Ten years into the war and nearly half that time without parliament, it is difficult to see a solution to the three-way power struggle between the king, political parties and the underground rebels.

The day-to-day headlines of blame and counter-blame poison the air and confuse war-weary citizens who have lost their trust in all political forces in the arena. They reject the Maoists' use of violence, they don't see signs of the political parties behaving any differently, and they are turned off by a monarch who doesn't even bother to hide his autocratic tendencies anymore.

In conflicts where a resolution looks intractable, it helps to distil to its essence differences between adversaries. In Nepal, the dispute is about how much power the king should have. The political parties will settle for a constitutional role, the Maoists want to get rid of the monarchy and the king himself wants more power than the 1990 constitution grants him. Each of them is exploiting the weaknesses of the other two.

The king senses the public disenchantment against the party leadership and believes this means support for himself. The parties haven't properly atoned for squandering democracy and think they can win public sympathy simply by pointing at a bullying king. The Maoists have played the parties and the palace against each other but despite the unilateral ceasefire are losing whatever support they once had. The irony, of course, is that all three claim to be fighting on the peoples' behalf and boast that they have their full support.

All three are tumbling down a precipice together, but instead of working to arrest the fall they are punching each other as they go down.

How does one even begin to stop this descent into oblivion? In the short-term we must buy time for confidence-building by pushing for an extension of the unilateral ceasefire and reciprocation by the army. The past two months may not have freed the people from extortion, abductions and disappearances but it has accomplished one thing: reduced the rate at which Nepalis were being killed.

A section of the Maoists now seem genuinely interested in a soft-landing by agreeing to suspend the armed struggle and join the mainstream. With his extended foreign tour, nomination of an insider to the NEA and the media ordinance the king shows he hasn't changed tack, but even he may respond to a face-saving offer to back down. The parties are working to convince the Maoists to come to the mainstream as the least-cost path to peace through social justice.

All three need to be given a chance to work things out, but for this they need a longer truce. Otherwise, we are looking at renewed post-ceasefire bloodshed as the Maoists commemorate the 10th anniversary of their 'people's war' with more human sacrifices.