That didn't take long

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal had unilaterally declared a ceasefire last September. (It was extended by a month at the beginning of December.)

The ceasefire expired last night, and within hours bombs had gone off.

Blasts rock Nepal after rebel ceasefire ends

Two fresh bomb blasts hit the tourist town of Pokhara in Nepal on Tuesday, following a series of overnight explosions in the Himalayan kingdom, which came just hours after Maoist rebels called off a four-month truce.

The explosions coming soon after the Maoists ended their unilateral truce at midnight on Monday has raised fears of a resurgence of violence.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in Tuesday's blasts in Pokhara, 200 km (125 miles) west of Kathmandu. One of the explosions occurred near a local government office and the other on a road.
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Commentators and ordinary Nepalese called for talks to try to end the fighting that has raged for a decade. More than 12,500 people have been killed in the insurgency that aims to topple the monarchy and establish one-party communist rule

Nepal has stepped up security in response.

It sounds anachronistic in 2006 to be talking about a group named for Chairman Mao. Yet, the group's objectives would be familar to the great backward leaper, and the destroyer of culture.

The International Crisis Group put out an informative report on Nepal's Maoists last October. This is from the executive summary:

The Maoists are at heart a political party. They have developed military capacity but it is subordinated to political control. They use terror tactics and coercion but they are not simply terrorists. They maintain links to other communist revolutionary groups on the subcontinent but they are neither Khmer Rouge clones nor is their campaign part of any global terrorism.

Maoist strategy is of a protracted people's war, both political and military -- the two cannot be separated. They have a long-term vision, and they have patience. They can be extremely astute politically (their September 2005 unilateral ceasefire announcement) but can also make grave miscalculations in terms of their own long-term objectives (their mishandling of leadership differences in early 2005).

The Maoists are not likely to collapse because of internal disputes. There are undoubtedly tensions within the top leadership and challenges of command and control but these do not add up to fatal weaknesses. The state's security-driven agenda under a succession of governments lacking legitimacy has only further strengthened their position.

The insurgents are pragmatic and tactically flexible. They are aware they will not win an outright military victory and have realised that an instant transition to socialism is impossible. They are willing to compromise to some degree and are keen to engage with domestic and international political forces.

The Maoists have employed force for political ends since the start of their armed campaign in 1996. They have used torture, execution and other forms of violence including terror and extortion. But they have also been more restrained than many insurgent groups: they have limited civilian casualties and generally avoided indiscriminate attacks. They have left the economy functional, if weakened, and have never targeted foreign nationals.

A few days after that report, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article on the Maoists. It is a journalistic look at the Maoists' motivations, and Nepal's political environment. Some excerpts:

Nepal is a landlocked nation, slightly larger than Arkansas, pressed up against the Himalayas. Its nearly 28 million citizens are among the poorest in the world. Its system of government - after more than a decade of tumultuous semi-democracy - is, in effect, an absolute monarchy, ruled by the world's only Hindu king, Gyanendra Bikram Bir Shah Dev, a chain smoker with perpetually downturned lips. Some of his followers regard him as a direct descendant of the god Vishnu.
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The stated Maoist plan for Nepal was always a mix of leveling social relations, addressing serious grievances, imposing far-left Puritanism and promoting economic growth, if there was to be any, through either revolutionary enthusiasm or, if necessary, revolutionary violence. The party's first list of demands, presented in February 1996, was typical: a call for a new constitution and an army accountable to the government rather than the palace; calls to ban "vulgar" Hindi films from India; an end to the recruitment for foreign armies of Gurkha soldiers, most of whom hailed from the midwestern hill districts. The government ignored these demands entirely.

In their own territory, the Maoists have instituted a raft of new laws. Untouchability is proscribed, in theory and practice. Alcohol and child marriage are banned. New polygamous marriages are not tolerated, although, depending on the local leadership, existing ones are left alone. Migrating to India in search of work is frowned upon. Legal disputes are adjudicated by a roving people's court that Nepali human rights advocates consider a travesty of justice. Policing is done by a people's militia, members of which also appeared to run Thabang's main tea shop.
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Why this intense revolutionary focus on schools? For the Maoists, schools represent a vital source of both revenue and recruits. Teachers, often the most influential elites in rural communities, can either be roped in as allies or eliminated as enemies. (Tulsi Kumari Dangi, a Nepali language teacher we met along the road, said it was routine practice for all teachers to give 5 percent of their salaries every month, plus the entirety of their annual bonus.) Public schools are also the last vestige of His Majesty's government across the Nepali countryside. And, of course, schools in an almost media-free rural society are the best place to assert control over the public mind.

The Maoists have shut down many schools, particularly the fee-paying private schools that have mushroomed in recent years. They have ferried away students and teachers for indoctrination and forced labor. They have brought their Communist song-and-dance shows to schoolyards. They have made children dig trenches around schools in preparation for what they regard to be an imminent, final military onslaught. A Unicef survey of one war-torn district found that the number of children who showed up for year-end exams had dropped by nearly half. To Unicef officials, this signaled that children were either not coming to school at all, or that their instruction days had shrunk so much that they no longer bothered to sit for the year-end exams. The gains made in the last decade to get children into schools, they concluded, were at risk of being lost. I learned in Thabang that no one in the last two years had passed the national 10th-grade matriculation exam, a benchmark recognized as the completion of formal schooling.

The South Asia Terrorism Portal provide daily updates on the violence throughout southern Asia, and you can regularly find items involving Maoists. (The site also has an extensive overview of the Maoists.) Frequently the items will involve India, as many Maoists seek sanctuary in India and spill over into that country.

I'd imagine that if you engaged many liberals today on the topic of communism, they'd guffaw and chortle if you suggested communism was a threatening ideology. I'd also wonder if those same liberals were aware of how much the Marxist philosophy drives the Maoists, and of the violence they commit.

At National Review Online today, James Robbins has an article focusing on Iran, but he makes a point about taking seriously groups that are not shy about proclaiming their willingness to use violence as a means to their ends.

Western liberals, who prize reason, are subject to the tendency to explain away beliefs they consider unreasonable. Progress and freedom are inevitable because they are the natural courses of history. Ideologies that do not fit our predetermined vision of the future are not worth taking seriously. Extremism cannot triumph because it does not make sense. Therefore, the Bolsheviks and their successors were not really after global Communist revolution, even though they said they were. The Nazis would not really commit armed aggression and genocide, even though they advocated both. And while Khmer Rouge military leader Khieu Samphan's 1959 doctoral thesis identified the urban bourgeoisie as a parasite class that had to be removed to the countryside, they wouldn't really empty Phnom Penh of its 2.5 million citizens and subject them to collectivization, reeducation, and execution, would they? Isn't that just plain crazy?

Why am I a conservative? Because I believe in personal freedom, and I believe in a fallen human condition and the tendency for governments to grow oppressive. There are any number of groups in the world today seeking to take away freedoms, to impose their enslaving ideologies in a quest for power, and through violence if necessary. The Maoists in Nepal are such a group, and by their actions we shall know them.