The United States, it appears this week, spent 20 years, a trillion dollars and the lives of over 2,300 of its soldiers, including 38 Coloradans, in a lost cause.

With extraordinary swiftness, the Taliban have retaken Afghanistan in the last month now that the U.S. has pulled out most of our remaining troops. Our efforts at the nation and democracy building, at secularizing and modernizing a medieval land and rooting out the nests of terrorist threats to our country, have failed.

Or have they completely?

We’re still working our way through the initial shock of seeing city after city fall to the once bloodthirsty Taliban, and our necessary anger that once again, our generals and politicians have misled us about the effectiveness and successes of our war-making abilities. Once we get past these initial stages of shock and anger and guilt, though, I wonder if we’ll come to see that some of the seeds of liberal values and democracy planted over 20 years have sprouted into stalks too rooted to chop down.

Granted this hope may be naïve. But a wise friend of mine who has spent much time in that part of the world thinks the rights won by women, especially, aren’t going away. He points out that Taliban soldiers have sisters, daughters and mothers who have tasted some of those freedoms Americans brought and may not be so willing to let their men undo them.

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In the two decades after the U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban, the United States invested more than $780 million to encourage women’s rights — opening schools, sending women to college, training women as police offers and soldiers. Girls and women have held political office and even competed in the Olympics.

By 2020, about a quarter of Afghan members of parliament were women.

About 40 percent of students in Afghanistan were female in 2020, according to USAID figures.

The last time the Taliban controlled the country, from 1996 to 2001, women were forced to wear full-body burqas and those who went unaccompanied in public places faced beatings. Schools for girls were all shuttered.

This time around, the Taliban have tried to strike a more conciliatory tone. “We assure the international community that there will be no discrimination against women, but, of course, within the frameworks we have,” spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said at a news conference in Kabul on Tuesday.

The Taliban have encouraged women to return to work and have allowed girls to return to school. A female news anchor interviewed a Taliban official Monday in a TV studio.

A group of women wearing Islamic headscarves demonstrated briefly in Kabul, unmolested, holding signs demanding the Taliban not “eliminate women” from public life.

“The Islamic Emirate doesn’t want women to be victims,” Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, was quoted as saying by The Associated Press, using the militants’ name for Afghanistan. “They should be in the government structure according to Shariah law.”

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Make no mistake, women in Afghanistan are deeply fearful of a return to a terror-filled, repressive past. And the real test of whether the Taliban has transformed will be in the hinterlands, away from the cameras and lights of the international press. In recent months, some women have been flogged by Taliban fighters in rural areas for having their faces uncovered. In some areas of Afghanistan, women have been told not to leave home without being accompanied by a male relative, and girls’ schools have been closed again. But those actions may be outliers not fully endorsed by Taliban leaders. 

Over the last two years, in an effort not to be branded a pariah state by the international community again, Taliban spokesmen have talked about their commitment to women’s rights, human rights, and freedom of speech “in the light of Islam.”

How far “the light of Islam” will allow the Taliban to go is the great unanswered question.

But what if Islam itself has changed? What if women in the last 20 years have already remade Islam so much that there is no going back?

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Clearly, the end of America’s presence in Afghanistan contains a lesson about the limits of the power of arms to persuade. The U.S. Army, the most powerful army in the world, wasn’t strong enough to stop the once-decimated Taliban from retaking their country.

Similarly, however, the Taliban’s guns may be no match for the tenacious strength of women newly empowered.

I pray that French author Victor Hugo was right when he said that no one, not all the armies in the world, can stop an idea whose time has come.