Five Years After Chaotic Pullout, Taliban Flaunts Power With Chilling All-Male Parade

Saturday marked five grim years since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and the ruling Taliban chose to commemorate the anniversary in the starkest way possible — with sprawling, all-male military parades rolling through the streets of Kabul. Armed fighters stood atop trucks and armored vehicles, waving white flags emblazoned with the Taliban's insignia as crowds of supporters looked on, a triumphant display from a regime that seized total control of the country in the chaotic final days of the American pullout. The images offered a jarring split-screen with archival footage from five years ago, when U.S. military aircraft roared overhead and desperate crowds swarmed the tarmac at Kabul airport in one of the most chaotic evacuations in modern American history.

The anniversary serves as a sobering reminder of how quickly the country's fate was sealed once American forces departed. Within days of the withdrawal's completion, the Taliban swept into Kabul virtually unopposed, toppling a government the United States had spent two decades and trillions of dollars trying to build. Five years on, the movement's grip on power appears firmly entrenched, and Saturday's parade was clearly designed to project strength and permanence — armed convoys, chanting supporters, and a total absence of women in a display that underscored just how completely the country's hard-won freedoms have been rolled back since the last American troops left its soil.

For many Americans, the anniversary reopens a wound that has never fully healed. The withdrawal remains one of the most widely criticized foreign policy episodes in recent memory, marked by scenes of desperation at the airport, the deaths of thirteen U.S. service members in a suicide bombing, and the abandonment of American equipment that ultimately armed the very forces now parading through Kabul. As the Taliban marks half a decade in power with tanks and rifles instead of ballots and rebuilding, the anniversary stands as a stark measure of what was lost — and a pointed question about the judgment that led to it.