‘War feminism’ helped doom USAID

The U.S. Agency for International Development is effectively dead. One of its killers — unmentioned in the requiems for the agency — is the idea of “war feminism.”

War feminism stands for the belief that ideas of women’s liberation espoused by Western feminists can be imposed on other societies via occupation and development aid. The visible and public failure to deliver women’s liberation to Afghanistan delegitimized USAID in the eyes of Americans, who have decided to turn away from the idea of development aid altogether.

In 2001, war feminists from both the Republican and Democratic parties vehemently supported the U.S. going to war with Afghanistan on behalf of Afghan women. This included First Lady Laura Bush, who famously announced in a November 2001 radio address that the U.S. would “liberate” Afghan women.

Feminist leaders from the nonprofit Feminist Majority Foundation supported the war, even though Afghan women’s groups had come out against it. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all supported the war-feminist agenda in Afghanistan.

In the two decades that followed, USAID programs became the vehicle for this goal. The agency gave out hundreds of millions of dollars for empowerment programs that ranged from running competitions to the airlifting of fabrics and sewing machines. In 2018, the agency launched “PROMOTE,” one of the largest programs geared toward women’s empowerment in the agency’s history, which aimed to help 75,000 Afghan women with internships and job training. The program’s price tag was $280 million, most of which went to U.S. contractors and failed to reach Afghan women altogether.

A 2018 report from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction noted serious flaws in this expensive program. In certain cases, women who had attended a single workshop were noted as having benefited from the program. In other cases, the metrics for deliverables were lowered such that only 20 women out of the 3,000 job training participants would have had to find a job with the Afghan civil service for the program to be considered successful.

The report notes that only 55 women could truly be said to have benefited from the program, a far cry from the 75,000 it was designed to help. For its part, in its formal response, USAID insisted that it had helped 50,000 Afghan women with training and support for skills so that they could do advocacy for women’s rights and start their own businesses. Neither USAID nor the Inspector General report made any mention of the fact that the problem may has lay with the Westerners who believed that a one-size-fits-all model of women’s liberation could be exported to another country and delivered on the back of the military.

The waste of these millions of dollars was obvious to U.S. taxpayers when the Taliban marched back into Kabul in August 2021 at the heels of a hurried U.S. withdrawal and reinstated all the draconian and misogynistic laws that America had promised to eradicate forever. Within months, women whom the U.S. could not liberate in 20 years were forced back to their homes. Girls’ schools beyond fifth grade were shuttered and women were not allowed to be outside their homes without an accompanying male guardian.

Next door in Pakistan, where tribal areas were being bombed by U.S. Predator drones, war feminists again tried to export their ideas of women’s empowerment via USAID. An Office of Management and Budget report from 2013 reviewed the performance of a grant of $40 million dollars made to a small Karachi-based NGO with the goal of “improving the lives of Pakistani women.”

The report stated that the program had “less than maximum impact” and the program’s grants had little lasting effect on the lives of women in Pakistan. Some of the projects undertaken by the grants were just as superfluous as the ones in Afghanistan. One example was a radio program to raise awareness about gender violence — a noble goal in itself, but hardly the most effective allocation of funds in a country that ranks near to last in the global gender gap index. Nor was any consideration given to organizational capacity or the predictable issues that occurred when a small organization with a paltry budget is suddenly granted $40 million.

In many cases, funds disbursed by USAID did provide much needed and essential services. But war feminism — and the “liberation” of Afghan women that it made a goal — delegitimized USAID in the eyes of the public. By the time Kabul fell, it was obvious that ideas of freedom cooked up by feminists in D.C. could not be translated to the Afghan context. The large amounts of unaccounted funds also exposed corruption within the organization and the intransigence of bureaucrats who refused to acknowledge failures or alter the direction of the organization when these failures were repeatedly pointed out.

The end of USAID is inextricably connected to the idea that “women’s liberation” — defined by technocratic bureaucrats as women receiving job training or sewing machines — could not cover up the ignominies of warfare. The eagerness of war feminists to export liberation via bombs has left Afghan women more vulnerable and oppressed than ever before.

The Trump administration and its supporters have lobbed many criticisms at the nearly defunct organization, but few admit that USAID’s failure also shows that moral legitimacy for war cannot be purchased via soft power costumed as women’s liberation.

Rafia Zakaria is a columnist at DAWN Pakistan and the author of the book “Against White Feminism.”