Major newspapers ran front-page stories today on the reconstruction of Lebanon. The New York Times and the Washington Post both emphasized details of Hezbollah’s efforts, while the Wall Street Journal mainly emphasized the Lebanese government’s official reconstruction investment. In each case, much of the story was about who would get political credit for taking care of Lebanon’s people — within Lebanon, would reconstruction strengthen weak government institutions or help Hezbollah’s informal government? outside Lebanon, would reconstruction help Iran or the United States? That political competition is surely important for many reasons. So far, the Lebanese government and Hezbollah seem to be cooperating although perhaps not coordinating their efforts, and maybe the “two parallel lines” of effort (to cite the Post‘s translation from Hezbollah leader Nasrallah’s speech after the cease fire) can help relax internal tensions that some people fear could renew the Lebanese civil war.

On the other hand, the Post also quoted a fighter from a rival (weaker) militia, Amal. The gist of what he said was that others (besides Hezbollah) helped the people displaced by Hezbollah’s fight while the war was going on, but now it’s time for Hezbollah to pay up. That is, at least some people in other groups expect Hezbollah to take care of fixing all the war damage, because Hezbollah owes the rest of Lebanon. That sounds to me like a recipe for dissatisfaction: when the government taxes other parts of Lebanon to pay for reconstruction, or concentrates its spending of new aid money in some parts of Lebanon (say, the war-damaged south) without giving a share to other groups, some people might start to complain about how Hezbollah gets “preferential treatment.” And if Hezbollah is not quick to compensate its political rivals, they may get upset. Even hoping for compensation seems forlorn: Hezbollah is probably less likely to happily “pay” Amal or to spend its Iranian money in Amal-controlled territory than the old American political machines were to spend civic funds on patronage for their partisan rivals. There’s still plenty of potential for division in Lebanon.

And in fact that’s the main problem with all post-conflict reconstruction: local politics. Local politics are likely to undermine the Lebanese effort, just as they have undone the American funding of Iraqi reconstruction.

Even countries with robust political institutions — the United States itself — have great difficulty with major infrastructure projects. We complain about wasted money and inept construction on the Big Dig in Boston (The Boston Globe did a great package of stories on the Big Dig). And we complain about the slow response after Hurricane Katrina that has left needy people pointing fingers at local, state, and federal officials. But the good news is that Americans accept our political process, so no one is going to start shooting about construction problems here in the U.S.

In fact, we have a political process that aggregates various interests so that we can set priorities in construction efforts. Neighborhood associations and environmentalists get their say in the Big Dig along with the pro-development business groups, the unions, and the construction firms. One reason that the Big Dig was so expensive, with its cost soaring from a couple billion dollars in its initial plans to over $15 billion (even before the current crisis that will require expensive repairs because tunnel ceilings are falling down), is that the project changed: on-ramps were moved to satisfy locals, Boston harbor cleanup was added to the project bill, etc. That process of log-rolling — and the money to foot the resulting bill — is precisely what is lacking in most developing countries. And it’s especially lacking in post-conflict reconstruction.

The New York Times article quotes a Lebanese professor, calling Hezbollah “a state within a non-state” rather than a state within a state. But while Hezbollah manages to represent the interests of a substantial fraction of the Lebanese people, and while it has a good deal of “street cred” with other Lebanese, we should not really confuse Hezbollah with a modern state — just as Hamas was not really a “state within a non-state” in the Palestinian territories until it got itself voted into control of the actual state-like Palestinian Authority.

Why should we assume that reconstruction efforts in Lebanon are going to go well — that the people are going to be happy about what Hezbollah (or the official Lebanese government) does or does not do for them? Right now, the Times notes that Hezbollah has a reputation as a “grass-roots social services network,” while the government is viewed as a bunch of “sleek men in suits doing well [for themselves].” But so far, Hezbollah has had few hard social services and reconstruction tasks, and Iranian money (even in the unlikely case that it proves endless) is not enough to solve all infrastructure problems in Lebanon.

The Wall Street Journal article has a sensible passage in which it talks about the government reconstruction program’s efforts to arrange for various types of investment: the government will appeal to all donors, and then it will ask the ones that it perceives as “soft touches” (France, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait) to fund the unpopular parts of reconstruction. I don’t know what those particular jobs will turn out to be, but Hezbollah may have trouble funding a “comprehensive” effort, too — whatever that means. At some point, reconstruction just becomes the day-to-day business of government investment, and infrastructure repair is never as popular as starting new projects, all government investment faces inefficiency and the NIMBY syndrome, and other problems abound. Handing out relief to displaced people in shelters is relatively easy; the reconstruction to come is much harder: deciding whose home to rebuild first or how nice to make the new houses or whether to upgrade the water treatment and electricity or change the road network, etc.

The bottom line is that there is no magic recipe for post-conflict reconstruction. No one should be surprised that the American effort in Iraq has failed, and no one should be surprised when the wheels likewise come off the effort in Lebanon. A whole set of critics of the American occupation of Iraq argue that the administration failed to plan for post-war reconstruction or that the American military’s doctrine emphasized firepower rather than winning hearts and minds through fixing the infrastructure or that the civilian parts of America’s Iraq effort were undertrained or underfunded. All of these critics seem to think that there is a magic recipe — that something could have been done better. Sadly, they are wrong.

No one can fix a wrecked country without political institutions that give people a stake in projects’ success and that allow people to be satisfied with projects even when they don’t turn out the way they wanted them to. And no one knows how to create those political institutions except through the sort of long, slow, domestic process of nation-building that worked over hundreds of years in Western Europe, North America, and a few other places. Frankly, we don’t even know how it worked where it did!

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