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On looks alone, Afghanistan has not changed much over the past few years.
Military outposts still dot the country, and the landscape, marked by sweeping deserts and towering mountains, is as picturesque as ever.
But for Fort Bragg soldiers in Afghanistan — many of whom are combat-tested veterans — the country has changed.
In simple terms: It’s not the same country where they deployed in years past.
Afghanistan is still a war zone. But it is not the war it was, even for those who were there as recently as two years ago.
President Obama last week laid out the end of the 13-year war in Afghanistan. But before then, Fort Bragg soldiers serving in Afghanistan told The Fayetteville Observer the war is already a far cry from what they had known.
U.S. troops and their coalition partners are largely on the sidelines now as Afghan National Security Forces do the heavy lifting in the fight against the Taliban and insurgents.
Afghan soldiers are now truly in the lead, officials said, planning and executing their own operations.
It was an unexpected turn of events for Fort Bragg soldiers, many of whom anticipated not just a fight — but potentially one of the most dynamic and difficult years of the war.
“It will require leaders at the top of their game,” Maj. Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, told deploying paratroopers earlier this year. “It’s not going to be like any past deployment.”
Several thousand Fort Bragg troops are estimated to be in Afghanistan, including about 3,000 from the 82nd Airborne Division. They make up a sizeable portion of the roughly 32,000 U.S. troops still there.
By year’s end, fewer than 10,000 American troops will remain in the country, according to Obama. And that number would be cut in half by the end of 2015 and continue to shrink until, by 2016, only a small contingent of troops will remain at the U.S. Embassy and as part of a security assistance office.
In the meantime, Fort Bragg soldiers are playing key roles as forces prepare for the transition from Operation Enduring Freedom to Operation Resolute Support, a change in mission that will mark the end of combat operations.