Taliban fighters marked five years since the American withdrawal and their return to power with celebrations through Kabul on Saturday, driving vehicles draped in the movement's flags. The date is the anniversary the movement chooses to observe, and the display was the one it has held each year since.
The measure that matters is not the parade. Afghan women remain excluded from public life. That has been the constant across five years of the movement seeking recognition, and it is the reason recognition has largely not come.
For an Israeli reader the interest is in what a withdrawal looks like at a distance of five years. The argument made in 2021 was that a government left behind would hold. It did not, and what replaced it has spent half a decade being governed by whoever holds the ground rather than by whoever signed the agreement.
That lesson has been invoked repeatedly in Israeli debate about arrangements in Gaza and in southern Lebanon, where withdrawal is being tied to verification by outside parties. Kabul is the case everyone cites and few describe precisely: not a deal that was broken, but one whose guarantors left.