Many of us have childhoods free from fear or intimidation. A childhood where we go to school, play with friends, meander in the fields and innocently dream of our futures. Childhoods full of calm, confidence and enthusiasm.

Yet, many of these qualities of childhood are being taken from the children of Nepal. Their childhood is disappearing. This beloved country, known for its peacefulness, seems to have lost its way. Nepal has gone into a wilderness of war, fear and betrayal.

Today, instead of eager students finishing their high school, youth are clothed in khaki and carrying guns. Instead of studying at homes in the evening, they are reciting lessons of ideology and dogma. Instead of playing with their friends by their local schools, children are forced to work as porters for armies of the night. Instead of finally being accepted in school, lower caste youth are told that war is the answer to oppression and the means to emancipation.

But, unfortunately, in our all-too-brief human incarnation, there are no simple emancipations or revolutions. There is always a price to pay and someone, some individual, has to pay it.

Too often the price of war has been paid by the children of Nepal. So, it remains for us to speak on behalf of the children, to say what we see today in Nepal. It is for us to speak about the traumas and terrors of a situation that has not brought the children of Nepal a better future, but is sacrificing that potential in the animosities of today.

War is not a solution. War is rarely glory or noble sacrifice. War is too often death, tragedy and the abject failure of adults to find reasonable solutions to often unreasonable problems. A country, where one could walk tranquilly in the hills, has become an armed encampment, where homes are shut tight in the evenings and villagers dread a stranger's knock on their door at night. In communities throughout the nation, na?ve and vulnerable children are taken against their will to the jungle for political indoctrination or taken furtively in the barracks to inform on a relative or friend.

There is hardly a day that goes by when we are not dulled or numbed into almost disbelief by the stories of children caught in the crossfire. Children whose parents are murdered in front of them. Children who are dragged from their own homes and shot or beaten based on an unproven or unquestioned accusation or allegation. Children whose teacher is taken away in the night by men in uniform and never returned. Children whose local school is turned into a militia recruitment ground or a brutal battlefield. Children who are seduced into the romance of war or the promise of an complicated future.

Are we permitted to question such promises? To ask why instead we can't promise the children of Nepal a quality education, a healthy life, a well-managed school? Can we not begin to hold ourselves accountable for these more mundane promises? Promises that government after government has made to its own people, as well as the international community, yet rarely sustain.

You only know what you have lost when it's gone. Does every party to this conflict understand what it has lost? Must we lose our own sons and daughters to understand the pain of those who have already lost their children to this internal, internecine conflict? How many more dead must we count to appreciate the value of a single human life? Wasn't one child killed by this dreary conflict enough for us to realise our own obligation as adults not to murder our own children? How many children must die brutally for us to pause to reflect on what we have done? When will the fires of such young cremations burn some sense into our collective national consciousness?

Time is not on our side. Time carries its own momentum. We have already lost a decade, how many more decades do we have to give? Who will be able to answer when one child comes back to ask us what happened to their childhood? Who will be able to stand to respond? Because we all know, some day, when this war is over, that child will want to know: "Was all of this worth my pain?"

Keith D Leslie is director of Save the Children US. This is an excerpt of his speech at the launch of the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict Report last week.