SUPPORT ETHIOPIA INSIGHT .wpedon-container .wpedon-select, .wpedon-container .wpedon-input { width: 200px; min-width: 200px; max-width: 200px; } Why Ethiopia’s emerging anti-Abiy alignment cannot defer what comes nextThere is an emerging logic behind the unusual constellation of forces now associated with the name Tsmido. Political and armed movements that disagree profoundly about Ethiopia’s history, constitutional structure, territorial claims, and perhaps even its future as a single political community appear willing to explore cooperation around one immediate objective: weakening or removing the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Recent reporting has linked discussions involving the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Fano, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), and other opposition actors, while Eritrea has reportedly supported some Ethiopian armed groups and facilitated contacts among forces opposed to Addis Ababa.There is little evidence that these actors are converging ideologically. Their understandings of Ethiopian sovereignty, federalism, self-determination, territory, and national identity remain sharply divergent. What appears to hold the emerging alignment together is a common adversary. That may be sufficient for tactical or even military cooperation. It is far less obviously sufficient for constructing a political future.The deeper problem is not simply that Tsmido has failed to articulate what comes after Abiy. It may be structurally unable to do so. The alignment appears possible precisely because its participants can temporarily bracket the questions that divide them most sharply. They can agree on whom they oppose more readily than they can agree on what Ethiopia should become. Requiring agreement on those questions before acting together might make the coalition itself impossible to sustain.This is where the idea of trial and error becomes useful. Trial and error is rational under conditions of incomplete knowledge only when the possible error is tolerable. In the Ethiopian context, the trial is clear enough: combine otherwise incompatible forces, alter the balance of power, weaken the federal government, and defer the political settlement until afterward. The possible error is far more consequential: severe weakening or collapse of federal authority, competing armed movements asserting legitimacy, renewed territorial wars, expanded foreign intervention, and perhaps fragmentation of the state itself.The danger is compounded because the possible error does not carry the same consequences for every participant. For some actors, fragmentation would be catastrophic. For others, a weakened Ethiopian center could create strategic opportunities. The coalition may therefore be participating in the same experiment while accepting very different consequences if the experiment goes wrong.Different StakesTigrayan and Amhara actors would have to confront competing territorial claims. Oromo nationalist forces would have to clarify the political meaning and limits of self-determination. Fano would have to determine what guarantees it requires concerning Ethiopia’s territorial integrity and continued cohesion. The participants would need a common position on the federal system, transitional authority in Addis Ababa, control of the national army, and the status of armed movements after victory.These matters go to the core political identities of the prospective participants and cannot easily be resolved through ambiguity. A meaningful compromise for one actor may require another to surrender a position it considers fundamental. This creates the central paradox of Tsmido. The coalition requires some conception of a post-Abiy order if its military cooperation is to possess coherent political meaning. Yet negotiating such an order in advance may expose contradictions so fundamental that the coalition cannot survive the negotiation. The absence of a post-Abiy plan may therefore be more than an oversight. It may be one of the conditions that makes the alliance possible.The strategy is consequently more problematic than simply “fight first and negotiate later.” It may operate according to a harsher logic: cooperate now because negotiating the future now could demonstrate that continued cooperation is impossible. If so, postponement is not merely a temporary weakness. It is part of the coalition’s organizing logic.War’s LogicThere is an even deeper difficulty with allowing war to resolve these uncertainties. One of the most influential explanations for why rational actors nevertheless go to war begins with factual uncertainty. If adversaries knew with reasonable certainty how a war would end, they would ordinarily have an incentive to negotiate around the expected outcome rather than incur enormous costs only to arrive at substantially the same distribution of power afterward. Wars occur in part because each side acts on assumptions about relative military strength, political resolve, endurance, and the reliability of allies. Put simply, wars are often fought because the parties do not actually know who will win.If the eventual loser knew beforehand that it would lose, rational leadership would generally prefer a negotiated settlement reflecting that reality to reaching essentially the same result after losing thousands of people and devastating the country. War can thus become a brutal mechanism for discovering facts that politics failed to establish beforehand: who is stronger, whose forces will hold, which alliances are reliable, whose population can endure longer, and which leadership has fundamentally miscalculated.The difficulty is that those propositions are tested on human beings. Every actor considering another Ethiopian war is making assumptions. The federal government makes assumptions about its military superiority and political endurance. Fano makes assumptions about its ability to withstand federal pressure and expand its influence. Tigrayan forces