin America's last major rebel army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

"The FARC's communications are medieval," explains Colombian armed forces chief Gen. Freddy Padilla. The communist group's command-and-control structure is so degraded that it sends important messages by courier.

In preparation for the mission, the Colombians installed U.S.-provided, remote-controlled video monitoring devices -- which can zoom in and out -- along rivers that are the only transport route through dense jungles, U.S. and Colombian officials said. U.S. surveillance planes also intercepted rebel radio and satellite phone conversations and employed foliage-penetrating imagery.

In mid-February, a Colombian patrol spotted the three Americans -- Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Thomas Howes -- bathing in the Apoporis River under guard, the first sight of the Americans since their photographic surveillance plane crashed in 2003.

For four days, "We had eyes on them," Brownfield said.

U.S. spy satellites helped track the hostages on a monthlong journey that began May 31 and ended with Wednesday's rescue.

All the while, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield and a team of 100 people at the U.S. Embassy worked closely with the Colombians running the operation.

For the FARC, the rescue could not have come at a worse time, The Associated Press reports. The rebels were already in disarray after losing three senior commanders in March -- one killed by government bombs, a second by a turncoat bodyguard and the third, co-founder Manuel Marulanda, succumbing to a heart attack at age 78.

"Even before the rescue operation -- but especially afterwards -- there is every indication that the war is, for all intents and purposes, over," said Michael Shifter of The Inter-American Dialogue, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. "A very different question is whether the FARC is prepared to acknowledge that reality."

But Gen. Padilla warns it could take well beyond the end of President Alvaro Uribe's second term in 2010 to defeat the rebels, who for 44 years have filled their ranks with peasants "resentful of government neglect."

Of government "neglect"?

Really?

Aside from providing courts to settle disputes, most of the world's people wish their national government would offer them a whole lot more "neglect." Isn't it possible peasants have instead flocked to the Colombian rebel standard for 44 years because their central government has been working with America to try and eradicate their main cash crops?

Which, interestingly enough, is the DEA mission on which these three captive American "contractors" were working when their plane crashed.

Last week's rescue was a great accomplishment for American technology, make no mistake, and evidence that the United States can trust and work with a South American ally as closely as it has often been able to work with its NATO partners in Europe.

But armies of rebellion will continue to stymie otherwise good-faith efforts to bring political, technological and humanitarian progress to such remote agricultural lands as Colombia and Afghanistan until the United States finally acknowledges that it's darned hard to win the "hearts and minds" of a people while you're in the process of attempting to destroy the crops with which they support their families.

A new approach is in order.