President Alvaro Uribe is Colombia's greatest leader since its 1824 independence. His achievements in diminishing a 44-year war and turning Colombia into a free-market garden spot are on a par with Lincoln's and Reagan's. Yet as little as he has to be modest about, his leadership is derided and undercut in Congress.

In six short years, Uribe has transformed Colombia from a terrifying hellhole wracked by civil war, drugs, corruption and refugees into a true success story.

Not only is the country winning its long, deadly war against Marxist narcoterrorists, it's fortifying its economy by cutting taxes, honoring property rights and easing regulation. Its annual growth is 6.8%, a third higher than the Latin American average.

Its benchmark IGBC General stock market index shot up 808% in five years. In two other strong signs of faith in its future, capital goods spending rose 23% last month and foreign investment is pouring in. The Business Software Alliance says the country has the best intellectual property enforcement in Latin America. Its exports are booming.

Today we associate Colombia with fancy coffee and fresh roses, instead of inner-city crack cocaine shootouts. But having grown on this strategy, it cannot stand still. It needs a free trade pact with the one ally — the U.S. — already has done so much to help.

But that's not good enough for Congressional Democrats, who go out of their way to insult Uribe and have shelved the already-negotiated pact in front of them.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who recently praised Syria's brutal tyrants, only grudgingly met with Uribe earlier this month, and then delivered only vile accusations against him in the familiar words of Colombia's enemies.

She claimed Colombia's human rights record was worthless, and ignored the progress Colombia has made — in labor, the environment, human rights and economic freedom. In so many words, she told Uribe he could kiss free trade goodbye.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was even more despicable. He suspended Colombia's $55 million war-fighting aid against Marxist drug lords. He also made the same vague claims about Colombia's labor and human rights — to a government that gives labor leaders bodyguards in a country whose murder rate has fallen 40%.

Both Leahy and Pelosi missed the ironic fact that Uribe has made Colombia's cities safer than Washington, D.C.

As a result, Colombia's leaders have gone from shock at Pelosi's hostility to deep discouragement. Now Uribe has lashed out, warning Congress that Colombia didn't deserve to be treated "like a pariah."

This week, a top local political ally of Uribe's, Senator Carlos Garcia, warned that if the U.S. has no intention of moving beyond urging Colombia to keep making the sacrifices of the drug war for free trade, then it needed to reconsider its alliance with the U.S.

Garcia warned that Colombia would shift its alliances elsewhere — such as Europe. France, which under Nicolas Sarkozy has shown empathy for Colombia's ordeal, may fill in as an ally where the U.S. has fallen short.

If we're lucky, it will be farewell only to the Monroe Doctrine. But the greater danger is a reduced commitment to fighting drugs at all. Why should Colombia help us if we refuse to treat it as an ally and give it the free trade we've extended to everyone else who has asked?

Garcia presented a stark reality. There's little reason for Colombia to keep making the sacrifices it's making if there's no ultimate reward.

Americans might not realize it, but Colombia has shown great friendship with the U.S, at a high cost to itself.

• It's lost 2,658 of its own troops in the drug war since 2002, but cut coca cultivation 9%, the United Nations found. Next door, the Venezuela that Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., praises is doing little about soaring trafficking.

• Colombia also has doubled oil production on the year, moving to become a top-15 U.S. supplier at a time when Venezuela is destroying its own energy industry.

• It has provided rare know-how to the U.S. in Afghanistan. Sending its own security forces into harm's way, Colombia's taken a top role in helping Afghanistan defeat the illegal drug cultivation that is a new threat to its stability.

• Do any Democrats remember that Colombia was first on the scene to offer swamp and jungle rescue teams, to help to the victims of the New Orleans disaster?

If Colombia is denied a free trade pact by Congress, its future will be severely hurt. To treat any ally in this way is unconscionable. But in the case of Colombia, it also is self-defeating.