KATHMANDU: In this lush Hindu kingdom tucked away in the shadow of Mt Everest, a brutal Maoist insurgency has killed more than 3,500 people. The fighting is escalating, and the casualties are mainly civilian. More than 1,700 Nepalis have been killed in the past four months alone, a greater number than in the previous six years combined.

The insurgency in Nepal is just one of three deadly conflicts in South Asia which have brewed quietly in the background of the Afghan conflict. But the lack of media attention is no indication of a lack of US involvement. In all three conflicts, which together have claimed tens of thousands of lives over the past two decades, US officials have quietly been applying pressure and support for peace talks, and, in the case of Nepal, a war against Maoist rebels.

In Sri Lanka, the US has thrown its support behind a Norwegian-brokered cease-fire that’s now in its fourth tenuous month, but the US has also sent emissaries to warn ethnic Tamil guerrillas to desist from terrorism.

In the Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, US diplomats are quietly pressuring both India and Pakistan to step back from their current war-footing, and resume talks over the Muslim-dominated state that they both claim.

In Nepal, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba arrived in Washington on Monday to finalize a $20 million US military aid package - which reportedly includes counterinsurgency training by US special forces - to help fight against Maoists.

“All these conflicts have a common feature of not being at an end,” says Kanti Bajpai, a national security analyst at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “Everyone is split and in doubt; everyone is waiting for everyone else to make the first move.”

Of all the major conflicts in South Asia, Nepal’s seems the furthest from resolution. The Maoist rebels, who declared a “People’s War” in 1996, have accelerated their 10-year plan to overthrow the current monarchy and parliamentary system and replace it with an egalitarian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To date, nearly 3,500 Nepalis have died in the past six years, the vast majority of them civilians.

Over the past five days, the poorly trained, poorly equipped Royal Nepalese Army appears to be making some successes, reportedly killing some 550 Maoists in the Maoist heartland in Western Nepal.

Today, nearly one third of all Nepali villages have no local officials to run health or education programmes; 17 out of 75 districts have lost phone service. In addition, Maoists have begun rounding up citizens who they consider to be informers and executing them.

Farther west on the Himalayan mountain chain, in the valley of Kashmir the All Parties Hurriyat Conference have pushed for separation from India. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a leading freedom fighter, recently told his followers that it was his “duty to God to end the bloodshed in Kashmir.” On the armed front, Kashmir’s top indigenous group, Hizbul Mujahideen, took Delhi by surprise on Friday by offering a cease-fire.

On paper, Sri Lanka’s cease-fire appears to be holding. On one side are ethnic Tamil guerrillas, who seek a separate nation in the north. On the other are the Sinhalese majority, who control the government.

But in the past two weeks, there has been evidence that the feared Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, have been using the cease-fire to rearm themselves.

Some experts suggest that this peace process may succeed because of the advancing age of the chief Tiger commander, Velupillai Prabhakaran. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.