Photo: U.S. Embassy.

I believe it would be a good thing if Trump and his crew of fascists, fools and billionaires cut the military budget in half. If USAID does actually get shut down, I would also be fine with that. After all, both of these entities—especially the military—are major parts of US imperialism and why the US has been at war for the last eighty some years without pause. Does this mean I am fine with cutting all the food and medical programs USAID ran around the world? Of course not. It does mean I am fine with ending the campaigns of subversion USAID was a part of. It also means I am good with the ending of so-called development projects that mostly served to transfer US public funds to private US corporations involved in those projects; projects which often misunderstood the lives and cultures of the people Washington insisted it was helping. Projects which also tended to benefit the wealthiest and often corrupt elites in those nations while further impoverishing other citizens.

My father was an officer in the US military from 1954 through 1979. His unit worked in concert with the National Security Agency (NSA) after he got his commission. This meant that he was assigned to different parts of the world over his career. With the exception of Vietnam, his family accompanied him on assignments that lasted more than a couple months. We spent three years in what was then West Pakistan from 1963-1966 and three years (1970-1973) in Frankfurt am Main in what was then West Germany. His other assignments were in the United States and Alaska before it became a state. Most of the stateside assignments were at Fort Meade, MD. Where the main NSA compound is. The first time I heard the acronym USAID was in Pakistan when the base Little League team my brother and I played on played against a team made up of boys whose fathers were beginning preliminary work on a giant hydroelectric program on the Indus River. The fathers all worked for USAID or a corporation hired by USAID.

I mention my childhood in this manner to tell a quick anecdote. When we lived in Germany, I was in high school. Several of my friends lived in a military housing area known as HICOG, which originally housed military and civilian members of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany—the occupation authority established in 1949 when the responsibility for running the US occupation of the defeated Germany switched from the military to the State Department. By the time I lived in Frankfurt, this housing was reserved for US government employees working for the CIA, USAID, the State Department and middle ranking members of the Foreign Service.

One day when a friend and I were hanging out, we got to talking about our fathers’ jobs and where we had traveled to because of those jobs. I mentioned my dad’s connection to NSA and being in Pakistan. My friend mentioned that her father had been in Laos before moving to Germany. I asked her what agency her father worked for. She told me that he had been with USAID in Laos, but was now with the CIA. I had been reading enough leftist and underground newspapers by this time to wonder how someone of her father’s ranking (GS-17) could move between agencies so easily. I asked my dad and he gave me an evasive answer—one he gave me often when I challenged US policy and its operations. He simply stated that if he could tell me hoe would, but I didn’t have the required security clearance. The next time I was hanging out with some German friends of mine who were members of the radical left youth wing of Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats (SPD) known as the Jusos (Jungsozialisten), I mentioned my conversation. One of them, whose father was a US citizen married to a German woman, referred me to an article in the New York Review of Books by Noam Chomsky titled “A Visit to Laos.”(7/23/1970) As the title implies, the article as about a visit by Chomsky and a few other antiwar activists to Laos, where Washington was running a vast CIA operation involving mercenaries, drug running and general subversion against the popular revolutionary nationalist army of the Pathet Lao.

These paragraphs from the article do a fairly good job summarizing what Chomsky observed.

Obviously USAID tries to implement American Government policy in Laos and to build domestic support for the American-sponsored Royal Lao Government. A more interesting example of the difficulty of determining just how the United States is intervening in the internal affairs of Laos is the case of the International Voluntary Services (IVS). This is a private volunteer group that has attracted many idealistic young people who are eager to help with modernization and development in traditional societies, without mixing in local politics. IVS has operated in Laos for about fifteen years. In 1962, the group was offered a large USAID contract for work in Laos, and its membership grew to about one hundred. The reasons for this sudden American interest seem clear. Before 1962, most American aid had gone to the urban areas. In fact, less than half of 1 percent of the extensive American aid funds[20] were spent on agriculture, the livelihood of over 90 percent of the population.

