NATO soldiers in Kabul, Afghanistan
© ReutersNATO soldiers walk in front of a damaged NATO military vehicle at the site of a suicide car bomb blast in Kabul, Afghanistan, October 11, 2015
Members of the U.S.-European military alliance NATO voted Tuesday to extend the occupation of Afghanistan for at least one more year, deciding to hold steady at 12,000 troops in 2016.

"We are in Afghanistan to prevent that Afghanistan again becomes a safe haven for international terrorists," said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, according to Reuters. "That is also in our security interest to make sure that doesn't happen."

NATO members also voted to raise over $3.1 billion USD to fund Afghan security forces, currently numbered at around 350,000 troops.

The vote in Brussels, Belgium, came just over 14 years after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, launched in Oct. 2001 after the Taliban government refused to immediately extradite Osama bin Laden to the United States. At the time, the Taliban, now an insurgent group battling NATO forces, said it would deliver bin Laden to a third country if presented with convincing evidence he was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Of the 12,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan—down from a peak of just over 400,000 in March 2011—5,000 come from the chief funder of the organization, the United States.

Despite promising to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan while campaigning for reelection in 2012—after nearly tripling the U.S. presence to roughly 100,000 soldiers upon winning his first campaign in 2008—President Barack Obama announced in October that he had decided to keep at least 9,800 soldiers deployed there through 2016.

There are also more than 10,000 private U.S. contractors in Afghanistan. In 2014, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. deaths in Afghanistan were contractors. The decision to extend the foreign military presence in Afghanistan comes in the wake of a high-profile incident two months ago that underlined the civilian toll exacted by 14 years of occupation and insurgency. On Oct. 3, U.S. forces in Afghanistan repeatedly bombed a hospital in Afghanistan run by the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, killing 13 of its staff and at least 27 others. The group has called the incident a potential war crime and has been demanding an independent investigation. An internal U.S. military review described the attack as an accident brought about by "human error," reportedly the result of its soldiers mistaking the building for a Taliban target.