CNN is archiving this blog but you'll continue to find Afghanistan news, features and analysis at CNN's Global Public Square, Security Clearance and news topic page.

Thanks for reading the blog, adding your comments, submitting iReports and sharing all your views on topics that ranged from U.S. troops and battles to the life and culture of the Afghan people.

Take a look at some blog highlights below, and thanks again for being a part of the blog over the past two years.

- Whatever happened to bin Laden? (Now we know!)
- Operation Moshtarak: The battle for Marjah coverage | Behind the scenes
- U.S. bases in Afghanistan say goodbye to Whoppers, DQ
- Nic Robertson: Shelter tries to help abused child brides
- Jill Dougherty: Lapis lazuli: Afghanistan's blue treasure
- Nick Paton Walsh/Tommy Evans: Inside a firefight | Additional photos
- Michael Holmes: Reminders of a hell for 1,000 men
- 'Shaming' her in-laws costs 19 year old her nose, ears
- Ed Lavandera: A real-life band of brothers
- Viral post pits coverage of Sheen, fallen soldiers

His crime: The killing of his lover's husband.

The judge: A local warlord in Kand, Afghanistan.

The executioner: The victim's father.

A mobile phone video captured the grisly scene.

Read the full story from CNN's Nick Paton Walsh and Moni Basu

Ten years ago, as the first bombs began to fall on Afghanistan, I was almost 500 miles away with our live satellite transmission dish on the roof of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Two weeks earlier the Taliban had forced me out of the country, but before they did I managed to get to their spiritual capital Kandahar, and to our make-shift office in a dusty, drab one-storey villa.

That visit was now proving vital. My cameraman, Alfredo Delara and I set up our staff there - two Afghan brothers - with a camera and satellite phone. Their job was to be CNN's eyes and ears once we were forced out of the country.

At that time, no other TV network had a presence in Kandahar. So as the United States began its response to the 9/11 attacks on October 7, our staff were able to relay details of the bombs falling around the airport.

Later we would learn the target was the al Qaeda training camps where Osama bin Laden's fighters had infamously been recorded swinging on monkey bars and crawling through mock tunnels.

That night it was enough to know the United States had gone to war.

Read the full story from CNN's senior international correspondent Nic Robertson

The Afghan capital has experienced a number of deadly, high-profile attacks this year. A supermarket, the airport, a hospital, a police station, the Defense Ministry, the supposedly impregnable Intercontinental Hotel, the British Council and the U.S. embassy have all been targeted.

Read the full opinion from James Fergusson

But there was little observance by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, where a month earlier many participated in commemorations to mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"We really celebrated the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and we were out here in Afghanistan," Marine Corps Maj. Gen. John Toolan Jr., commanding general of ISAF troops in southern Afghanistan, told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.

"I think that to us it was a far more significant date than 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan because, really, when you look at the 10 years, you're looking at different levels of forces, different levels of attention given to Afghanistan."

The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began October 7, 2011, with an air campaign that was followed within weeks by a ground invasion. President Barack Obama has called it "the longest-running war in the nation's history".

The aim was to oust the Taliban and dismantle al Qaeda's leadership, though the leaders of both groups - Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden - managed to escape capture.

Bin Laden was killed in May during a raid by U.S. commandos on his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The whereabouts of Mullah Omar is unknown, and he has not been seen in public in years.

As the United States turned its attention toward Iraq, insurgent violence in Afghanistan flared against Afghan civilians and security forces as well as the U.S. and its coalition partners.

More than 2,700 troops from the United States and its partners have died during the 10 years of war, according to a CNN count. Of those, 1,780 were American, 382 were British and 157 were Canadian.

Since the conflict began, the number of casualties has risen by the year, with a significant jump from 2008 to 2009. At least 296 coalition troops died in 2008.

It nearly doubled in 2009 when 517 coalition troops were killed. That year, President Barack Obama authorized a surge of 33,000 U.S. forces to Afghanistan to combat the violence.

Two years later, the United States outlined its plan to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, beginning with pulling the 33,000 surge troops by the end of 2012 and the remaining 68,000 by the end of 2014.

The move was followed by withdrawal announcements by most of the NATO nations.

