This paper explores connections among debt, technology, and popular sovereignty through a critical moment in the history of Lebanon's Litani river. In 1955, the parliament concluded a loan agreement with the World Bank to fund the Litani project, a series of dams and tunnels that created new connections among the rural Biqa', South Lebanon, and the capital. When construction completed in 1965, the Litani infrastructure produced electricity for Beirut consumption and extracted water from rural, predominantly Shi'a areas. But that same year, members of South Lebanon's landowning elite successfully petitioned parliament to redistribute the Litani waters. I argue these petitions succeeded due to two of the project's key effects. First, the Litani could no longer serve the purposes for which it had been designed. This was not because the technology functioned poorly, but because the future that the World Bank calculated in 1955 never came into being. The Bank predicated their designs on projections for Beirut's kilowatt-hour market between 1955-1965 and openly exerted power over the Lebanese state through their debt in order to realize these predictions. However, their influence could not regulate changes in urban demand and the decentralized network of power providers. When the second Litani power plant came online in 1965, the market the World Bank had struggled to create simply did not exist. Second, I argue that while in the 1950s the Lebanese state was conspicuously absent from rural South Lebanon, the Litani project made the state conspicuously present. The infrastructure materialized pre-existing inequalities between the capital and hinterland, providing a visible shared injustice against which rural communities mobilized into larger political formulations that challenged the state. The government and landowning elite sought to curtail the politicization of Southern communities by redistributing the Litani's waters. But as these efforts floundered, the equitable redistribution of the Litani became a critical object of contention in the emerging conflict between the movement lead by Musa al-Sadr and the older elites.