When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal 30 years ago, I felt a small earthquake. It was just a few small tremors in the middle of the night, but it was big enough to wake me up.

The next morning, I asked my “Amma” — meaning “Mother,” the matriarch of my host family — what had happened. “There’s a fish underneath the ground,” she said, “and it flops around when we do something wrong.”

I thought of her comment as I read about Saturday’s massive earthquake in Nepal, which has already claimed more than 4,000 lives.

Of course, none of the victims deserved their horrendous fate. But there really is something wrong in Nepal, and it helps explain the devastation that the country is experiencing. It’s called politics.

Simply put, Nepal’s leaders have been too busy battling each other to establish a workable state. ...