Fixed Purpose, Open Destination: Why Tigray Needs Direction Without Premature Closure

Mekhete must be anchored in Tigray’s non-negotiable national purpose and guided by clear, measurable objectives. But Tigray should not lock itself into one final political destination before the balance of power, the conduct of its partners, the viability of coexistence, and the growth of its own capacity have revealed which destination can most securely protect its people.

Over the past several weeks, as meetings have widened across Tigray and the language of መኸተ (Mekhete) has become more visible in our public conversation, one question has moved quietly to the center of everything: what, exactly, is all of this trying to achieve?

I hear the question in different registers. For some, the answer is obvious and frightening: Mekhete means another war. For others, it means the removal of Abiy Ahmed and a march to 4 Kilo. For others still, it is read as a quiet subordination to Eritrea, or as a project in which Tigray will once again supply the sacrifice while another force inherits the outcome. And for a smaller but insistent group, Mekhete is simply the old party reaching, under a new name, for the power it lost.

These readings are not entirely invented. Each is responding to something real that can be seen in the current moment. But each takes one track of Mekhete, one alliance, one possible development, and mistakes it for the destination of the whole. That is the confusion I want to address here, because I think it is doing real damage. When a people cannot agree on what its own central effort is for, it becomes easy to divide, easy to discourage, and easy to manipulate.

I want to be honest at the outset that this essay revises something in my own earlier writing, though I hope readers will see it as a refinement rather than a reversal. Over the past months I have argued repeatedly that Tigray must not move without political direction, that sacrifice detached from a defined outcome is the oldest and most expensive mistake we can make. I still believe that. What I want to add is a distinction I did not draw sharply enough before: direction is not the same thing as a fixed final destination, and to insist on the first is not to require the second.

What Mekhete is not

Let me begin by clearing away what Mekhete is not, because much of the fear and much of the division comes from collapsing the effort into one of its possible expressions.

Mekhete is not, in itself, a declaration of immediate war. When I wrote in When War Is Not an Option, What Then? that avoiding war is not itself a strategy, I was not arguing for war. I was arguing that a people cannot organize its future around the mere absence of catastrophe. Preparedness is not the same as intention. A Tigray that can defend itself is not a Tigray that has decided to attack.

Mekhete is not a march to 4 Kilo, and it is not a plan to reinstall any party at the Ethiopian center. It is not permanent friendship with Eritrea, whose forces did to Tigray what no temporary convergence of interest can ever be allowed to erase. It is not ideological unity with Fano or with the Oromo Liberation Army. And it is not the abandonment of Pretoria. As I argued in Beyond the Framework, the Agreement remains a real legal and diplomatic reference point, but it cannot be permitted to define the outer boundary of what Tigray is allowed to think, prepare, or become. To keep the framework and to prepare beyond it are not contradictory acts. They are the two halves of a single seriousness.

Above all, Mekhete is not an agreement that Tigray will carry the principal sacrifice so that someone else can capture state power. A tactical relationship is not a shared destination. A common adversary does not, by itself, create a durable alliance. I will return to this, because it is where much of the current anxiety is concentrated, and rightly so.

What Mekhete actually means

If Mekhete is not any of these narrow things, what is it?

I have tried, across several essays, to describe it in a wider way than the purely military one that dominates our conversation. In From Diffused Authority to Functional Order, I argued that what Tigray is really rebuilding is its capacity to act, and that this capacity is political, institutional, social, diplomatic, and economic long before it is a question of arms. In Beyond Two-Track Mekhete, I tried to push the idea further, toward an organized national resilience rather than a reactive posture. Mekhete, in that reading, is the system through which a vulnerable people organizes its own survival and converts that vulnerability into agency.

Said more plainly: Mekhete is the process through which unresolved injustice is turned into organized pressure, and dependency is turned into the ability to choose. This wider system includes the consolidation of legitimate authority, the preparation and organization of the public, diplomacy, legal and constitutional positioning, economic and logistical readiness, defensive and deterrent capacity, careful strategic relationships, the struggle over narrative, and negotiation backed by leverage. It also requires deliberate preparation for more than one possible future.

None of that is the same as choosing a single final destination and marching toward it. And that is exactly the point I want to develop.

Why we insisted on an end-state

It is worth being honest about why so many of us, myself included, spent the past two years insisting that Tigray must define its end-state.

The insistence came out of pain. After 2022, we watched enormous sacrifice produce an outcome that few of us would have accepted had it been named in advance. The lesson many of us drew was that movement without a defined political purpose is how a people bleeds without deciding anything. I made a version of this argument more than once, including in What Tigray Wants, where I tried to separate the formal negotiating track from the leverage track and warned that negotiation without leverage becomes accommodation, while leverage without institutional discipline becomes danger.

