On: Eritrean troops reportedly enter Ethiopia’s Tigray region

8 October

A border that two armies share is not a border. It is a fuse laid across dry ground.

The reports say foreign troops have crossed into Tigray. I read this and feel the old cold in the stomach: a war that was contained now has a second door, and doors once opened do not close quietly. The federal government calls the intruders allies of its enemy. The intruders call themselves nothing at all. An army that denies its own presence has already told you it intends to stay.

Consider the terrain. Two neighbours who fought beside each other three years ago now sever ties and point spears across the same valley. Each knows the other’s roads, depots, and habits. This is the worst kind of war - between commanders who have studied one another too well. There is no empty ground here; both sides hold maps of each other’s fullness. So the fighting will go to the one place neither can map: the patience of the civilians between them.

What is the load-bearing point? Not the mountains. Not the capitals. It is the belief, held in Addis Ababa and Asmara alike, that this can remain a limited affair. Every wider war in my memory began as a limited affair that one side thought it could win quickly and the other side refused to lose slowly. Break that belief and the region burns; preserve it and the incursion becomes a bargaining chip, ugly but survivable.

The wise general does not ask who will win. He asks who can afford to stop first. Neither of these governments can stop without losing face, and face is the heaviest supply to carry into winter.

I write this with no satisfaction. The map offers no good ground here - only ground where more people will die for positions that were never worth holding.

The battle avoided is the only victory that does not need a monument.