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Journalism of Courage
Like a severely disturbed individual, a failed state is a danger not just to itself but to those around it and beyond. That was a lesson indelibly learned on September 11th 2001. After 20 years of war, Afghanistan had become such a state, no longer functioning in any conventional sense. Unable to offer its own citizens anything other than poverty and fear, it was also unable to prevent itself from being hijacked by drug barons, war lords and jihadists of every stripe, from those who merely hoped to establish a new caliphate in central Asia to those whose target was the heart of the world’s most powerful nation. From a failed state, to borrow from Yeats, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, less through deliberate design than through negligence. But there is also a second danger. Neighbours, like nature, abhor a vacuum, and are tempted to rush in. However high-minded their motives, they can trigger competition and conflict; from the Balkans in 1914 to central Africa now, there is no scarcity of depressing examples. Which is why the eyes of the world ought to be focused more clearly on Nepal…
After nine years of a vicious civil war that has seen at least 10,000 people killed, the government has abandoned much of its territory to Maoist guerrillas. Its own soldiers commit human-rights violations on a horrific scale. A despotic monarch treats his own elected politicians with contempt. As we report (see article), there is no chance that the government can defeat the rebels; there is, however, a small but growing possibility that the rebels could defeat the government.
If this were purely an internal matter, the world could afford to look shamefacedly away. But it isn’t. Nepal’s Maoists have formed links with India’s own Maoist insurgents, who go by the local name of Naxalites, and, says India, with some of the vicious groups fighting secessionist wars in its north-east. As the Nepali Maoists have advanced, so have the Naxalites. They now pose a serious security threat in half a dozen of India’s states, including three of the largest.
Excerpted from a leader in the December 2 issue of ‘The Economist’
