RASC News Agency: The Taliban on Saturday marked the fourth anniversary of their so-called “victory,” the day many Afghanistanis remember instead as the collapse of the republic and the handing over of Afghanistan to the group through the combined betrayal of Washington and former president Ashraf Ghani. Yet unlike previous years, when Taliban leaders celebrated the 24th of Asad with parades, fireworks, and an intoxication of hollow triumphalism, this year’s commemoration unfolded in muted silence, stripped of spectacle and bombast.vIn earlier years, the group indulged in elaborate shows of force: staging military parades at Bagram Air Base, flying captured helicopters of the fallen republic over Kabul, and showering neighborhoods with pamphlets proclaiming their conquest. The imagery was calculated to present a narrative of inevitability and permanence. But this year, the Taliban avoided such grandstanding. No parades, no extravagant speeches only discreet gatherings. For a movement that once thrived on theatrical propaganda, the sudden restraint speaks volumes.
Afghanistani social media users quickly offered their interpretation: the Taliban’s silence was less a gesture of humility than an act of fear. Many pointed to the sharp warnings of U.S. President Donald Trump, who had repeatedly condemned Taliban parades using American-supplied weapons and vowed that such spectacles were intolerable. Trump had also raised alarms over reports of China’s interest in Bagram Air Base, framing the Taliban’s posturing as both reckless and unacceptable. While some analysts dismissed Trump’s remarks as theatrics, the Taliban appear to have decoded them differently reading them as veiled threats they could not afford to ignore.
This shift is telling. The group’s leaders, so often steeped in fiery anti-American slogans, now tread carefully, softening their rhetoric and toning down their theatrics. The absence of anti-American sloganeering on this anniversary reveals a growing awareness within the Taliban that their “victory” is little more than a façade. For what kind of triumph allows a movement to boast of defeating the world’s greatest power while simultaneously accepting weekly cash infusions of $42 million and $30 million in neatly packaged deliveries from international channels? The contradiction is impossible to hide. If the leadership has learned the art of calculated restraint, the same cannot be said of the rank-and-file. On the streets, Taliban foot soldiers still intoxicated by the illusion of having humbled America cling to fantasies long since punctured by reality. Videos circulated online showed motorbike convoys mocking effigies of Trump, reveling in a theater of defiance that masks their deeper vulnerability. Yet these men remain the expendable front line of a brutal machine: the cannon fodder and sacrificial pawns of a movement sustained not by genuine legitimacy but by fear, cash, and repression.
The contrast could not be clearer. Taliban leaders, increasingly cautious, bend their rhetoric in deference to global warnings; their followers, trapped in the narcotic haze of past slogans, march on in delusion. What emerges is not a portrait of a victorious regime, but one of fracture and decay an authority that fears its own shadow while its foot soldiers celebrate a mirage. Four years into Taliban rule, the truth has become undeniable: their so-called “victory” is neither conquest nor stability but a carefully staged deception. Afghanistan today is not liberated but shackled; not secure but destabilized; not triumphant but dependent. And the greatest victims of this charade are not only the Afghanistani people forced into silence and fear, but also the Taliban’s own followers the young men sent to die for a lie, trapped in the caravan of primitivism and violence that their leaders continue to disguise as destiny.
The question is no longer whether the Taliban’s myth will collapse, but when their own foot soldiers their blind and expendable vanguard will awaken from the propaganda-induced trance and realize that the only war they won was against themselves.
