The Bush School's Gregory Gause says "no one" will protect women and girls at risk in the region.
By Lesley Henton, Texas A&M University Division of Marketing & Communications
(TODAY.TAMU) After more than 20 years and billions of dollars of support from the United States, the Afghan national security forces have collapsed to Taliban fighters just days after President Joe Biden withdrew troops.
Texas A&M Today spoke with Gregory Gause, professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, about the collapse of the Afghanistan government to the Taliban. Gause is an expert on the international politics of the Middle East.
The U.S. trained and equipped 300,000 Afghan soldiers to defend their country. Why did the country fall to the Taliban so fast?
After more than 20 years and billions of dollars of support from the United States, the Afghan national security forces have collapsed to Taliban fighters just days after President Joe Biden withdrew troops.
Texas A&M Today spoke with Gregory Gause, professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, about the collapse of the Afghanistan government to the Taliban. Gause is an expert on the international politics of the Middle East.
The U.S. trained and equipped 300,000 Afghan soldiers to defend their country. Why did the country fall to the Taliban so fast?
Armies do not collapse on an arithmetic timeline. Collapse is geometric. Once units see that other units have collapsed and that nothing is being done to try to stem the enemy tide, they tend to give up pretty quickly. A fighting retreat might be the most difficult thing an army has to do. Moreover, if the government for which the army is fighting does not have the support of the army, the incentives to fight are reduced even more. This is clearly the case in Afghanistan.
Is this the same Taliban as 20 years ago?
This is the big question. All we can do now is speculate; the tests of Taliban intentions will come very shortly. It is possible that the leadership will be less likely to harbor jihadi Islamist groups with international goals, like al-Qaeda, given the experience of 2001 (the U.S invasion to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan). However, we do not know that with any certainty. Likewise, we have no idea if the Taliban leadership has drawn any lessons from its previous experience regarding the enforcement of their extremely strict notions of Islamic law on social issues. They ruled the country from 1996 until our invasion in 2001, and I think that they will be as powerful now as they were then.
What is going to happen to the women and girls of the region? Who will help them?
We do not know, but we can be certain that the social gains for women and girls in major Afghan cities will be reversed. How much they will be reversed remains to be seen. Who will help them? No one.
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