As the Taliban celebrated the first anniversary of their capture of Kabul, their supporters paid tribute to the suicide bombers on Twitter, using the hashtag "Seekers of Martyrdom" and posting dozens of videos of the attacks and explosions.
"We love to die in the way of Allah as much as you love your life," wrote pro-Taliban user Ajmal Mansur, "We did not sacrifice ourselves only for the establishment of the Ismaili government, but we are always ready to preserve it."
For nearly 20 years, the United States, Britain and their NATO allies have sent troops and over a trillion dollars to Afghanistan, only to have the security structures they built collapse overnight.
The price has been paid by ordinary Afghans, whose country has changed beyond recognition during the NATO presence, and now faces a completely different future.
The lessons of last year's defeat, however, extend beyond Afghanistan. Occasional discussions of "lessons learned" aside, the national security establishment in Washington and its allies has shifted sharply, spurred by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions over Taiwan, which China claims belongs to it. At the June summit in Madrid, NATO leaders reiterated their commitment to the defense of the eastern members with a dramatic increase in military presence along the borders with Russia and Belarus, and US President Joe Biden said that Article 5 of the Alliance on self-defense is a "sacred obligation" - but with a slight reference to her longest war just ended.
Former US defense official Anthony Cordsman said in a report this month that the US strategy for Afghanistan was conceived in a flurry of emotions after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and never grew into something achievable.
Last year's events in Kabul reflected these larger, more recent conflicts.
China has repeatedly warned Taiwan that it will learn from them that they, like Afghanistan, will be abandoned.
Russia pushed a similar narrative before moving into Ukraine - as US intelligence agencies issued similar warnings of imminent collapse and Western governments again rushed to evacuate their embassies.
Such scenes have provided Beijing and Moscow with a powerful narrative - that what has been happening for two decades and then again last summer in Afghanistan points to a deep-rooted and catastrophic weakness of Western democracies, combined with an unwillingness to face facts and leaving allies in the lurch.
Last Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin urged the United States to learn from "failures" in Afghanistan, while Russia welcomed an Afghan trade delegation to Moscow.
Neither China nor Russia has yet recognized the Islamist group as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. However, while both countries unequivocally celebrate the defeat of the West, they emphasized the anniversary less aggressively than expected.
In part, the reason for this may be the complicated consequences of the conflict in Ukraine. It is difficult to assess the extent to which the events in Kabul contributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin's conviction that the Ukrainian government would fall at a similar rate. However, Ukraine's resistance has shifted expectations about the willingness of Western democracies to adapt and fight when they are truly threatened.
Former US defense official Anthony Cordsman - now chairman of strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington - said in a report this month that the US strategy for Afghanistan was conceived in a rush of emotion after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and never grew into something achievable.
Similar fears were voiced and persistently ignored during the NATO intervention, which halted major combat operations in late 2014 — and although it remained a training mission until last summer, the alliance was already shifting its focus to Russia after Putin's first escalation of the conflict with Ukraine in 2014.
Even at the height of NATO's combat missions between 2006-13, Eastern European states often said quite openly that the reason for their presence was to build good relations with allies in case the Russian threat returned.
At the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, NATO's eastern members expressed concern that the US, Britain and the Alliance could similarly slip up when it came to building a new NATO "strategic concept", particularly in terms of providing enough logistics, ammunition and command that would be ready to fight against Russian forces if necessary.
For Afghans, of course, such recognition deepens a sense of betrayal as they struggle with drought, food shortages, a financial crisis and a government not yet recognized internationally even by its closest allies in Pakistan. Both Moscow and Beijing, meanwhile, have their own concerns about Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers.
Earlier this month, a US drone strike in Kabul killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, a reminder of the US's ability to reach out to its enemies without colossally expensive military intervention — but also that it has failed to achieve its original goal of driving extremism out of Afghanistan.
In comments marking the anniversary of the fall of Kabul, the Taliban's foreign ministry reiterated its pledge that there would be no attacks from its territory on any foreign country, saying it had intercepted and stopped an attempt to fire rockets into neighboring Uzbekistan.
But Zawihiri's death, and the fact that he lived in a suburb of Kabul favored by Taliban leaders, has been repeatedly described even by self-censoring Afghan media as a "disaster" and "humiliation".
It's a reminder of a few confusing truths. Neither the US nor its allies nor the Taliban have figured out how to deal with the unexpected speed and reality of last summer. However, they will have to if they want to protect themselves from a similar brutal failure in the future.
Translation: N. Bogetić
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