A prime minister is appointed, executive power is handed over with a mandate to restore law and order and hold early elections. But there are questions of legitimacy about the new prime minister and whether he is up to it.

The country is in shambles. Already suffering from decades of neglect, the conflict has ruined the economy and brought the country to its knees. There are no jobs and development has come to a standstill. Rebel groups have destroyed much of the infrastructure. They frequently abduct people, and parts of the country have descended into anarchy as bandits plunder villages.

Roadside bombs, landmines and ambushes along the highways take their toll on the security forces who retaliate with indiscriminate shooting, bombings and helicopter-borne attacks. Both sides torture prisoners in detention, many non-combatants are disappeared.

Sounds like Nepal? Actually we were describing Iraq on the week that the United States handed over power to its designated prime minister, Iyad Allawi, and a governing body of wealthy exiles. Though the Americans have tried to cloak this handover as a deliberate and pre-planned move, President George W Bush is obviously trying to extricate himself from a quagmire with only five months to go for elections.

He has no one to blame but himself and the fossil-fuel driven billionaires who bankroll him. When the mightiest country on earth starts making policy on the basis of the corporate greed of a few rightwing ideologues, it turns the whole earth into a powder keg. What's worse, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was justified on the extrapolated excuse that Saddam and Osama were in cahoots, a view actively promoted by neocon thinktanks and Fox news. The whole world knows that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their war-profiteering cronies were only after crude.
Like in Iraq, Nepal needs to move swiftly towards resolving its own conflict, restoring law and order, re-establishing a representative government that is inclusive of all Nepalis and not just the powerful, then galvanise human and natural resources of the country to finally lift the living standard of a people who have suffered for too long.

The present argument between the palace and the rump anti-regression alliance is over how that should be done. However late, we now have a multiparty interim government in place, it is time for all political forces, underground and in Ratna Park, to look strategically to the future and help put the genie back into the bottle. Unlike Iraq, our governing council is made up mostly of once-elected politicians. They have to be given the chance to return the country from the bullet to the ballot.