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The waterfall of leaks on Afghanistan underlines the awful truth: We’re not in control.

Not since Theseus fought the Minotaur in his maze has a fight been so confounding.

The more we try to
do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we
try to do. As Congress passed $59 billion in additional war funding on
Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful, they’re disdainful.

Washington gave the
Wall Street banks billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the
back, handing out a fortune in bonuses to the grifters who almost
wrecked our economy.

Washington gave the
Pakistanis billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back,
pledging to fight the militants even as they secretly help the
militants.

We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.

Robert Gibbs
recalled that President Barack Obama said last year that “we will not
and cannot provide a blank check” to Pakistan.

But only last week,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to hand over a
juicy check: $500 million in aid to the country that’s been getting a
billion a year for most of this decade and in 2009 was pledged another
$7.5 billion for the next five. She vowed to banish the “legacy of
suspicion” and show that “there is so much we can accomplish together
as partners joined in common cause.” Gibbs argued that the deluge of
depressing war documents from the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks,
reported by The New York Times and others, was old. But it reflected
one chilling fact: The Taliban has been getting better and better every
year of the insurgency. So why will 30,000 more troops help?

We invaded two
countries, and allied with a third – all renowned as masters at
double-dealing. And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have
the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures
work. Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous
for warrior cultures.

And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

But whenever
America tries to train security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan so that
we can leave behind a somewhat stable country, it’s positively
Sisyphean. It takes eons longer than our officials predict. The forces
we train turn against us or go over to the other side or cut and run.
If we give them a maximum security prison, as we recently did in Iraq,
making a big show of handing over the key, the imprisoned al-Qaida
militants are suddenly allowed to escape.

The British Empire
prided itself on discovering warrior races in places it conquered –
Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, as the Brits called Pashtuns. But why are they
warrior cultures only until we need them to be warriors on our side?
Then they’re untrainably lame, even when we spend $25 billion on
building up the Afghan military and the National Police Force, dubbed
“the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” by Newsweek.

Maybe we just can’t train them to fight against each other.

But why can’t
countries that produce fierce insurgencies produce good-standing armies
in a reasonable amount of time? Is it just that insurgencies can be
more indiscriminate?

Things are so bad
that Robert Blackwill, who was on W.’s national security team, wrote in
Politico that the Obama administration should just admit failure and
turn over the Pashtun South to the Taliban since it will inevitably
control it anyway. He said that the administration doesn’t appreciate
the extent to which this is a Pashtun nationalist uprising.

We keep hearing
that the last decade of war, where we pour in gazillions to build up
Iraq and Afghanistan even as our own economy sputters, has weakened
al-Qaida.

But at his
confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Gen. James Mattis, who is slated to replace Gen.

David Petraus, warned that al-Qaida and its demon spawn represent a stark danger all over the Middle East and Central Asia.

While we’re
anchored in Afghanistan, the al-Qaida network could roil Yemen “to the
breaking point,” as Mattis put it in written testimony.

Pakistan’s tribal
areas “remain the greatest danger as these are strategic footholds for
al-Qaida and its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri,” the blunt four-star general wrote, adding that they
“remain key to extremists’ efforts to rally Muslim resistance
worldwide.” Mattis told John McCain that we’re not leaving Afghanistan;
we’re starting “a process of transition to the Afghan forces.” But that
process never seems to get past the starting point.

During the debate
over war funds Tuesday, Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., warned that we
are in a monstrous maze without the ball of string to find our way out.

“All of the puzzle
has been put together, and it is not a pretty picture,” he told The
Times’ Carl Hulse. “Things are really ugly over there.”

© 2010 New York Times News Service