The U.S. could expand military aid beyond drug trafficking to the wider civil war, Coatsworth speculated.

He said the U.S. war on terrorism could also spur increased military aid to fight Colombian leftist groups, whose strategies of kidnapping and guerrilla tactics are often characterized as terrorism.

The Bush administration has already promoted the connection between drug trafficking and terrorist organizations in its national anti-drug campaign.

“It’s so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder,” Bush said earlier this year. “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.”

And in a panel discussion on Colombia last month at the Kennedy School of Government, Dean Joseph S. Nye said the Colombian guerrillas had committed “terrorist actions in our hemisphere.”

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.