make assumptions about the military and political balance surrounding Tigray. The OLA makes assumptions about the resilience and potential of its movement. Eritrea makes assumptions about how far Ethiopian instability can proceed without threatening its own security. Tsmido adds another assumption: that movements pursuing profoundly different political objectives can cooperate long enough to weaken the existing order without their contradictions destroying either the alliance or the country they hope to inherit.Some of those assumptions will inevitably be wrong. The consequences, however, are rarely borne primarily by the political leaders who made them. They are borne by the young people sent to fight, civilians living where armies move, families displaced when territory changes hands, and communities left with the social and economic consequences.Ethiopia has only recently experienced this on a devastating scale. The 2020–22 Tigray war produced immense mortality, displacement, destruction, and trauma. That experience should have altered the burden of proof for everyone contemplating another military solution. Military confidence is not enough. Political leaders must also account for the degree of uncertainty underlying their assumptions and for the consequences if those assumptions prove wrong.Uneven RiskTsmido is conducting two experiments at once. The first is military: whether these forces can cooperate sufficiently to defeat or fundamentally weaken the existing government. The second is political: whether the same forces, after success, can construct an Ethiopian order that all are prepared to accept. The first determines the distribution of power. The second determines what Ethiopia becomes. Human lives are the cost of conducting both.More troubling still, the first experiment may become the means of generating the information necessary to resolve the second. If the participants cannot agree beforehand on the post-Abiy balance of power, conflict itself may determine who emerges strongest, who controls which territory, which external relationships survive, and consequently who possesses the greatest capacity to shape the settlement afterward.War would then perform two functions. It would seek to defeat the government while simultaneously establishing the internal hierarchy of the coalition.That possibility makes the human cost still more difficult to justify. Before asking young Ethiopians to fight, political leaders should be capable of explaining what political order those young people are being asked to risk their lives to create, rather than merely identifying the government they are being asked to fight. If Ethiopia’s political future is to be determined only after the battlefield reveals which participant is strongest, human lives are effectively being used to produce political information.The risks created by this experiment are also distributed unevenly. For Tigrayan political forces, the present order leaves significant grievances unresolved, particularly concerning territory and displacement. A severely weakened federal center could increase bargaining power, widen regional autonomy, or reopen political possibilities presently constrained by federal authority. This does not mean that fragmentation is the TPLF’s objective. It means only that the weakening of the center may not represent the worst conceivable outcome for every political current within Tigray.A similar asymmetry exists in Oromo politics. Oromo liberation movements have historically emphasized self-determination and have contained currents ranging from expanded autonomy within Ethiopia to independence. A weakened federal center could produce grave instability in Oromia, but it might also enlarge the political space within which demands for self-government could be pursued. Again, the point is not that fragmentation is necessarily the OLA’s objective. It is that even a failed experiment may leave Oromo nationalist forces with political possibilities that remain meaningful within their own ideological background.Eritrea’s calculation is different again. Eritrea is not an Ethiopian political movement but a sovereign state pursuing what it understands to be its own national interest. It would be too sweeping to claim that Eritrea seeks Ethiopia’s fragmentation, and no such proposition is necessary to the argument. A unified and militarily powerful Ethiopia presents one strategic environment for Asmara; an Ethiopia absorbed by internal conflict presents another. Fragmentation would carry obvious dangers for Eritrea, but a weakened Ethiopian center would also possess less capacity to project power toward Eritrea or the Red Sea.Fano’s DilemmaThis asymmetry makes Fano the most awkwardly positioned participant in the emerging alignment. Fano is itself not ideologically uniform. It contains strong Amhara nationalist currents focused on security, representation, political power, and disputed territories, alongside currents rooted in an Ethiopianist tradition that regards preservation of Ethiopia as a central political objective. These tendencies differ substantially, but neither has an obvious strategic interest in uncontrolled fragmentation of the Ethiopian state.For the Ethiopianist current, fragmentation would defeat the political objective itself. For more explicitly Amhara-centered forces, the calculation remains scarcely less difficult. Amhara communities extend far beyond the borders of the Amhara region, Amhara political and economic life is deeply embedded in Ethiopia as a whole, and the region is geographically situated among several competing centers of armed power. A weakened or collapsed center does not automatically translate into greater Amhara security.The strategic landscape of the morning after should therefore concern Fano with particular urgency. To the north would remain organized Tigrayan forces and unresolved territorial disputes over areas claimed by Amhara actors. Beyond Tigray lies Eritrea, pursuing interests of