Afghanistan: Why This Is the Most Important Year of the War in Afghanistan --- This final year of the war in Afghanistan will be the most crucial. A bilateral security agreement between Washington and Kabul needs to be reached to allow some U.S. and NATO troops to stay behind, training the Afghan army and police and conducting targeted counterterrorism operations. --- “Our war may be ending, but the war in Afghanistan is only changing,” Matt Sherman, a political advisor to ISAF Joint Command, told Defense One, in a telephone interview from Kabul. --- Signing a bilateral security agreement is priority number one right now. The sense is that Karzai needs to ink a deal before he leaves office because the new president isn’t going to want his first act in office to be an agreement that cedes his nation’s sovereignty. Also, the political machine moves slow in Afghanistan -- after a likely runoff election, it would be next fall before a new leader is in place. --- Although the war rarely makes the front page or the evening news anymore, the fighting is not over. Four U.S. soldiers were killed this weekend by an IED in Kandahar. There are certainly fewer U.S. and NATO casualties now that they’ve stepped back to let the Afghans take the lead, but that doesn’t mean the fighting has abated -- it just means that the Afghans are taking the hit now with as many as 100 Afghan soldiers and police killed each week.