Dusty Helmand province thrusts north from an ill-patrolled Pakistan border into the heart of Afghanistan’s bandit country.

Forty years ago, Afghans called it “Little America” for the small army of U.S. government do-gooders who had come to plant trees, dig canals and build air-conditioned hospitals, state-of-the-art irrigation systems and cotton factories.

These days, the canals are silted up, the hospital is a Third World wreck and Afghanistan remains an afterthought in U.S. war spending.

With only 18,000 U.S. troops there, versus 150,000 in Iraq, the military is spread pretty thin.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Taliban are back – and with them questions about whether America neglected the first and most important front in the war on terrorism.

Scores of Taliban fighters died this week in Helmand and nearby provinces in pitched battles with U.S. coalition and Afghan forces. A Canadian captain also lost her life in what’s believed to be Canada’s first female combat fatality since at least World War II.

When night falls, the Taliban – supplied and directed from Pakistani safe houses and allied with local warlords and drug barons – run much of southern Afghanistan and its lucrative smuggling routes and drug fields.

Yet because of Iraq, precious little money has gone into Afghanistan since U.S. and Afghan forces ousted the Taliban in 2001. That has allowed the Taliban to rebuild, stoking a newly hot war full of suicide bombings, improvised explosives and other techniques borrowed from Iraq.

The 98 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan last year represented a seven-fold increase over 2001.

America should have known better.

In a country as immensely poor and dependent on family and tribal ties as Afghanistan, money greases relationships.

In the 1980s, America spent $3 billion arming the same Afghan religious militants who are battling us now. The precipitous withdrawal of that honey pot after the 1989 ouster of the Soviets fueled the barbarous civil wars that wiped out Afghanistan’s traditional village leadership.

That, in turn, allowed the rise of the extreme Taliban movement of religious students – and enabled their blood alliance with Osama bin Laden and his Arab fighters.

And though bin Laden is gone, he didn’t go very far. He and his closest lieutenants are believed to be just over the border in Pakistan.

Compared with the billions spent on Iraq, humanitarian and development aid in Afghanistan has averaged just $425 million a year. And even though security and anti-drug assistance push the yearly total closer to $1 billion, corruption, security and overhead (read: padding) gobble up dimes on the dollar.

It’s a pittance compared with what’s needed in a country where 160 babies die out of every 1,000 born and opium poppy cultivation is increasingly the farmer’s ticket to survival.

Fortunately, the world is awakening to the peril.

Other countries pledged $6 billion in February on top of earlier promises of $9.5 billion in aid. In December, America offered another $5.5 billion over the next five years.

NATO allies are finally stepping up, sending in thousands more troops to Taliban-infested parts of southern Afghanistan like Helmand province. More than 3,000 British forces arrived in the old Little America this month, and formally take over from U.S. troops at the end of July.

The pending withdrawal of several thousand U.S. troops doesn’t make all Afghans happy, however. Many see it as a slackening in the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan’s future. And the erroneous notion that America is running may be what encouraged the latest Taliban offensives.

Still, the Brits don’t hesitate to point fingers – at Pakistan.

“The thinking piece of the Taliban is out of Quetta in Pakistan,” the British local commander, Col. Chris Vernon, told the Guardian newspaper last week. “It’s the major headquarters. They use it to run a series of networks in Afghanistan.”

Pakistani officials bristled, demanding “actionable intelligence.”

But truth to tell, it’s just as it was when the CIA used Pakistan’s lawless border regions to run the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets. Only now, the muj answer to the Taliban, and they’re hunting the Americans to kill.