With Ethiopian troops deep inside western Eritrea, it would appear that Ethiopia had scored a decisive victory in the Horn of Africa. But the chances are small that the Ethiopian army will conquer Eritrea, or even consolidate its hold over much of the country, where food and water are scarce.

The conflict is often portrayed as another example of Africa's hopelessness, but this is not even an African war per se. The combatants are Semites whose languages bear similarity to Hebrew and Arabic. Indeed, it is useful to see the Horn of Africa as a fragment of the Middle East dislodged from Eurasia, where the style of warfare, with tens of thousands of casualties, is more reminiscent of, for example, the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, than of any African conflicts of the past decade. The Horn is likely to fade from the news as the war drags on, but the dispute is intractable.

And given the pattern of this 40-year-long conflict, it is possible that the Eritreans will resort to what, arguably, they are more accomplished at than any other people in the world: guerrilla warfare.

In the 1980's, I saw Eritrean guerrillas build trench warrens lined with slate and sandbags, convert cluster bomb parts into flywheels for trucks, use the tips of spent tank shells for rain gauges in their desert agricultural stations, make wash basins out of exploded MIG shells, and store blood in refrigerators powered by wind and solar energy. In a mountainside hut, I saw amputees operate an Italian-made machine that produced 10,000 sanitary napkins per hour for women guerrilla fighters at the front.

Decades of conflict in their sun-blistered moonscape of a country have raised Eritreans' resourcefulness to levels rarely seen elsewhere. While I watched guerrillas produce chloroquin tablets to fight malaria, the pharmacist in charge told me that he planned to start producing materials from which chloroquin is composed, "since we can't depend on anyone." Even with satellite photographs, in the 1980's it was difficult for Western intelligence agencies to estimate Eritrean battle loses because of the Eritreans' ability to get their dead and wounded off the field more quickly than all but the most sophisticated armies.

War has engendered a monastic approach to existence in Eritrea, where people have raised deprivation and absolute self-reliance to the status of religion, even as both Orthodox Christianity and Islam have been de-emphasized. In Eritrea, a nation of 4 million people fighting one of 61.7 million, a situation of permanent siege has led to the breakdown not only of religious barriers, but of sexual ones, too. In a society where clitoridectomy used to be common, the culture of war has liberated women. A third of Eritrean soldiers are female, and in the 1980's they accounted for 30 percent of the casualties.

Eritrea's evolved sense of equality is a paradoxical byproduct of Italian colonialism. Whatever its faults, Italian occupation was seen by Eritreans as preferable to feudalistic domination by Ethiopia. Italy had occupied Eritrea by 1899, envisioning it as a staging post for a future invasion of Ethiopia. So the Italians built a rail and road network that, by uniting the territory, facilitated the growth of Eritrean national consciousness, spanning sectarian lines. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Eritreans fought in large numbers on the Italian side.

Today, what the outside world sees as an incomprehensible war has a relentless logic to it. Ethiopia, dominated by ethnic Amharas from around the capital of Addis Ababa, has often been less a nation than an empire, with the Amharas ruling Tigreans, Oromos and others. Consolidating that empire means subjugating the Eritreans, who control access to the Red Sea, without which Ethiopia is a landlocked state.

The Italians' defeat in World War II led eventually to a United Nations mandate that made Eritrea a semi-autonomous territory of Ethiopia. But Emperor Haile Selassie never respected the autonomy agreement, and a guerrilla movement grew up in Eritrea, with war breaking out in 1961. In 1978, after the overthrow of Selassie and the consolidation of power in Ethiopia by the new Stalinist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Tigreans, too, revolted. The 1980's saw Ethiopia embroiled in war and famine. Fighting ended in the early 1990's with Mengistu's departure and the emergence of the Tigreans as the new rulers in Addis Ababa.

While the Eritreans and Tigreans were uneasy allies against Mengistu's regime in the 1980's, the Tigreans, once ensconced in the Ethiopian capital, have adopted the imperialistic legacy of their former enemies. At the moment, the rulers in Addis Ababa are trying to consolidate their empire in the Horn of Africa, much as Moscow is trying to do in Chechnya. While they seem to be winning now, history shows that there is no such thing as victory in the Horn of Africa.