Does nothing shock us anymore? It was the highest casualty on a single night during this whole mad war: 41 policemen slaughtered, nine attacking Maoists killed and three non-combatants dead. It was the largest number of Nepalis killed by other Nepalis in a 24-hour period in our nation's entire history.

How did we react? In Kathmandu our elected leaders were in their narrow corridors of power, bickering endlessly. The guardians of our human rights were busy ringing Tundikhel. The commander-in-chief was on a junket to Britain and saw no particular reason to hurry home. Some argued cautiously that getting the army to fight the insurgency would invite civil war, but many asked: aren't we already in the midst of a civil war? Coming a month after the other slaughter in the royal palace, there was a numbing sense of fatalism, an apathy and silence that came close to condoning the killings.

Elsewhere across the country, terror-tactics and intimidation magnified by media spread low-intensity panic. The Maoists, building up to a bloody week that could see the declaration of their parallel peoples' republic and regional government in the mid-west, appear to think that killing any fewer than 40 people doesn't give them the headlines anymore. So they make canon fodder out of recruits driven to police jobs out of sheer desperation.

The police, whose initial atrocities during Kilo Sierra Two in 1998-99 unleashed this savage revenge, has already lost the war physically, psychologically and morally. When bad blood flows so freely, and society is brutalised by violence and fear, it is difficult to think of solutions. Our parliamentary parties utterly failed to unite during the national calamity of the royal tragedy, they are now failing miserably to evolve a joint plan to respond to the insurgency and offer a negotiated solution. It is at times of national crisis like this that the constitutional monarch is required to use constitutional means to seek a settlement. But the king is handicapped by an image problem.

The Maoists don't even need to be brilliant military strategists when the enemy is so feckless, corrupt and self-centred that it sends under-armed, under-trained and under-motivated young men to be butchered in cold blood. We have said it many times in this space in the past year: there is no military solution to this emergency, the only solution is political. The government knows it, and deep down in their heart of hearts the Maoists leaders must know it too.