A Monitoring Mandate Younger Than the Group It Watches

Twenty years ago the United Nations widened the mandate of its force in southern Lebanon so that it would monitor adherence to a ceasefire in the fighting between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah. That is a narrow, specific job: watch whether a truce holds. The monitoring role was an expansion of the force's remit, tied to a particular ceasefire rather than to peacekeeping in general, and NPR reports that the mandate now runs to checking compliance with it. Hezbollah is considerably older than that job description. It is Iran-backed, and NPR describes it as the militant group created in 1982 to counter a second Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The mandate is therefore decades younger than the organisation it was written to watch — a gap worth keeping in mind whenever a ceasefire is described as monitored.