Hizbullah's Challenge and Lebanon's

BEIRUT -- The Doha agreement that ended the latest round of political tension and armed clashes in Lebanon has bought, at best, 18-24 months of calm for the country -- and an opportunity for the largely discredited political elite to start acting responsibly. Hizbullah remains the focus of discussion about the challenges ahead, given its dominant strength relative to the other Lebanese factions, including the central government and its armed forces.

The dilemma for Hizbullah is that its strength -- from its inception a quarter of a century ago in the early 1980s -- is now its weakness in its political engagement inside Lebanon. Its combination of military prowess, links with Syria and Iran, and domestic strategic political ambiguity about its ultimate aims for Lebanon are issues that have rallied the opposition to it among a growing circle of Lebanese.

This is not purely a question of "What does Hizbullah want?" or "Will Hizbullah give up its arms?" Hizbullah's power and aims cannot be analyzed in a vacuum, because the party did not emerge as the most powerful military force in the country in isolation of the behavior of other national actors. Two issues are at play here: Hizbullah's status, and the quality of Lebanese statehood. 

The strength and status of Hizbullah and the weakness of the Lebanese state are symbiotic developments that feed off each other, and can only be resolved together. 

The coming era of calm political adjustment in Lebanon -- including the national unity government and the Spring 2009 parliamentary elections -- must address the very difficult core disputed issues. The central one is the Hizbullah-state relationship, which is directly or indirectly linked to other tough issues such as Syrian-Lebanese ties, and the role of external powers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

If Lebanon does not make progress on these issues in the coming few years and instead falls back into a pattern of stalemate and street fighting, a second civil war is likely, and no country I know of has survived two civil wars and remained intact. A resumption of fighting on a large scale will see the country slip into a slow and steady pattern of dysfunctional statehood and patchwork sovereignty, somewhere between the Yemen and Somalia models.

The challenge remains to construct a state built on equal citizenship rights in which all Lebanese have the opportunity to improve their quality of life in the context of the rule of law, rather than tribal or communal self-defense. The manner in which the parties at Doha haggled over electoral districts in Beirut and other parts of the country suggests that the concepts of the Lebanese state and citizens' rights remain subsidiary to the more powerful forces of sectarianism and tribalism that define both the affirmation of identity and the exercise of power. This is not unique to Lebanon. Most of the Middle East suffers the same problem, but elsewhere it is camouflaged beneath the stultifying calm of the modern Arab security state.

Hizbullah has proven to be very good at most of the things it does, including social service delivery, communal mobilization, military resistance and appealing to wider public opinion around the region. It is the culmination of one of the most impressive and compelling political sagas of the modern Arab world -- the journey of the Lebanese Shiite community from marginalization, abuse, and subjugation to dominant power in a span of just over a generation, starting in the early 1970s.

Yet Hizbullah has proved to be very weak in domestic political engagement, mainly because it is inexperienced. Some of its strongest critics say it is insincere, and does not care to engage politically or share power, because it reflects Iranian-Syrian rather than Lebanese priorities. The arguments here are fierce. We shall soon find out. Politics, however, remains new territory for Hizbullah.

Its 18-month-long political challenge to the government was a stalemated failure and exploits such as its downtown tent encampment were occasionally an embarrassment. It gained the upper hand only when it responded to the government's challenge to two aspects of its security system by sending armed men into west Beirut. 

To fight instead of bargaining is not a sign of political prowess or sophistication.

Hizbullah and the Lebanese state must both now grapple with basic issues of their own legitimacy, efficacy, and reach. It is clear that the existing balance of power is not sustainable. More and more Lebanese are openly challenging Hizbullah, which responds with familiar arguments about the centrality of its resistance role -- arguments that sound increasingly less credible to many compatriots. There is no easy answer to this dilemma of how to reconcile a weak state with a strong parallel state structure. But an answer must be found, or both will pay the price in the years ahead.