Ten years ago, Army Special Forces Lt. Col. Jason Amerine, a 1989 Roosevelt High School graduate, was part of a handful of U.S. forces waging war on the ground in Afghanistan.
Amerine, then a captain, recalled there were about 50 U.S. troops in the north of the country, "and there was nobody in the south but us" — his detachment of 11 Green Berets with the 5th Special Forces Group.
Delta Force and other special operators flew in for missions and then flew out, he said.
Amerine and his team went into Afghanistan in mid-November 2001, linked up with future President Hamid Karzai, and had spectacular success against the Taliban before a U.S. bomb wounded Amerine and killed three Americans and about 50 Afghan fighters in early December.
A decade later, America’s longest war is very different: There are 100,000 U.S. and 50,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, with plans for the U.S. forces to be out by 2015 but with efforts under way to keep some troops there longer.
Amerine, who now works at the Pentagon and has seen the arc of the war from the beginning, said his read on the situation is that "things actually are going pretty well there because of the counterinsurgency fight."
But he also acknowledges that counterinsurgency "is just not something that you win quickly" as the United States starts to draw down its forces.
"It’s an Afghan fight. It was from the beginning, and it still is," Amerine said. "So the question is, what can the Afghans accomplish? We’re going to do what we can to build them a strong security apparatus between their military and their police, and that will give them a strong tool to try to rein in the tribal groups."
The withdrawal deadlines create something of a race against time, but Amerine, 40, said it’s not a very dramatic one.
"We’ve built an army, and we’ve done what we could for them," he said. "(But) we’re not suddenly going home and abandoning them."
The U.S. probably will have people there continuing to train their forces and supporting the government in a variety of ways, he added.
Amerine, who served again in Afghanistan in 2004, said he "won’t get into the debate over, ‘Should we have gone into Iraq?’"
Once the U.S. was engaged in both countries, Amerine said, he understood how the focus for years came to be on Iraq.
The Taliban were "so thoroughly routed" in Afghanistan that it took a good five to six years for anti-government forces to really start to come back.
"So you are talking about something that took a long time, and part of what enabled them to come back is, we just didn’t have the troops to counter their growing threat, because it was a limited threat and we were far more concerned with Iraq and there was a much bigger threat there," Amerine said.
The U.S. needed to turn things around quickly in Iraq before America lost resolve to carry on the fight, "so the fact that Afghanistan was the ‘forgotten war’ for a while was because Afghanistan hadn’t gotten that dire," he said.
Amerine, who lived in Hawaii from the age of 3 to 18 and was based at Camp Smith from 2008 to 2010, was part of a special operations success early in the Afghanistan war.
On Nov. 17, 2001, Amerine’s Operational Detachment Alpha 574 team rallied Afghan fighters and directed Navy aircraft to repel an approximately 100-vehicle enemy convoy seeking to re-take Tarin Kowt in the Taliban heartland. It was a huge psychological loss for the fundamentalist regime.
Eighteen days later, a 2,000-pound bomb dropped by a B-52 bomber landed near his team after an Air Force controller located with the group accidentally called in his own position for the strike.
Master Sgt. Jefferson Davis, Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Petithory and Staff Sgt. Cody Prosser were killed. Amerine was on the other side of a hill when the warhead burrowed into the ground and blew up.
Amerine was hit by shrapnel in his leg and his eardrums were ruptured.
"The shrapnel that hit me in the leg probably came literally out of the ground and hit me," he said.
