It was a tragic Thanksgiving this year. The holiday was marred by a heinous shooting of two members of the National Guard, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24. They were shot by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, an Afghan national who worked with U.S. Special Forces and other intelligence units in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Eve in Washington, DC. He drove from Washington State to commit this attack. Beckstrom later passed away from her injuries. Wolfe is hanging on and showing signs of consciousness.
Lakanwal has been charged, but was he vetted? He was technically (sort of), but the glaring issue regarding the vetting of Afghan migrants whom Joe Biden scooped up and plopped here during our humiliating exit in 2021 has been well known: there was no way we could vet these people. Some likely weren’t, and corners were cut. Intelligence sources told Public’s Michael Shellenberger, among many things, that the situation was so shambolic that no appropriate analysis could be done. That is to say, the problem was not seen coldly and objectively. Second, Lakanwal was an asset of the intel community. You don’t bring those people onto home soil. They’re mercenaries, and what do you think happens when you stop paying them? That question was never asked at CIA, apparently (via Public) [emphasis mine]:
The 29-year-old Afghan man suspected of shooting two National Guardsmen yesterday in Washington, D.C., was “clean on all checks,” a senior U.S. official told CNN. The official told CNN that “the US government had been doing continuous, annual vetting of individuals since the Afghans’ arrival in the US, especially in the wake of the failed terror plot disrupted before the election last year in Oklahoma, which involved an Afghan evacuee.”
But a senior intelligence official told Public, “There wasn’t adequate screening done,” of Afghan evacuees. “We don’t have good fidelity on who any of them are. We say ‘they’re vetted’ and he [the suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal] was vetted. That meant we thought he wouldn’t turn his guns on us when we were paying him every month. And that worked for a decade with him. But the second we’re not doing that anymore, the deal on their end changes.”
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“You’re never supposed to bring your proxies home,” said the official. “They’re mercenaries we hire for a very specific purpose. We can’t bring large populations with a drastically different culture here. There was never a moment like, ‘Will these guys be good neighbors?’ It was, ‘Can I pay him enough to shoot the enemy and not me?’”
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The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2022 published a report warning of security risks among the Afghan evacuees in the U.S. “DHS encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees,” it found. Information was “inaccurate, incomplete, or missing,” it added, and Border Patrol “admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”
On November 21, the Trump Administration’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a memo saying it would revoke the refugee status of people who do not meet the criteria and would stop processing applications for permanent residence for all refugees who entered under President Joe Biden, about 233,000 people. The memo noted that the Biden administration had cut corners on properly vetting candidates.
The reason the US didn’t find many terrorist ties among evacuees was “because they were fighting the Taliban,” said the official. “If they were fighting the Taliban, we said, ‘They’re not terrorists.’ This individual [Lakanwal] and the election day attacker came up clean. There was no DEROG [derogatory information] on them. So we flew them to the States with no long-term plan.”
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Why did the US government bring so many Afghans to the US in the first place? Was there a better option for them? And what should happen to them now?
Psychological screenings are “impossible to do for this volume [of evacuees],” the official said. Operation Allies Welcome brought approximately 77,000 Afghan evacuees starting in July 2021. When family members are included in the total, and those brought in successor programs like Operation Enduring Welcome and Operation Allies Refuge, the number of Afghan evacuees is closer to 200,000.
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The official added that, “There was an emotional response in the CIA and among the paramilitary guys who had fought alongside them and felt a sense of duty to them. There was no adult in the room to say, ‘They were great mercenaries when we paid them, but what do you think they‘re going to do back in America?’ That question was never asked. We threw them on a plane and hoped for the best.”
Again, nothing new here, along with the lack of leadership, which is a hallmark characteristic of the Biden presidency. Some tough questions weren’t asked, and lives were lost as a result.
So, was Lakanwal vetted? On paper, maybe, but I think you already know the real answer.