That argument was, I still think, correct. The earlier warning was not wrong; what would be wrong is to turn a necessary demand for political direction into a premature obligation to declare a final constitutional destination before the conditions for choosing it exist. But there is a mistake waiting on the other side of it. It is to conclude that because direction is necessary, the final constitutional destination must therefore be declared now, in advance, before we know the things that will actually determine which destination is achievable. That inference does not follow, and I want to explain why I have come to think it is not only unnecessary but dangerous.

Direction is not destination

Here is the distinction I did not draw clearly enough before. There are at least four different things being folded into the single word “objective,” and Tigray is paying for the confusion.

There is purpose, which is why Mekhete exists at all. There are immediate objectives, which are what it must secure now. There is strategy, which is how pressure is organized across the many tracks. And there is the final political end-state, the constitutional arrangement eventually chosen. Many of our disagreements are really about the fourth question, imported prematurely into the first three. When someone asks, “Is the purpose of Mekhete to remove Abiy and enter Addis Ababa?”, they have already collapsed all four into one, and the answer they fear is the answer their own question has smuggled in.

The purpose of Mekhete can be stated with complete clarity, and it does not depend on choosing a constitutional form. The purpose is to reach a condition in which Tigray is no longer territorially fragmented; in which the displaced can return safely and with enforceable guarantees; in which Tigray holds functional and legitimate authority over its own affairs; in which no outside actor can unilaterally determine Tigray’s political future through military coercion; and in which the people of Tigray can decide their next step without making that decision under occupation, siege, dependency, or the fear of annihilation.

That is a political end-condition, and it must be clear. It is not the same as a political end-state. The end-condition describes the situation Tigray must reach. The end-state describes the constitutional form Tigray eventually chooses from within that situation. The first can and should be fixed now. The second, I want to argue, should remain open a while longer, not out of indecision, but out of strategy.

The formula I would offer is this: fixed national purpose, clear strategic conditions, flexible political destination. Fixed purpose. Measurable objectives. Disciplined pathways. And a final decision that belongs, legitimately, to a Tigray strong enough to make it.

Why premature closure is dangerous

Why not simply declare the destination now and be done with the ambiguity? Because declaring a single final end-state too early would weaken us in several concrete ways, and I think we should name them honestly rather than pretend the choice is cost-free.

A premature declaration narrows our diplomatic space before we have used it. It hands our opponents a fixed target to organize against, which is a gift we have no reason to give. It can divide Tigray internally before the facts that would settle the argument are even known, turning a question of sequencing into a test of loyalty. It makes every later adjustment look like betrayal, so that leadership becomes trapped inside whatever maximal language it used at the moment of least information. And it forces today’s tactical partners to answer tomorrow’s constitutional questions before their answers can be trusted, which is the surest way to break an alliance that might otherwise have served a limited, honest purpose.

I do not want to be misread as arguing for open-endedness in general. Flexibility has its own failure mode, and it is just as real. Flexibility that is not disciplined becomes drift. It becomes improvisation without accountability, or worse, several factions quietly pursuing incompatible destinations under the same banner while telling the public nothing. A leadership that will not tell its people what present sacrifice is meant to achieve is not being strategically patient. It is being unaccountable. The discipline I am describing is meant precisely to prevent that. The public does not need to be promised a constitutional destination that conditions may later invalidate; it does need to know the present objectives, the red lines, the expected costs, the standards by which progress will be judged, and the institution that will authorize any change in direction.

Alliances are instruments, not destinations

Nowhere is the confusion between direction and destination more consequential than in the argument now unfolding about Tigray’s alliances.

There is a criticism circulating, sometimes dismissive in tone, that the forces we speak of as partners, the OLA, Fano, and various others opposed to the government in Addis Ababa, are not reliable at all; that they expect Tigrayans to carry the decisive cost while preserving themselves; that talk of allies “at the gates of Addis Ababa” is closer to propaganda than to operational reality. The language is often too sweeping, and it sometimes shades into a general defeatism I do not share. But the core warning is sound, and I would rather take it seriously than wave it away: a shared enemy does not create a dependable friend.

The correct response is not to idealize these relationships, and it is certainly not to romanticize them. It is to hold each one to a disciplined test. What independent pressure can this partner actually generate? What has it, concretely, already delivered? What cost is it willing to carry itself? What does it expect from us in return? Where do our objectives genuinely converge, and, more importantly, where will they diverge once the immediate common adversary is weakened? What happens to Tigray’s own claims, above all in Western Tigray, on the day the enemy that currently unites everyone is no longer there to unite them?

