"Because counterinsurgency requires the categorisation of population into combatants and non-combatants, and because the easiest way to quickly identify and categorise populations as high-risk combatants or low-risk civilians is by gender, the combatant/non-combatant distinction becomes fully gendered, where the all-encompassing suspicion against all men is operationalised into specific actions (to be discussed below), while women are afforded the status of being ‘naïve’ objects of ‘protection’, pacification, and humanitarian salvage. We already know that this gendering produces a ‘masculinist logic of protection’,36 and that the object of military intervention, humanitarian aid, and primary focus of concern in a post-conflict environment becomes an undifferentiated ‘womenandchildren’. What counterinsurgency does is to transform the ‘womenandchildren’ into either actors considered by the counterinsurgent to be complicit with the combatants, a terrain upon whom the counterinsurgency’s social engineering experiments can be performed, or, increasingly, as hostages and literal or symbolic message-bearers for the work of counterinsurgency."

Read the second link. The women don't want us there, they're not damsels in distress. Its a lie we tell them and ourselves just as western empire has for centuries. We aren't and never where white knights rescuing brown women from their savage men.