The New York Times has just published the most scathing indictment I have read of the Obama administration’s grossly inadequate train-and-assist program for the Syrian rebels. It didn’t appear on the editorial page but, rather, in the news columns. It contains no overt editorializing and is all the more damning for it.

The article, written by three Times reporters, is pegged to the embarrassing news that the commander and deputy commander and six other fighters of the only contingent of Syrian rebels so far trained by the Pentagon — a total of 54 men — have just been abducted by the al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda offshoot which evidently has more money, personnel, and weapons than the American-backed groups. Before being kidnapped, the rebel commander, Nadeen Hassan, had spoken to the Times of the troubles he and his men faced. He initially applied to train 1,200 men. But that number was quickly whittled down:

After screening, just 125 of his recruits were invited to the first course. Of those, more than half were thrown out or quit.

The rest, he said, had deployed back to Syria, but had not been told whether American warplanes would defend them if Syrian forces attacked.

Mr. Hassan said the Americans, worried about the lack of recruits, were recalling men they had once rejected. Some, expelled on suspicion of embracing “Islamic State doctrine,” are unavailable: They have since died in Syria, he said — battling the Islamic State.

Other problems cited by Hassan include the following:

Mr. Hassan said the Pentagon program had not provided night vision goggles to counter the Islamic State’s expert night attacks. Yet, he said Tuesday, trainers had been pushing his men to quickly join front-line insurgent groups, “so they can get results to show their bosses.”…

Better-financed groups are luring recruits awaiting the next course; they make $225 a month, and with no budget, Mr. Hassan said, “I can’t buy them lunch.”

“The situation is bad,” he said.

And then we come to the little matter of who the insurgents are supposed to be fighting. It is commonly believed among the rebels that they are being asked by the Americans to fight only ISIS — not Bashar Assad. The U.S. claims they are not being made to sign formal pledges not to fight Assad but they might as well be:

Trainees must promise “to defend the Syrian people from Daesh” and to refrain from harming civilians and prisoners. An English translation of the pledge, circulated through American military channels, does not mention Mr. Assad or the government.

But the insurgents’ misperception is understandable, given official statements. Trainees will lose American support, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, head of the United States Central Command said recently, if they “vector off and do things that we haven’t designed them to do initially.”

And while U.S. aircraft might bomb to protect the trainees from ISIS, they won’t bomb to protect anyone from Assad, even though his forces have killed far more people than ISIS has.

This is the most dysfunctional foreign assistance program ever. And it makes a mockery of recent administration claims that the U.S. and Turkey have agreed to set up an ISIS-free zone in northern Syria. As the Times notes: “Mr. Hassan’s trainees were mainly from villages within the 68-mile strip along the Turkish border that the moderate insurgents are supposed to seize, and had long been slated for deployment there. But, Mr. Hassan said, they are so few ‘they can barely cover 200 meters.’ “

Such shortcomings could be addressed if Turkey, the U.S., or other powers were willing to deploy their own troops to safeguard this safe zone. But there is no sign of that, which suggests that the safe-zone plan is DOA — just like so many of the rebels that the U.S. is counting on to fight for a Syria dominated neither by murderous Shiite nor by murderous Sunni extremists.