The Two USAIDs

"I wrote an autopsy of foreign aid. A lot of good people assumed it was about them. It wasn’t — and here’s the line the cover didn’t have room to draw."

By Beau Taylor  ·  author of Expat Confidential: An Ugly American Autopsy

My book has an ugly cover, and I made it that way on purpose. Expat Confidential: An Ugly American Autopsy. It promises waste, dysfunction, and an insider willing to name both. It delivers.

But an autopsy is performed on a specific body. And in the month since I published, I’ve watched a lot of people assume the body on my table was theirs. It isn’t. So let me do the thing a cover doesn’t have room to do, and say plainly who and what I was cutting into.

Formy career abroad, there were two USAIDs.

One was the agency people picture when they think of foreign aid at its best — the patient, unglamorous work of helping a poor country build the things a functioning society runs on. Water systems. Clinics. Schools. The institutional plumbing of a place trying to climb out of poverty. The people who did that work didn’t do it for the money, because there wasn’t much, and they didn’t do it for glory, because no one back home was watching. They did it because they believed a healthier, more stable world was worth building one stubborn project at a time. Not perfect, but worthy.

The other USAID is the one I worked for in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 9/11, Washington decided aid could be a weapon — that you could pacify an insurgency by flooding a battlefield with development money, that a canal or a cash-for-work program might do what bullets couldn’t. So aid got drafted into the wars. It was handed budgets it could never spend well, in places too violent to work in, chasing goals it was never designed or staffed to reach. The money came in faster than anyone could account for it. Some of it built things. Some of it vanished. Some of it, I’m convinced, ended up in the hands of the people we were fighting.

That second USAID is the one on the table in Expat Confidential. That’s the autopsy. The waste and the absurdity on my cover — that’s the war-money machine. It was never the water systems.

I can tell the two apart because I lived in both. About a year and a half of my USAID time was in the war zones — Iraq, Afghanistan — watching the machine run. Roughly three years were spent somewhere most Americans couldn’t find on a map: post-Soviet Central Asia. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan. Strange, hard, half-broken places still hungover from the collapse of an empire, run by strongmen who’d learned power in the Soviet system. That was development work in the real sense, though slightly dystopian relative to the humanitarian work in places like sub-saharan Africa — slow, maddening, occasionally even working — in a corner of the world the headlines had forgotten. More of my USAID time went to that actual mission than to the war, which is exactly why I can tell you the war stuff was something else entirely.

So to the people who gave their careers to the first USAID, and watched those careers end this year through no fault of their own: my book is not about you. It was never about you. The thing I’m angry at in those pages is the same thing many of you were quietly angry at for years — the militarization of your mission, the turning of development into armed nation-building, the spectacle of serious money shoveled into a war and called progress. You didn’t do that. It was done to the agency you believed in, by people in Washington of both parties, and you had to watch it corrupt the thing you’d given your life to.

I still believe parts of that agency needed to be torn down and rebuilt, and I’ll say so plainly, because it’s true and because honoring good people doesn’t require lying about the broken parts. There were unseeming parts of the USAID apparatus outside the war zones that needed course correction, not elimination. But Aid should never have been a battlefield tool, that’s the point of my book. That’s a job for the Pentagon and the State Department — not for a development worker with a clipboard in a province that is actively trying to kill him. The part of USAID that went to war should never have existed in the first place.

But “restructure the part that went to war” and “gut the part that fed children and built clinics” are not the same thing. The first is a serious argument. The second is what actually happened this year, possibly under the guise of the first — and it happened without anyone bothering to draw the line I’m drawing now. My cover doesn’t make that distinction. This essay is me making it.

Here’s the last thing, and it’s the part I most want the laid-off to hear. My own development career didn’t end on my terms either. It ended because of forces I couldn’t control, the way a lot of yours just did. And what I found on the far side of that ending surprised me: I came home to a bankrupt American city everyone had written off, and I turn its lights on — forty percent working to ninety-nine. I’m not telling you that to brag. I’m telling you because if your career was just taken from you, I have stood where you’re standing, and there is a life on the other side of it. A good one. Sometimes a better one.

So judge the book by its cover if you like. It earned that cover. Just know whose autopsy it is — and that it was never yours.