He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley’s
After the National Guard shooting, the US needs to reckon with how its legacy of global violence inevitably comes home. Stephen Miller wants to do anything but.
Stephen Miller is not letting the nativist opportunity posed by the murder of Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and the shooting of Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe allegedly by an Afghan refugee go to waste. “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” the White House’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser tweeted in response to the conservative Wall Street Journal editorializing against the collective punishment of Afghans.
Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s nationwide raids and roundups of perceived migrants, is at the vanguard of the Trump administration’s response to this week’s shocking shootings of the West Virginia National Guardsmen, who were deployed to DC in support of Miller’s crackdown. President Donald Trump is pledging to “pause” all migration from so-called “Third World” countries; to deport not merely “illegal” but “disruptive populations”; and to “denaturalize migrants” who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
But the most sobering fact about Wednesday’s slayings is that the alleged killer, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was all too compatible with Western Civilization.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued an extraordinary statement revealing that the 29-year-old Lakanwal was a “member of a partner force in Kandahar.” While a knowledgeable source with deep experience in Afghanistan cautions that the US sponsored a variety of proxy forces in southern Afghanistan, much additional reporting has identified Lakanwal as a member of the Zero Units, death squads used by the CIA during the US’s longest overseas war.
In other words, contrary to Miller and Trump, Lakanwal’s shooting spree is not the result of importing Afghan culture to America. While much will surely be revealed in Lakanwal’s upcoming trial, it looks more like the result of importing American culture to Afghanistan. The realities of blowback – the violence America experiences as the unintended consequences of the violence of US foreign policy – are what the US needs to examine in the wake of this horrifying murder if it expects to prevent the next one.
Instead, in a manner befitting both nativism and a broader elite political culture that wishes to whitewash and then forget the imperial violence it embraces, the Trump administration is scapegoating the relatively few Afghans admitted to the US after the war’s final 2021 failure. Overwhelmingly, that population served the war effort, and now finds itself part of the long lineage of US allies to be discarded when it suits imperial prerogatives. Or, as the novelist Dur e Aziz Amna messaged me after seeing Miller’s “broken homeland” post, “Bitch, who broke the homeland!!?”
Again, it is important to remember that we do not yet have the full story of Lakanwal and his road to the Farragut West Metro stop, where he allegedly opened fire. FBI Director Kash Patel vowed not to “stop until we interview anyone and everyone associated with the subject, the house and every piece of his life.” But the New York Times reported that Lakanwal’s brother was the deputy commander of the Kandahar-based Zero Unit, known as 03. The first door the FBI should knock on is at CIA Headquarters. The second belongs to Rahmatullah Nabil, the former Afghan intelligence chief who oversaw the units.
Much of the CIA’s Afghan workforce remains shrouded in official secrecy. But what is known about them is their wanton brutality, licensed and materially supported by the United States. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report detailed “extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war” committed by the Zero Units. The single best piece of American journalism on them, Lynzy Billing’s 2022 expose for ProPublica, is a nonstop document of atrocity. “Far too often,” Billing wrote, “I found the Zero Unit soldiers acted on flawed intelligence and mowed down men, women and children, some as young as 2, who had no discernible connection to terrorist groups.”
The CIA, in its typical rejection of any form of accountability, calls such reporting a calumny and Taliban propaganda. It is understandable why the CIA does so. Lakanwal joined Langley’s proxies “nine years” before the 2021 fall of the US-backed government in Kabul, according to the BBC, which cited “a former military commander who served alongside” him. If true, Lakanwal was around 15 years old when the CIA put a gun in his hand. That would validate the longstanding rumor that the agency used child soldiers in Afghanistan.
There is bound to be immense psychological damage when making someone, particularly a teenager, into a member of a death squad. A childhood friend interviewed by the New York Times reflected that Lakanwal “would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure.” Shortly before the fall of Kabul, Lakanwal had been smoking marijuana – a common habit amongst US-backed Afghan soldiers – and divorced his wife days into their marriage. “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind,” the friend told the paper.
Imperial violence is often shaped by the violence the US inflicts on its own subordinate populations, and comes home just as often. Last month in Chicago, a Customs and Border Protection-led team of federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night to assault an apartment complex and round up its tenants on the pretext that some of them belonged to a Venezuelan gang. Barnett Rubin, a longtime US adviser on the Afghanistan War and one of the Americans most knowledgeable about Afghanistan, immediately identified the assault as a night raid, a characteristic US special-operations tactic during the war – and one that often involved the US military and the CIA’s Afghan proxies.
It is characteristic of the US’s attitude toward its foreign misadventures to shift the blame for its failures onto the local population, and especially onto the local forces it sponsors. The US did so in Vietnam, it did so in Iraq, it did so in Afghanistan – think about how many indignant stories you have read about US-sponsored units that would not fight for Washington’s proxy governments – and it will do so in the future. It shifts this blame so it can continue its extractive, destabilizing imperial policies; preserve the myth of its innocence; and, in the ideological variant of American Exceptionalism that Miller subscribes to, treat the foreigners who must endure US occupation as inferior and unworthy of alleged American beneficence.
It avoids at all costs asking what it owes to the people whose doors the Americans kick in, whose relatives they kill in high-profile airstrikes, and whose children they recruit. In its neglect, it puts its own, now including Beckstrom and Wolfe, at similar risk – and, in this case, exploits one’s death and the other’s wounds to advance the mass deportation of precisely the people who arrived in America once America spent an entire generation making their country too dangerous for them to remain.
Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter and the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He is also the author of the FOREVER WARS newsletter on Ghost.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
Check out more from Zeteo:
Zeteo gets it right again.
Trump did deploy the National Guard…armed with rakes. The Guards mission was apparently just to stand around making them sitting ducks. It has been reported that Trump had been told the deployment put the lives of the National Guard at risk.
But Trump will be a sociopath.