Made in America: The Suspected DC National Guard Shooter’s CIA Ties Deserve More Scrutiny 

When Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly shot two National Guard officers stationed near the White House on the morning of November 26, he had only been in the United States a few years. But his history with the country that occupied his homeland of Afghanistan began long before.

Lakanwal came to the U.S. as an evacuee from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. The 29-year-old’s origins were quickly capitalized on by the media, as a way to place his actions in a different category from the 455 other mass shootings that took place in the U.S. so far this year. To the Trump administration, the shooting was fresh fodder for their vehement anti-immigration policies. A chance to move from the threat of “bad hombres” to “Islamic terrorism” and “jihadists“, long before any motive had been established.

But all those arguments came crashing down once it was revealed that Lakanwal was 16-years-old when he was recruited to serve in one of several paramilitary units that were run, trained and equipped by the CIA—units that have long been accused of human rights abuses and potential war crimes.

Lakanwal’s CIA Past

As an Afghan-American journalist who lived through and covered the US occupation of my birth country, Lakanwal’s history made it clear it is America, not Afghanistan or the Taliban, that must reckon with what led him to commit such a crime. Even the Islamic Emirate’s current Foreign Minister said Lakanwal’s crime has “nothing to do” with Afghanistan or the Afghan people, precisely because it was the US who trained him.

Lakanwal was only an adolescent when he was recruited into the notorious Zero Units, the CIA-run paramilitary groups that terrorized civilians across several Afghan provinces, including Kandahar, where he eventually served as a member of the 03 Unit for eight years. Given that he was recruited into a combat military role under the age of 18, that would make Lakanwal a former child soldier under the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child’s optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the U.S. is a signatory to.

The Zero Units conducted raids into people’s homes, a practice that led to continual accusations of abuse and torture, including willfully puncturing the veins of detainees. The New York Times reported that in one instance Zero Units in Nangarhar province were accused of threatening to run over a detainee with a tank if he didn’t say his brother was a member of the Taliban. Lakanwal himself was even briefly jailed when the forces he was part of killed five high-ranking Afghan policemen.

Yes, Lakanwal was radicalized, but it was the CIA, not the Taliban, who accustomed him and thousands of other Afghan men to wanton violence.

These paramilitaries were also given authorization to order U,S. air raids, which often resulted in civilian deaths and injury. In 2018, when civilian casualties rates were reaching a new high, the United Nations stated that 60 percent of civilian casualties from international and Afghan aerial operations were women and children.

Media and human rights reports have tied these CIA-run forces to civilian killings and torture for years, documenting how Zero Units conducted night raids into people’s homes, enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, and attacks on medical facilities. Yet opponents of the current Taliban-led government now claim that a man who spent a decade in the embrace of the CIA somehow managed to keep his alleged Talib allegiances a secret from the institution that cut his checks and handed his unit their orders.

When the US began its chaotic evacuation of Afghans in the summer of 2021, the Zero Units were placed in charge of the entrance to the Kabul Airport, where tens of thousands of people had camped out. Even in the final days of the occupation, those forces were accused of employing physical violence and intimidation to control crowds, shooting into the air and beating civilians with switches and pipes. They also faced accusations of taking bribes to let people into the airport.

Since the DC shooting, Lakanwal’s Afghan identity has been the fixation of nearly every commentator with a Substack or an X account, but the most significant determinants of his action are the years he spent as a CIA-trained soldier. He was only a child when he was enlisted into paramilitary forces who would be identified as “bounty hunters” and “paid assassins” by local leaders. Yes, Lakanwal was radicalized, but it was the CIA, not the Taliban, who accustomed him and thousands of other Afghan men to wanton violence. Ignoring the brutal reputation of the Zero Units is just another way to keep the well-documented crimes of the U.S. military, along with their allies and charges, from public discussion.

An American Dream?

Numerous media reports have stated that since arriving in the U.S., Lakanwal was haunted by the memories of his actions in Afghanistan and that he grew to feel abandoned by the very country that trained him. Lakanwal went from a life of inciting fear in Afghanistan as a U.S. asset, to a man living in the suburbs of Washington State, meandering from job to job while the memories of his violent past in Kandahar reportedly raced through his mind.

Many Afghans undoubtedly feel betrayed by the U.S. government. Lakanwal’s case is specific. He was no ordinary Afghan soldier, or even an intelligence operative. He was trained to be a mercenary as a teenager by the CIA, and worked directly for the Americans.

Almost all evacuated Afghans have had to face the harsh reality of displacement and the economic hardships facing millions in the West. But unlike most, Lakanwal was also trained to kill, and suddenly had to find a way to feed his wife and five children in the American suburbs without any real marketable skills or meaningful government support.

The Trump administration’s rush to suspend the promised visa process of all evacuated Afghans and cancel citizenship ceremonies is a way to keep Washington from looking inward, and the American people from asking questions. Lakanwal was not an “imported” problem—it is the U.S. that has for decades exported violence, false promises, and guns around the world, and each time it leads to blowback. In rural Afghanistan, the U.S. raised Lakanwal to be a fighter, and then left him to his own devices, struggling once he arrived in the U.S. as millions of immigrants do. The CIA ordered him to inflict violence on his own people, and then left him to make ends meet in a country where jobs are scarce, immigrants are scorned, and a rifle can be purchased at a Walmart. Although he had just arrived, Lakanwal was, in his own way, made in America.