Militarized Humanitarianism: The Liberal Crusades of Foreign Aid in Afghanistan - 2001 to 2025

This thesis examines why the foreign aid regime in Afghanistan, particularly the programs spearheaded by the United States, failed. In doing so, it departs from the dominant explanation in the literature, which often attributes this failure primarily to mismanagement and corruption. Instead, this project argues that the failure was structural and ideological, and even if implementation had been well-managed, many of the same failures would have persisted, nonetheless. I arrive at this conclusion by demonstrating that USAID operated under the logic of American statecraft rather than altruistic humanitarianism. Moreover, the aid regime was colonial in nature, organized around the imperative to remake Afghan society in the image of the West, instead of meeting the needs of the country’s most vulnerable populations. I draw on Realist International Relations theory, which explains the strategic logic of why states use aid as an instrument of power, and the decolonial theory of Aníbal Quijano and Maldonado-Torres, whose concepts of the coloniality of power andcoloniality of being illustrate how aid reproduces power in racialized forms. To substantiate the argument, I examine U.S. foreign aid programs in Afghanistan through the U.S. National Security Strategy documents alongside reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).