Even in that article, it says that Al'Qaida started that war. We never went to war with Afghanistan. Afghanistan as a state arguably never existed. The people of Afghanistan are tribal and only had warlords and religious leaders as institutions. We occupied territory to root out a terrorist organization, which was successful. The Taliban tried to harbor said terrorists, but our beef was never with them. Around 2010, our mission statement shifted from destroying Al'Qaida to leaving Afghanistan a better place than we left it, which came in the form of hospitals and schools. Then in 2012 to 2014 that expanded again to leaving them a functional government. The last bit is where we failed. But it was not a disaster for us, and the 2nd bit of whether or not they are better off from the 1990s is debatable, but mostly successful.

The citation is that I am a SME on avionics. All the GPS modules I have worked on have potential for 24 connections(channels) at a time, typically you will never see more than 18 at any one time. It is a one way connection yes, and they use something similar to frequency hop to effectively encrypt all but 3 or 4 for civilian use.

Edit: for further clarification, they have to recieve a steady signal before they use pings from any particular satellite. That confirmation process is what I am referring to as connecting.

Civilian GPS has limited number of satellites they are authorized to connect to at a time. Military GPS can connect up to 24 satellites at a time for an accuracy better than 10cm with better response time. Still cool to see alternatives to DoD dependent technology.