The colonial origins of contemporary land development policies in the Maghreb region have long been recognized. Environmental historians have traced land expropriations, changes in tenure, and restrictions on traditional land uses to erroneous colonial narratives which portrayed the North African landscape as a region desertified by the ‘barbaric’ practices of Arab nomadic communities. Yet while the economic motivations behind colonial land practices are widely recognized, less understood are the links between land policy and the security objectives of colonial institutions. Such an understanding is especially important when one considers the prominent role often played by military administrators in the formulation of colonial policy. In the spirit of the “colonial present” (Gregory, 2004), this paper revisits the intertwined history of security and development. In particular, it investigates how land use policy under the French protectorate in Morocco (1912-1956) was shaped by the security objectives of French colonial administrators. Through an analysis of official reports, training manuals, correspondence, and memoirs of French colonial administrators, it traces the installment of water infrastructure and irrigation networks as tools through which land use policy came to be shaped by the mantra of “tying the natives to the soil.” This strategic military objective was animated by ethnicized and spatialized imaginaries of security that projected a particular hostility towards nomadic pastoralism and transhumant communities. Adopting the methods of historical sociology, the paper contributes to a number of contemporary debates within the fields of development, planning, and security studies. First, it seeks to contextualize current narratives on the imbrication of security and development within the Maghreb and North Africa. Second, it brings a more agentic lens to understanding how spatialized geographies of security are constructed and sustained. Finally, it builds on the turn within planning studies towards incorporating rural perspectives as a means to understand how rural and urban histories are co-constituted.