“At one point we were throwing money at anything with a pulse and a proposal,” said a former embassy aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It was out of control.”

The fund underwrites projects ranging from Fulbright fellowships to cellphone towers. “Public diplomacy is how we engage people around the world, it’s how we explain our values,” said an embassy spokesman, David D. Snepp. “All of these programs fit together to provide a comprehensive public diplomacy strategy that we feel has been very successful in the last 10 years or so.”

One group, Young Women for Change, run by an Afghan woman attending college in the United States and two friends here, said it received American Embassy financing to put on a fashion show in February, which it described as a “female empowerment project.” The audience was largely foreigners and journalists.

“I think we should spend American money in more practical and lasting ways,” said Daoud Sultanzoy, a commentator for Tolo TV, an Afghan station that itself has received millions. “People come here with an idea and want to do it in this country, but they open us to critics and even attacks by the conservatives in this country, and there are many of them.”

Some bizarre-sounding aid groups have done very well. Skateistan, an Australian aid group that teaches skateboarding to Afghan children, would not seem to make much sense in a country where even the potholes have potholes. But it built a skate park and provided schooling and lunches for street children here, attracting support from several European governments.

At the peak of the spending spree, American money underwrote an Afghan version of “Sesame Street” in late 2011. In what may have been a first in the annals of war and diplomacy, the American ambassador at the time, Ryan C. Crocker, was photographed with the Grover character in downtown Kabul.

Some well-intended ideas have run up against the harsh realities of Afghan life. In 2007, a representative of the United States Agency for International Development addressed an audience at Kabul University to discuss plans for a gender empowerment project that would give free bicycles to women in Kandahar, a city in the deeply conservative Pashtun south.