This paper is a history of how agrarian communities in Lebanon enrolled international development researchers and their technologies into fulfilling these communities’ immediate needs. It argues and that these enrollments comprised a dismissal of the technological and temporal imaginary animating midcentury international development, and that this represents a strategy for how communities can eke out benefit from aborted, failed, or exploitative development interventions. In 1950, engineers from the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) began a four-year research mission to prepare a development plan for Lebanon’s Litani River basin. Their report would form the basis of the Litani project. Animating the USBR mission were the technopolitical ideas about technology and temporality fundamental to the postwar “development era.” They believed US engineers would transfer large technological systems to backwards countries, and technology transfer would provoke—or constitute—modernization. Communities in the Litani basin did not share these ideas. They were extremely skeptical that this research program would actually lead to real works. They had slim interest in prospective technology that may or may not be built sometime in the future. Nor were they concerned with the broader field of expertise the USBR researchers imagined themselves to represent. But they did recognize that the USBR researchers represented an opportunity to materially benefit their lives. They insisted that the USBR use their skills and the tangible technology that had physically travelled to the basin—the USBR’s state-of-the-art drilling rig—to dig wells in their water-poor region. Lebanese and Euro-American planners, both in the 1950s and today, lament this kind of near-term pragmatism as a mercenary failure to understand big-picture state planning. But this paper shows that these communities’ skepticism was a pragmatic negotiation with the reality that, in the 1950s and today, most development schemes do not actually take place. Within the development finance industry, huge amounts of money and resources go into research for projects that never materialize. Litani basin communities provide lessons in how those subject to development and enrolled in technopolitical imaginaries can win benefits from that cycle of otherwise wasted research labor and funding.