Suspect in National Guard Shooting Brought the CIA’s Shadow War Home

After two National Guard soldiers were shot in Washington, D.C. last week, several U.S. pundits and politicians were quick with their descriptions of the alleged attacker. They erroneously assumed that he brought his “culture” or “society” to the United States.

“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies… At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on X.

Miller’s assumption about the “great lie of mass migration” was dead wrong. When I saw the suspect’s name, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, I immediately recognized that he used to work as a U.S.-trained militiaman, and it was the United States that destroyed his childhood, his life, and his home country. Lakanwal came to the United States in 2021 as a longtime member of one of the CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units. For years, Lakanwal was treated as a U.S. ally and equipped with many resources from the U.S. military and intelligence service to do some of the most brutal work on behalf of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

The Zero Units were among the most aggressive instruments of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Though some units were formally tied to Afghan intelligence, they were in practice created, trained, armed, and directed by the CIA. They operated outside Afghan law and far beyond any realistic oversight. And they became known inside the country as some of the most feared armed actors of the war.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented at least 14 major cases of abuse committed by these forces between 2017 and 2019 alone, including unlawful killings, disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. The real number is almost certainly higher; many areas where the Zero Units operated were inaccessible to journalists and rights monitors due to massive restrictions and repression.

In Khost Province, where Lakanwal came from and where I reported extensively in 2017, residents described repeated arbitrary detentions, killings, and notorious night raids, in which civilian homes were brutally targeted by soldiers and militiamen. In one incident, the clandestine fighters of the Khost Protection Force, another CIA-backed militia similar to the Zero Units, killed 14 civilians, including women, during a single operation. Afghan officials could not intervene, because the units did not answer to Kabul. “Don’t let them catch you,” several friends of mine in Khost told me when I was investigating U.S. war crimes in the region back then.

Afghan officials told me repeatedly that their government had no authority over these CIA-built militias.

According to multiple sources from his home district, Lakanwal’s unit also carried out operations in Kandahar, where war crimes occurred and even members of the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces were killed. These actions never resulted in consequences for the Zero Units or their American handlers. Impunity was an operational fact, not a malfunction.

Before the return of the Taliban in 2021, Afghan officials told me repeatedly that their government had no authority over these CIA-built militias. This was widely understood inside Afghanistan: If Zero Unit fighters arrived at your home at night, no Afghan court, police officer, or ministry could protect you.

Washington designed the units this way. The U.S. wanted a rapid-response force unconstrained by local bureaucracy, political negotiations, or legal limits. The long-term risks — political, social, and psychological — were all ignored.

When the Taliban took over Kabul four years ago, the Zero Units abruptly lost the protection they had relied on for years because their U.S. backers withdrew. For good reason, their fighters feared that their history of killings would make them immediate targets for the incoming Taliban regime. During the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, members of those units were assigned to secure the Kabul airport. Witnesses have described Zero Unit members beating back crowds and taking large sums of money from Afghans desperate to reach evacuation flights.

Yet the United States evacuated the Zero Units and other de facto war criminals anyway. Not selectively, not cautiously — but comprehensively. A militia built for a shadow war was relocated to American suburbs without any public accountability process — not internationally, or within the U.S. or Afghanistan — and without a plan to address the extensive trauma its members carried.

The U.S. wanted a rapid-response force unconstrained by … legal limits. The long-term risks — political, social, and psychological — were all ignored.

According to different sources, Rahmanullah Lakanwal was between 14 and 16 years old when he became a militiaman. Many others, including former soldiers I am in touch with, started their war journeys as minors too. Once in the United States, some former fighters found themselves isolated, without language support, community ties, or psychological care. According to sources in both Khost and the U.S., Lakanwal had long struggled well before he left Afghanistan. Several media outlets reported that he had been deeply traumatized by the operations he conducted under U.S. direction. His work as an Amazon delivery driver did little to change that reality.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s promises of mass deportations and rising bipartisan anti-immigrant racism left many Afghan evacuees, including former Zero Unit fighters, fearing removal to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. For someone like Lakanwal, deportation was not a theoretical concern. It was a death sentence.

The United States must acknowledge what this shooting represents. It is not a failure of immigration vetting or a surprise act of radicalization. It is the direct outcome of a U.S. military strategy that relied on militias empowered to kill without consequence — and then attempted to fold those same fighters back into society, and a completely new society at that, without addressing their history.

The U.S. built a war in which Afghan partners were encouraged to operate outside the law, and sometimes outside basic norms of human conduct. It then evacuated many of them with no structure for accountability, no mental health support, and no acknowledgment of either what they had done or endured.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal did not bring a foreign ideology to American soil. He was shaped by the U.S. counterterrorism system itself. The violence he carried out in Washington, D.C. is linked to the violence he carried out in Afghanistan — not because he shared the Taliban’s goals, but because he shared the CIA’s operational environment. His violence is among the many monsters that the U.S. created during the “war on terror.”

If U.S. policy makers want to understand how a man trained and empowered by their own security apparatus ended up killing two American soldiers near the White House, they should start with a basic admission: When you run a shadow war for two decades, eventually it stops staying in the shadows.