Lebanisation of Pakistan

Lebanon's post-war era militia leaders became the political leadership and have kept a lock on power ever since. The country remains a nation without an effective governing dispensation. Pakistan seems to be going the same way!

ALMOST TWENTY YEARS BACK and over a month after landing up in Lebanon as the Chief Humanitarian Officer of the UN Interim Force in 2001-02, I got a faint glimpse of how fractured and dysfunctional their society and the polity really was. The Indian Ambassador was hosting an ‘At Home’ on the eve of the Republic Day and it came to my notice that the Lebanese government would be represented by three ministers, one each for the President, the PM and the Speaker. Ipso facto, they would be representing Maronite Christians, Sunnis and Shias respectively as per the confessional system of governance arrangements that the country had adopted. It had just come out of decades of civil war between the largely Christian South Lebanon Army (SLA) and Iran-Syria backed Hezbollah, and Israeli occupation of Shia-dominated South Lebanon, south of the Litany River, from 1985-2000.

As part of my humanitarian projects, I would traverse the length and breadth of South Lebanon which curiously had its own President, apart from the President of Lebanon. The Hezbollah dominated the territory mostly, their ubiquitous yellow flags fluttering on the street poles and photos of martyrs staring at you. The militias use the cocaine and hashish drug trade as well as other “criminal enterprises” to fund their military ventures in Lebanon, while some of their funds do go to education and health assistance for the poor.