This was, of course, a factor in the support for the Pathet Lao revealed by the 1958 elections and subsequently. As (Arthur J.) Dommen points out in his book Conflict in Laos, the Pathet Lao needed no propaganda to turn the rural population against the townspeople; indeed the enormous corruption and graft associated with the aid program sickened many city dwellers as well. In 1962 the US therefore decided to channel more funds to the countryside and to do this through an American-controlled apparatus so as to reduce corruption. The plan required the presence of Americans in the villages, and IVS filled the breach. As one volunteer puts it, “IVS became a private agency recruiting young, relatively idealistic Americans to engage in politically motivated counter-insurgency programs in Laos.” (my emphasis-Ron J.)

Even though I was fairly skeptical, if not jaded, about US government operations around the world by then, this information moved my growing anger at what my German friends had convinced me was US imperialism to another level. I wondered even more what the fathers of my friends were actually involved in when I visited their homes, ate the food they offered and drank their beer.

In the decades that followed, USAID claimed to have ended some of these kinds of operations. In actuality, they ended the ones that no longer served the Empire’s goals, but they continued to use their presence in countries around the world to subvert national elections and overturn governments not in line with US strategies and plans. The food aid provided to nations suffering from natural and man-made famine served a two-fold purpose: to feed the hungry and to get rid of surplus crops from the US. Of course, these crops were surplus in large part because US prices needed to be kept at an artificial level so US agribusiness could show a profit and farmers could continue to afford to farm. Virtually any development undertaken by USAID involves (involved?) US companies importing their managers and executives and exporting the profits. This isn’t to say that USAID has not been involved with positive development projects; it is saying that there are other ways to conduct these projects so that the locals gain the bulk of the benefits. In other words, there are other ways besides the structure of neocolonialism to help countries develop economic and physical infrastructure.

USAID was a huge presence in Afghanistan during the US war and occupation of the country. According to the Lead Inspector General’s Report in October 2018, over half a billion dollars had been spent on USAID projects in the country since the October 2001 invasion. Many of these projects involved feeding and sheltering people left with nothing after US military raids in their areas and attacks by the Taliban and other resistance forces. Some funds went to development, much if not most of which was ferreted out to the private sector. In fact many Indian capitalists were recipients of these funds. One other aspect of USAID’s presence in the country was vaccinating the population. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan still have many cases of polio every year, in addition to other diseases that can be remedied by vaccinations. Teams made up of UN and USAID workers go into regions of the countries and provide vaccinations and other health services. This has taken place for decades and was very prevalent during the US occupation. The visits have been stopped several times, sometime for months. This usually occurred because the teams were threatened when they entered territories under control of the resistance. The reason for the threats was often because these territories were often bombed and otherwise attacked not long after the vaccination teams’ departure. The resistance forces were convinced that these teams were reporting back to the US military about the presence of the resistance in the villages. The military then used this information to attack. In other words, the vaccine teams were accused of providing intelligence to the occupation forces. Although specific instances of such behavior is seemingly impossible to find in any accessible documentation, a relevant example of this type of behavior is present in the CIA’s tracking of and eventual murder of Obama Bin Laden. According to a paper published on the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank focused on the US empire’s presence and expansion in the world and where Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken worked before his appointment to the cabinet,

Prior to the 2011 assault in which bin Laden was killed, the CIA used a local doctor to fake a door-to-door vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, Pakistan to acquire DNA samples from family members. This ruse subsequently became public, igniting multiple disturbing reactions. The Pakistani government ordered Save the Children expatriate personnel to depart, even though they had no role in the CIA effort and were supporting over two hundred thousand Pakistani children… (Muller/Morrison)

When all is said and done, the positive elements of USAID’s mission tend to be overrun by elements which have, intentionally or otherwise, destroyed, devastated and otherwise negatively disrupted those whom it claimed to help. Making this statement is not an indictment of the well-meaning individuals who work and have worked for USAID. It is however, an indictment of an organization which would manipulate this well-meaning into its opposite. Unfortunately, the trumpist plan to end USAID will neither help people in need or change the essence of US imperialism. Most likely, it will exacerbate the plight of the former and make the latter even more cruel than Trump’s regime says it plans to be.

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