To Aid or Not to Aid

Can someone please explain to me why we have sent 48 billion dollars to Afghanistan since we pulled out of there?

What is one logical good reason for sending our hard earned tax dollars to Afghanistan AFTER we left there.

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) November 30, 2024

Insurrection Barbie has a point. Even for the world's largest economy, $48 billion isn't exactly chump change. $48 billion can pay for a lot of things; things like the National Institute of Health's entire 2023 budget ($47.7 billion), practically all of CHIPS for America (computer chips, sorry), and about two years of runway at NASA. It's enough to cover the yearly cost of the National School Lunch Program—providing low-cost or free lunches to children in schools—nearly three times over. Meanwhile, the Child Care and Development Block Grant reached less than a quarter of eligible children in large part due to a shortfall of billions, while the rate of homelessness across the US is at a decades high. So why on earth are we sending so much money over there when we could use it so badly over here?

Well.. we're not. At least, nowhere near $48 billion. That number represents the combined total of funds obligated to the military toward Operation Enduring Sentinel, a Department of Defense mission to "contain terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan and to protect the homeland by maintaining pressure on those threats". Whether or not that money's being used wisely is a good question too but that's the military's money, no matter how you slice it.

That's not to say we're not sending any money over there. We're just sending... a bit less:

Don't get me wrong. $3.8 billion in aid is a lot by any measure. It's just.. a lot less than $48 billion. It's actually so much less, and growing smaller still year over year, that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the office tasked explicitly with overseeing US funds obligated to Afghanistan reconstruction projects since 2012, recently recommended its own closure:

For SIGAR’s part, in our annual budget submission to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), I recommended that SIGAR cease oversight operations on September 30, 2025. My recommendation to close the agency reflects the geopolitical realities of the Taliban takeover and the concomitant reduction in U.S. assistance to Afghanistan. The amount of appropriated funds in the reconstruction “pipeline” has declined by 82% since before the Taliban takeover in August 2021, from $6.68 billion on June 30, 2021, to nearly $1.21 billion on September 30, 2024. This is a trend that we at SIGAR do not believe will be reversed.

Now to be fair, the Inspector General is talking about funds committed just by the U.S. And while the US is far and away the largest donor for Afghani humanitarian aid, it's still a team effort. Each country distributes international aid through a variety of channels. Still, we can use the UN's Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF) as a jumping-off point to gauge how the global community stacks up when it comes to pitching in for Afghani relief. Established in 2014, the AHF is a country-based pool fund; kinda like when everyone in the office puts a few bucks toward Karen's birthday card, but bigger. At first glance, America puts the team on its back, dwarfing the contributions of even the next largest state donor last year. However, after adjusting donations by country as a share of that country's GDP, the seemingly stingiest states emerge as some of the most self-sacrificial:

Even with the U.S.'s outsize contribution to the bottom line, Afghanistan barely cracks the top ten of nations receiving the most economic aid, coming in at #7 in 2023—after setting aside the massive sums sent to Ukraine and Israel. The way the U.S. doles out economic aid isn’t exactly guided by a strict formula. Consider that Kenya’s severe food insecurity rate (27%) isn’t that far off from Afghanistan’s (30%), yet the latter receives nearly double the economic aid per capita—$90 to Kenya’s $44. Or take South Sudan, where aid per capita is roughly three times higher than Afghanistan’s, despite the country scoring a dismal 1 on combined measures of political rights and civil liberties, compared to Afghanistan’s 6. Clearly, aid isn’t purely about need, and it doesn’t hinge on a nation’s commitment to democratic values either. For Afghanistan, its long and bloody entanglement with U.S. military and reconstruction efforts pulls weight in explaining its relatively high share of aid. But even that context has its limits. Since 2021, Afghanistan’s share of U.S. economic aid has amounted to just 3%—a small fraction of Washington’s sprawling, 150-nation-plus global assistance budget.

Even in the absence of boots on the ground, one thing both sides of the aisle seem to agree on is that the flow of aid to Afghanistan remains a crucial lever of U.S. foreign policy— designed to serve national interests as much as to alleviate human suffering. Besides, at this point we've got a pretty good idea of what happens when aid goes out the door too quickly. In Iraq, the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011 coincided with a reduction in support, creating a vacuum that ISIS was all too eager to exploit, plunging the region into chaos and drawing the United States back into the fray. South Sudan offers a similar lesson: when aid was abruptly cut during its civil war, the violence escalated, humanitarian needs deepened, and the instability rippled across borders. Afghanistan teeters on that all-too-familiar knife's edge. Economic aid here acts as a guardrail, a way to temper the chaos and prevent extremism from flourishing in that chaos. It's not just a gesture of goodwill; it's preventative maintenance on America’s interests in a region where the cost of neglect is measured in crises yet to come.

Coming back to Insurrection Barbie's search for a 'logical good reason' for sending aid to Afghanistan, it almost feels like it's easier to split it into two: the good and the logical. On the "good" side, feeding the hungry and giving voice to the voiceless seems pretty.. good. On the "logical" side, the devil you feed is a whole lot better than the devil you don't—because if you don’t, someone else will.

Anyway.