This is why the case of Fano deserves particular honesty. Cooperation against the government in Addis Ababa does not resolve the question of Western Tigray. It may temporarily contain that contradiction, but it cannot remove it. The contradiction waits, and it may return more dangerous than before, precisely because the war that contained it will have raised the stakes on both sides. To pretend otherwise, for the sake of alliance morale, would be to repeat the exact error I warned against in When ጽምዶ Becomes Amnesia: allowing a tactical relationship to quietly erase a strategic memory.

The healthier way to think about all of this, I have argued before in From Siege to Strategy and The Architecture of Patience, is that alliances are instruments, not destinations, and that Tigray must own the timing and the terms of every alignment rather than be swept into someone else’s schedule. Mekhete does not require permanent friendship. It requires a sober reading of converging interests, limited and reciprocal commitments, measurable contribution, and, at every point, political ownership by Tigray. An alliance is to be judged by whether it changes the balance of coercion in Tigray’s favor, not by whether it produces a permanent coalition or a shared flag. To call an alliance instrumental does not mean that it must be shallow or insincere. It means that even serious cooperation must remain bounded by defined objectives, reciprocal obligations, independent capacity, and an understood point of reassessment.

There are also emerging indications that Tigray’s strategic environment is no longer confined to the central theatre. Developments in the western and northern theatres may be creating additional forms of depth and pressure, and I have discussed that broader logic in Tigray Must Think North and in The Horn Is Being Rearranged.

But the specific claims now circulating about forces, coordination, and operations remain unevenly verified. They should be treated as signals to assess, not as facts on which to build strategy.

The general point survives the uncertainty: Tigray may be developing more than one vector of pressure, and that changes what is possible. It does not tell us which final destination to choose.

The confusion about 4 Kilo

Much of the current anxiety reduces, in the end, to a single assumption: that Mekhete is ultimately about removing Abiy Ahmed and capturing 4 Kilo, and that Tigray is therefore preparing to spend itself so that Fano, or the OLA, or someone else, can sit where he sits.

I understand the fear, and I do not think it is foolish. But I think it rests on a mistaken premise. Pressure against the government in Addis Ababa, and even convergence with actors who do want to capture the center, does not mean that Tigray must define its own success as taking that center. Those are different objectives, and the difference matters enormously.

Tigray’s objective may instead be to generate enough converging pressure to secure the things that actually protect its people: the restoration of its territory, the return of the displaced, the enforceable implementation of obligations already agreed, the removal of the federal government’s coercive economic and political grip, the restoration of Tigray’s own constitutional authority, real security guarantees, and, above all, the freedom to decide its next political step from a position of strength rather than supplication. Tigray can influence the Ethiopian center profoundly without ever making possession of that center its own goal. The capture of 4 Kilo may well be another actor’s end-state. It does not automatically become ours, and we should stop speaking as though it must.

A decision architecture, not a predetermined destination

If the final destination is to remain open for now, then something must take its place, or the openness really will become the drift I warned against. What takes its place is not a single announced end-state but a decision architecture: a disciplined structure for how the choice will eventually be made, and by whom.

That architecture has parts that can be named now, even while the destination stays open. It includes the fixed national objectives and the red lines I will come to in a moment, along with a ranking of strategic priorities, so that when they conflict, as they will, we know which yields. It includes measurable indicators of success, honest enough that we cannot fool ourselves about progress. It includes periodic strategic review by legitimate institutions authorized to read the changing environment, so that assessment is a function of the whole and not the private property of a faction. And it includes public accountability, so that the people in whose name sacrifice is asked are told what it is for. The body conducting that review must itself be broadly legitimate, its indicators must be publicly known in advance, and its findings must be disclosed. Otherwise, strategic review will become only another name for decisions made inside a closed circle.

Within that structure, the questions that will actually determine the destination can be held open honestly rather than answered prematurely. Under what conditions could a genuinely reconstructed federal coexistence still protect Tigray? What further violations would prove, beyond argument, that such coexistence can no longer be trusted with Tigray’s security? What economic, diplomatic, territorial, and security capacity would Tigray need to have assembled before more fundamental alternatives become rational rather than merely desirable? Who holds the legitimate authority to make that determination, and what degree of public consent would it require? What evidence would trigger a change of direction?

For example, if territorial restoration, the return of displaced communities, and enforceable federal security guarantees remain blocked after a defined political and diplomatic period, that failure should not simply produce another extension. It should trigger a formal reassessment of whether the federal pathway remains credible. I am not proposing a deadline in this essay; I am describing how the architecture would work, so that a threshold, once reached, produces a decision rather than a delay.

