The hurdle in Lebanon is political

Randa Slim and I published a piece on Beirut reconstruction today in Foreign Affairs today. As we focus in the piece on investigation of the explosion and reconstruction, it did not treat the heinous behavior of the Lebanese security forces towards demonstrators, hence my temptation to include the video above from Human Rights Watch.

Lebanon is a failing state. It was failing even before the August 4 explosion that devastated a large part of the city center near the port. Such states offer profit opportunities to whoever holds power, while impoverishing everyone else. It is no easy task to help such a country without helping its power elite.

Randa and I offer in the Foreign Affairs piece a combination of two ideas for rebuilding the destroyed area: a contractual relationship for reconstruction and an internationally controlled but Lebanese-staffed “authority” to set priorities and do most of the actual contracting. The “contract” idea has often been used in recent years, at various levels of operation: the Millennium Challenge Corporation we site does it at the project level. The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund does it at a higher policy level. The European Union does it with candidate members. It amounts to conditionality: you get the money only if you do such and such.

The wise choice of “such and such,” and the willingness to follow through on the conditionality, are key elements of this approach. If our approach were to be adopted, the focus should be mainly on economic policy reform as well as transparency and accountability for government expenditure. But that creates an obvious problem: the international community would be asking for reforms from a central government that would not suffer any direct loss if aid were to be cut off. I think the importance of Beirut reconstruction to the government would be sufficient to mitigate this mismatch, but I’m in favor of examining downsides of any policies I suggest.

The idea of an International Beirut Reconstruction Authority is the more innovative of our propositions. Something like it existed in Sarajevo during the 1992/95 Bosnian war, but its capability was limited due to the siege and continued fighting. Randa and I cite the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, but the entity we have in mind is more hands-on than that. It would actually contract for and execute the reconstruction, as independently of the Lebanese government as feasible. Critics will say that proposition would weaken the Lebanese government. I would suggest the government has even more important things to do by way of economic and political reform.

We went light on the political reform piece, which is fraught. Lebanon is in form a democracy. If only technically competent people formed the government, they would likely have little connection to the political forces in the parliament, whose cooperation is necessary for many reforms. Meaningful political reform would give less weight to Lebanon’s sectarian political organizations, including Hezbollah, and more to its vibrant and competent civil society, including the demonstrators abused in the above video. Shifting power in that way is an enormous challenge, even in a small country. And it will have to be Lebanese who design a political system that delivers more to citizens and less to sectarian leaders.