On Thursday, defense ministers from the 49 nations that make up the International Security Assistance Force pledged their support to Afghanistan even as they make plans to withdraw troops by 2014.

"Let there be no mistake: transition is not departure. We will not take our leave when the Afghans take the lead," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters Thursday in Brussels, Belgium.

The ministers are scheduled to meet again in May in Chicago where Rasmussen said they will "need to decide what more we will do."

While NATO has insisted that the transition of security for the country to Afghan forces is conditions-based rather than calendar-driven, the clock is ticking on the withdrawal deadline.

The planned withdrawal has raised a number of questions about the stability of Afghanistan, which has been hit by a wave of high-profile attacks in recent months that have jeopardized the peace negotiations.

Last month's turban bomb assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, revered by many as a father of the Mujahideen movement that ousted the Soviets in the 1980s, appears to have dealt the biggest blow to the peace process.

Rabbani was the chairman of President Hamid Karzai's High Council for Peace, which has been trying for a year to foster dialogue with the Taliban - a strategy that Karzai publicly abandoned following Rabbani's killing.

The war in Afghanistan, once viewed by a majority of Americans as a must, has become widely unpopular as concerns have shifted to the economy and job losses.

In a new Pew Research Center report on war and sacrifice released this week, half of post-9/11 veterans said the Afghanistan war has been worth fighting. Only 44% felt that way about Iraq, and one-third said both wars were worth the costs.

Robert Messel is among those veterans who question the war.

Messel, who was a freshman in college and a ROTC student on September 11, 2001, said he remembers thinking that the war in Afghanistan would be over before he joined the Army.

But as the war continued, Messel said he began to have mixed feelings.

"I joined to defend the country, and I feel that a lot of the things we were doing were not exactly that," he said in a CNN iReport.

"In my opinion, it basically should have been limited to what we initially were going in to do: Hunt down bin Laden and the architects of the attacks."

Messel said it is very difficult to look back objectively on the experience.

"You lost friends and made sacrifices. You don't want to ever think that everything that happened was in vain," he said.

But Asmatullah Kohistani has a different perspective on the war, which he says gave his family back their home and their livelihoods.

He was 13 when he and his family fled their home in Afghanistan's Kapisa province amid a civil war that would see the Taliban take control of the country. Driven out by bombardments and fighting, his family crossed into Pakistan, making their home in Islamabad.

Kohistani, 28, said "everything changed" after the Taliban were forced from power.

Kohistani, who worked for a U.S. business for two years upon his return to Afghanistan, founded media startup Afghan123.com last year.

"(E)veryone can have a job and go to school (now), and I can have my business," he said in a CNN iReport.

But 10 years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, many issues still plague the country.

CNN.com asked five people - either Afghans or Afghanistan experts - to explain what they think is the most important thing needed for a successful Afghanistan.

Check out what the iReporter, the professor, the non-profit researcher, the regional expert and the Afghan journalist had to say.

The war began in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, with the goal of ending al Qaeda terrorist activity.

To look back on 10 years of war, CNN asked service members, contractors and Afghans how the conflict changed their lives. We gathered 10 of those that outline 10 very different experiences in the years of war, but the contributors all have one thing in common: Their lives will never be the same.

Check out the full interactive: 10 years, 10 perspectives

If you've been involved in the war in Afghanistan, we want to hear your stories, too. Share them on CNN iReport.

In a new Pew Research Center report on war and sacrifice, half of post-9/11 veterans said the Afghanistan war has been worth fighting. Only 44% felt that way about Iraq, and one-third said both wars were worth the costs.

Some of those costs were outlined in the Pew study, which comes out as the United States marks the 10th anniversary Friday of the Afghanistan conflict, the longest-running war in the nation's history.

For instance, four of every 10 veterans reported they had difficulties adjusting back to life at home after the combat zone, and 37% said they suffered from post-traumatic stress, even though they might not have been formally diagnosed as such.

"The ambivalence that many post-9/11 veterans feel about their military mission has a parallel in the mixture of benefits and burdens they report having experienced since their return to civilian life," the report said.

Read the full story and check out the complete report from the Pew Research Center