NATO officially "ends" the war in Afghanistan, but troops remain. Yahoo/AFP

International troops in a flag lowering ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan.

After 13 years of war, NATO officially ends their involvement in the Afghanistan conflict. Yahoo/AFP. A secret ceremony heralded the event, showing that even though the war is officially over, security threats remain. 12,500 international troops will remain in Afghanistan for 2015 but their mission is no longer combat. Instead they will train and support Afghan troops. At its peak, 135,000 NATO and NATO aligned  troops, mostly from America but also from 49 other countries, were involved in the war. Since 2001 3,485 NATO troops have died in the war. The battle for Afghanistan is far from over though. 350,000 Afghan troops are still fighting against a resurgent Taliban, with more Afghan troops and civilians dying then at any other point of the war. Fears of a Iraq style collapse, and continued problems with corruption in the Afghan government mean that the war may not be over just yet. 

My Comment:

Much like the end of the Vietnam war this changes very little. Unlike the Vietnam War, thousands of troops will still be at risk in Afghanistan. This isn't the end of the war by any means. People will still die and some of those people will be Americans. The Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies have given no sign of surrendering. Afghanistan has not know peace for as long as I have been alive, and though the factions have changed the violence remains the same. 

As for the war itself one has to ask "was it worth it?" I don't even know. Destroying Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was a noble and correct goal, but unfortunately we got sucked into nation building again. That never seems to work out well and after our initial successes we lost so many lives and treasure fighting a battle we never seemed to be committed to winning. If the goal was to destroy Al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization then we succeeded. If the goal was to make Afghanistan into a functioning democracy with enough power to ensure that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban never come back then we failed and failed badly. 

It's amazing to me how little coverage that this story got. I know that there were other big stories today but you would think that the end of America's longest war would get more attention. It's possible that everyone knows that this isn't the end of anything. If that's true then it means that people don't have a lot of respect for what the government tells us about the war. Still, even though Obama and the government have lost much of their credibility, you would think it would be easier to find stories about this. Some sites have this on their front page but others have the story buried. None of them had it as the top story. The combat history of the U.S. military in Afghanistan ended with a whimper instead of a bang...