its own. To the south lies Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region and a major center of demographic and political power. None of these structural realities disappears with Abiy Ahmed. His removal would not remove Oromo political power, resolve Welkait, eliminate Tigrayan nationalism, permanently align Eritrean interests with Amhara interests, or guarantee that Fano would emerge as the strongest force shaping the succeeding order.Fano could consequently contribute to dismantling the center only to discover that it had weakened the very political structure within which its own security and political future must ultimately be negotiated. Other participants may possess conceivable strategic advantages in a weakened center: greater autonomy, enhanced bargaining power, wider possibilities for self-determination, or a more favorable regional balance. The comparable advantage for Fano is far less apparent.This is precisely why Tsmido may be unable to articulate a post-Abiy settlement. Resolving Welkait in advance could threaten cooperation between Tigrayan and Amhara forces. An unequivocal commitment to Ethiopia’s territorial integrity could conflict with political currents that preserve separation as a legitimate exercise of self-determination. Agreement on authority in Addis Ababa would expose competing conceptions of national legitimacy. A commitment by Eritrea to the emergence of a strong and territorially consolidated Ethiopian state could conflict with calculations of Eritrean national interest. The coalition therefore functions more easily while these matters remain unresolved.What appears to be political ambiguity may thus be structural necessity. Tsmido can more readily agree on the government it seeks to oppose than on the state it proposes to construct. Merely demanding a detailed post-Abiy plan therefore understates the problem. The obstacle may not be a shortage of political imagination or drafting capacity. A serious plan would require agreement on precisely those subjects on which the prospective partners possess the least room for compromise. The fundamental difficulty is that Tsmido may be unable to define what comes next without simultaneously calling its own viability into question.Bearable ErrorNone of this means that Fano should simply disarm or accept the political status quo. Nor does the argument require support for the Prosperity Party. The Abiy government bears responsibility for its own choices and confronts serious political failures, including continued conflict in Amhara and Oromia, unresolved consequences of the Tigray war, contested political space, and deteriorating relations with Eritrea. The narrower issue is whether dismantling the existing center without first establishing a viable replacement advances the political objectives of those contemplating that course.The larger lesson is that Ethiopia does not suffer from a shortage of organizations willing to test political assumptions on the battlefield. It suffers from a shortage of political settlements capable of making those experiments unnecessary. The actors change sides, but the method remains familiar: identify the immediate enemy, construct the alliance necessary to confront it, postpone the contradictions, and address them after victory. That is precisely the historical cycle Ethiopia should be trying to escape.Trial and error is useful only when the error can be borne. Experimentation is rational where failure is survivable, its consequences can be corrected, and the cost of being wrong does not overwhelm the value of what is being tested. It becomes profoundly irrational where the possible error is catastrophic or irreversible, particularly when the principal cost is imposed on people who did not make the decision.That is the central problem with Tsmido. The possible error is not merely that the coalition fails to remove Abiy Ahmed. The more consequential error is that it succeeds in weakening the Ethiopian center without producing an agreed political order capable of replacing it. The result could be renewed territorial conflict, competing armed authorities, deeper fragmentation, and another immense loss of Ethiopian lives. Recent history provides little basis for treating those possibilities as remote.For Fano, this asymmetry should be central to the calculation. Its prospective partners will understandably pursue their own interests: Tigrayan actors those of Tigray as they understand them, Oromo actors their own political objectives, and Eritrea its national interest. Their interests may overlap with Fano’s for purposes of confronting a common adversary without remaining aligned once that adversary disappears.Fano must therefore assess the experiment principally by reference to the error it may ultimately have to bear. If that error is the weakening or fragmentation of the Ethiopian state, if the resulting order leaves Amhara interests more exposed rather than more secure, and if discovering whether the underlying assumptions were correct requires the sacrifice of another generation of young people, then the decisive consideration is not simply the apparent opportunity presented by the coalition. It is whether the possible error is bearable. If it is not, trial and error is simply the wrong method. .wpedon-container .wpedon-select, .wpedon-container .wpedon-input { width: 200px; min-width: 200px; max-width: 200px; } Query or correction? Email us window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function(){if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") {sfsi_widget_set();}}); While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.Main photo: Amhara Fano National Movement leader Zemene Kassie [center] allegedly meets Colonel Ibrahim Usman Aliyu, chairman of the Afar insurgent group Ugugumo [left], in Eritrea. August 2026. Source: social media.Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.The post The Error in Tsmido’s Trial and Error appeared first on Ethiopia Insight.