On 26 November, an Afghan national allegedly shot and wounded two national guards in Washington DC. That the guardsmen were deployed as part of Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration purge is an imperial blowback story in itself. But there’s more to this one. Quite a lot more, in fact.

In 2021, thousand of Afghans who’d worked for the occupation forces during the war were brought to the US. That’s well known. But reports are now saying alleged shooter Rahmatullah Lakanwal worked with the CIA in Afghanistan.

He may even be connected with the same CIA death squads I tracked in the country in 2020, not long before the occupation fell apart. You can see my documentary report, Kill Or Capture: Inside The CIA’s Secret Afghan Army, here.

The Times of India has described Lakanwal as a fluent English speaker who was given a spot in the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) programme in 2021. He struggled through various visa issues, losing his right to work for a time, until he was granted a form of asylum. He was eventually granted leave to stay and given the right to work in the US.

Despite settling in the US, there are unverified reports of him becoming increasingly despondent and angry about US policy in recent years.

National guard shooting – blaming Biden

Lakanwal was reportedly shot and seriously wounded before being detained. The national guards who were shot are in critical condition. But in the wake of the shooting the current head of the CIA appeared to confirm (albeit to Fox News) that Lakanwal had worked for the agency in-country:

CIA director John Ratcliffe said:

In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation.

He continued:

​​The individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here. Our citizens and service members deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures.

Clearly, the CIA director wants to make the shooting a partisan issue. But, the CIA’s violent history in Afghanistan spans decades – and implicates both Republican and Democrats.

Afghan death squads and blowback

According to The Times of India, Lakanwal worked as a logistics coordinator for a US contractor supporting US Special Forces. Other sources – unverified for now – claim he was a full member of the Kandahar Strike Force (KSF).

KSF, as well as the so-called Zero Units, were CIA-controlled Afghan special forces units who took over kill-or-capture missions from British and US troops. They were linked to many extrajudicial murders of innocent Afghans. Rolling Stone and The Intercept have published long reports on how many members were relocated to the US after the occupation collapsed in 2021.

The CIA itself went to great lengths to rescue Zero operatives during the last days of the war. One 2022 report notes:

the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA.

Human Rights Watch, among others, has reported on unlawful killings by the these CIA-trained forces.

Trump’s racist backlash

In the wake of the shooting, Donald Trump suspended all immigration requests from Afghans. He declared that the US government:

must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.

Yet attempting to frame this example of blowback from Afghanistan as a purely Biden issue is highly questionable. It was under Trump that the secret war in Afghanistan was escalated. As a 2023 ProPublica investigation into the CIA’s kill-or-capture program point out:

Under the Trump administration, CIA Director Mike Pompeo announced that the agency was ramping up its approach in Afghanistan.

Pompeo said at the time:

The CIA, to be successful, must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentless — you pick the word.

Neither of the two main US political parties are innocent when it comes to Afghanistan. Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump were parties to the 20 year occupation and dirty war of Afghanistan. I met firsthand with civilians whose family members were slaughtered in night raids and drones strikes.

To my knowledge, nobody was ever held accountable.

The full details of the Washington shooting will become clearer with time. But having been to Afghanistan twice, my instinct – and that’s all it is for now – is that their significance is that they occurred at the precise meeting point of the West’s endless dirty war abroad and spiralling fascism at home.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot

By Joe Glenton

This post was originally published on Canary.