The result was the East Central Luzon Guerrilla Area, which grew into a partisan force of some seven light divisions, consisting of 3,700 officers and 38,000 enlisted men and women.
That was how Vann handled the situation: he would outline on a wall-length map in the Seminary's combined Operations and Intelligence Office a plan for a helicopter assault on a guerrilla area.
The Pentagon says the training of the 2,000 elite Georgian troops is part of a counterterrorism effort that has already sent thousands of American troops to Afghanistan and nearby central and south Asian countries, hundreds to a Muslim guerrilla area in the Philippines and a team planning military training for the Arab nation of Yemen.
They say that the government has targeted civilians in guerrilla areas, with mass arrests.
Mr. Trajkovski said Interior Ministry special forces would stay out of former guerrilla areas as long as regular police forces were not attacked.
The gesture, announced after the government had reversed itself and said it would accept a modest NATO force to foster reintegration of guerrilla areas, strengthened the flagging peace effort.
The president already faces criticism for a hasty effort to give an amnesty to right-wing paramilitaries, who have a murderous past and links to some army officers.Perhaps the weakest part of the security strategy is its approach to the civilian population in guerrilla areas.
The crop-dusters are currently concentrating on some 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of coca in the departments of Nariño and Cauca.Officials insist that because of the scale of Colombia's coca crop, and because some of it is in guerrilla areas, aerial spraying is the only way to eradicate it.
But it remained unclear whether Mr. Pastrana would order an all-out attack on the guerrillas' "safe area".
I had the feeling that if I had I might have stumbled into a guerrilla training area.
He was hoping to catch and annihilate the 504th Main Force Battalion, which Drummond had tracked to a far section of the Plain of Reeds, a vast guerrilla-base area along the Cambodian border.
