Is America's longest military engagement finally over?

IT started as a "war on terror" that originated as response to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on Sept 11, 2001, which was officially identified later as the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and has also been known as the "long war" and later bashed as the "forever wars".

The opening shot of that war was the US invasion of Afghanistan which had served as a base for the Al-Qaeda group that masterminded the 9/11 terrorist acts, and the goal was to oust from power in Kabul the forces of the Taliban, a Pashtun-led Islamist movement that had hosted Osama bin Laden and his murderous gang.

In a way, that war has never ended. What was supposed to be a short-term American-led military intervention that would result in the capture of bin Laden and his associates and bring about a regime change in Kabul was transformed into a massive military operation followed by an ambitious plan for nation- building in Afghanistan, the kind that was tried by other great powers, including the British Empire, czarist Russia, and the Soviet Union who failed eventually to impose their preferred order on Afghanistan.