These are not the questions of a people that has failed to decide. They are the questions of a people that has decided to decide well. Depending on how they are answered over time, the eventual end-state might be a genuinely reconstructed federation, a confederal or highly autonomous arrangement, a negotiated special status, a wider transformation of the Ethiopian order, or an independent Tigray. I am deliberately not endorsing one of these as the predetermined conclusion. The governing principle is not which form we prefer in the abstract. It is which form, when the moment of choice arrives, actually protects the fixed national purpose.

What must remain non-negotiable

Flexibility about the destination must not become flexibility about everything, or adaptation decays into opportunism and Mekhete loses the moral center that gives it meaning. Some things must stay fixed precisely so that the rest can move.

Tigray’s territorial integrity cannot be traded for an alliance. The displaced cannot be turned into a permanent bargaining instrument, their return endlessly deferred as a chip in someone else’s negotiation. Tigray must not become the principal sacrifice for another force’s capture of Addis Ababa. No temporary accommodation with Eritrea can erase Eritrea’s responsibility for what its forces did in Tigray. No cooperation with Fano can silently suspend the question of Western Tigray. No return to any Ethiopian arrangement is acceptable if it leaves Tigray exposed, once again, to a centrally organized war of annihilation. And the final political status of Tigray, whatever it turns out to be, must rest on the legitimate consent of the people of Tigray, and not on the convenience of any leadership or the momentum of any alliance.

I would add one more, because it speaks to a fear that runs beneath much of our current argument. Mekhete must never become a mechanism through which any party substitutes its own organizational survival for the survival of the nation. The strongest version of the criticism is not that every act of organization is a plot. It is that an established party may use the language of national survival to protect its own authority from accountability and renewal. That risk is real and must be guarded against. But it does not follow that every organizational capacity associated with that party should therefore be dismantled. Criticism of leadership and rejection of the organizational and historical capacity that still exists in Tigray are two different things. A serious reconstruction must preserve useful national instruments while subjecting them to legitimacy, accountability, and renewal. These red lines are decision constraints. They are not a predetermined end-state. They mark the ground on which any acceptable destination must be built, without dictating which destination it will be.

Strategic optionality as restored agency

There is a deeper reason to keep the destination open, and it has to do with the difference between weakness and strength.

A weak actor is usually forced to announce what it wants and then plead for it. It declares its destination at the moment of least leverage, and then spends years asking others to grant it. An actor that is rebuilding its strength can do something different. It can work first to alter the environment, observe which possibilities become genuinely viable, and commit to a final choice only when the costs, the guarantees, and the opportunities have become clear. This is not evasion. It is the ordinary discipline of anyone who negotiates from a position they are still building.

Keeping the destination open is therefore not a way of hiding from the public. It is a way of preserving more than one credible pathway until Tigray has accumulated enough power to choose one rather than merely accept whatever is left. The essential discipline, and I want to state it as plainly as I can, is this: postponing the final choice must never mean postponing preparation for every serious choice. Tigray can leave the constitutional destination open while building, in parallel, the institutional, diplomatic, economic, territorial, and security foundations that each possible pathway would require. That is not the absence of an end-state. It is strategic optionality held under a fixed national purpose.

Two sentences capture the whole of it for me. The destination should remain open only until Tigray has rebuilt the power to choose it. And: open-ended weakness is drift, but strategic optionality backed by growing capacity is agency.

Conclusion

So let me answer, as directly as I can, the question I began with.

Mekhete is not a promise that Tigray will march to 4 Kilo. It is not a promise that Tigray will remain forever inside the existing federal order. It is not a promise to Eritrea, to Fano, to the OLA, to Pretoria, or to any outside power at all. It is a promise to the people of Tigray that never again will their survival, their territory, their dignity, and their political future depend entirely on the calculations of others.

We were right to insist that Mekhete must not proceed without political direction. Sacrifice without direction is the mistake we have already paid for once. But political direction does not require us to freeze the final destination before the balance of forces, the conduct of our partners, the viability of coexistence, and the growth of our own capacity have revealed which destination can actually protect us. To keep the purpose fixed while keeping the destination open is not confusion. It is the most disciplined thing a recovering people can do.

Tigray does not need to announce its final destination before it has rebuilt the power to reach or to choose it. But it must know, clearly and publicly, what it is protecting, what it is seeking now, what it will never trade, and what conditions must exist before the final decision is made. The purpose must remain fixed. The pathways must remain disciplined. And the final destination must be chosen by a Tigray strong enough to choose freely.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！