When No. 2,000 fell last weekend in Afghanistan, journalists were keeping count. But is the nation keeping up?

Sunday marks the 11-year anniversary of the first American missile strikes against terrorist and Taliban targets inside Afghanistan. The U.S. military death toll has ticked ever slowly upward from the war's launch in October 2001 as a globally watched counterattack to 9/11 through the height of the Iraq War when service members in Afghanistan darkly dubbed their own battleground “Forgot-istan.”

Last Saturday, Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens, 39, was shot and killed by an Afghan National Army soldier at a highway checkpoint in Wardak Province. The Airborne Special Forces member had three children and a wife. Residents in his tiny hometown, Tolar, Texas, gathered Wednesday night on the local high school football field, burning candles in his honor.

According to The Associated Press, Stephens was the 2,000^th U.S. service member killed in Afghanistan, the type of historic landmark that gets the media’s notice.

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But if the simple cold arithmetic of his passing didn’t get your attention, you’ve got company. Although 68,000 U.S. troops remain in that war zone, the majority of Americans have mentally moved along, military experts say, to the point where such tragic notches rarely rate a mention at the supper table and barely raise more than a momentary blip in the Twitter-sphere.

“I don’t think it ranked very high” in the nation’s consciousness, said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. “Thoughtful people – even if they have made up their minds about the war – they just want to commemorate it the same way we commemorate Veterans Day or Memorial Day. It merits a little bit of response in that regard. But beyond that, it elicits almost no new policy debate whatsoever."

“A 2,000^th fatality does not affect people's (personal) calculus on mission feasibility or the desirability of one policy option over another. It’s just going to be a sad milestone,” O’Hanlon said.

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Perhaps that’s partly because America’s lengthiest war has not generated the fatal pace of past military conflicts. While 181 U.S. service members have been killed, on average, per year in Afghanistan, the annual death rates for American troops in three previous wars were higher to exceedingly higher – Iraq: 498 per year, Vietnam: 4,850 per year, and Korea: 12,300 per year.

The U.S. military plans to finish a withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“Of course, 2,000 fatalities these days really means 20,000 wounded because we’re keeping so many wounded people alive,” said O’Hanlon, who describes himself as “a supporter of the mission” in Afghanistan. “So, I think the numbers are pretty high in many ways."

“The fact that the country has sort of tolerated them, even though we’re still unhappy about still being in this war, is a testament to the fact that they are not huge,” he added. “Most people are not losing sons and daughters and brothers and sisters in this war. And that may explain why we’re still all sort of more or less against it and yet tolerating it. We have a presidential campaign in which there’s no real pressure to get out and yet everybody wants to get out.”

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Beyond that, giving special commemoration to the 2,000th service member to die in Afghanistan seems somewhat disrespectful to the 1,999th U.S. troop to die there -- someone whose life story and profound sacrifice may get far less acclaim. Meanwhile, the first casualties of the conflict get shoved deeper into the nation's collective memory, said Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive officer and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit group with more than 200,000 members. 

"The larger concern we have is with that general disconnect," Rieckhoff said. "Obviously somebody was just killed in action there and that person should be remembered and celebrated. But we’ve also got to remember there are widows who have been dealing with this since 2001. They still need support and their families need care and their kids need to figure out how they’re going to school. The price those families pay impacts generations." 

"Most Americans aren't constantly thinking about Afghanistan. It’s not always in the papers. It’s at the end of very few news broadcasts. Maybe there is some fatigue in the general population," Rieckhoff said. "But I also think there’s some paralysis: They don’t know what to do about it. So, what we simply try to tell them is just make sure you remember the families."

 

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One Goh, the man charged with killing seven people at the Oikos University Christian college in Oakland, California, has said he is “deeply sorry” for the families of his victims, in an interview from jail.

“Families are so angry with me,” he told CBS San Francisco at the Santa Rita Jail, Calif. “(But) if I tell them sorry, it doesn’t bring anybody back.”

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Goh, 43, a native of South Korea and former student at the school, has been charged with seven counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder at the Oikos University – the deadliest U.S. campus attack since the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. He has not yet entered a plea.

Police have said Goh was targeting an administrator who had been involved in his financial dispute with the school.

When he learned she wasn't there, police say, he began shooting in classrooms. Police are also investigating whether Goh might have been seeking multiple targets.

CBS San Francisco reporter Julie Goodrich said that as they spoke, Goh kept his head down. His eyes were bloodshot and at one point he started to cry, she said.

She added that he spoke English clearly, despite accounts in the aftermath of the shootings that he had struggled with the language and was teased because of his lack of fluency.

“I was studying to be a nurse … but it didn’t happen. It is complicated to explain,” he told her.

Meanwhile, the director of the nursing program at Oikos college, said her students don't want to return to the classroom building where the shootings took place.

Ellen Cervellon said Wednesday that nursing students at Oikos are still traumatized by the April 2 shooting and are looking for a new space off campus to hold classes. Instructors say they are not sure when classes will resume.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Updated at 5:43 a.m. ET: Two U.S. F-15s were scrambled to escort a Korean Air passenger jet to a Canadian military base Tuesday after the carrier's call center received a "credible bomb threat," NBC News reported. The aircraft later made an emergency landing.

Korean Air flight 72, which was en route from Vancouver to South Korean capital Seoul, diverted to the Comox base on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the airline said.

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"The (Korean Air) U.S. call center received a call that there was a threat on board the aircraft," Korean Air said in a statement. The threat was received about 25 minutes after the flight took off, The Associated Press reported.

NBC News reported that Canadian authorities had requested U.S. assistance to escort the flight back to Canada.

Two Oregon National Guard F-15s, which took off from Portland, Ore., intercepted the plane and shadowed it until it landed at the Canadian base, NBC News reported.

The plane, a Boeing 777, had 147 people including 134 passengers on board, the airline said.

"The airline will decide about the continuation of the flight after discussion with the airport and related authorities," Korean Air said.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Brian Massey told NBC News early Wednesday that cargo and luggage was being screened.

NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, Reuters, The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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Federal authorities have charged a 71-year-old Korean man with trafficking $700,000 worth of counterfeit erectile dysfunction pills into the United States through Los Angeles International Airport.

The man, Kil Jun Lee, a former Korean law enforcement officer who lives in Los Angeles, was arrested upon returning from a trip to Korea with nearly 40,000 pills wrapped in aluminum packets and tucked away in his golf bag and luggage. The pills were counterfeit Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.

When customs agents asked Lee if the pills were for personal use, he said he would die if he took them all because he has a heart condition.

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The Viagra site says that its counterfeit counterpart may contain blue printer ink, speed and drywall.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

In a separate case, another man, Barry Ronnel Johnson, 38, pleaded guilty Wednesday to using Craigslist to sell counterfeit erectile dysfunction pills. Johnson admitted that he was importing the pills, blue-diamond shaped tablets labeled “Filagra,” from China and India.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations reported they made nearly 25,000 seizures of pirated items in 2011, a 24 percent increase over 2010.

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