Image Credit: The Washington Post / Contributor / Getty Images 
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man arrested for shooting two National Guard soldiers in Washington on Wednesday—one of whom has now, sadly, died—was a member of a secretive CIA paramilitary group called the Zero Units. Some have called them “death squads,” and accused them of abducting and torturing civilians, murdering entire families and laying waste to villages.
A recent Rolling Stone feature called the Zero Units “the CIA’s secret Afghan army.”
“Trained by American special-operations soldiers, they acted as the CIA’s secret army, carrying out some of the most dangerous missions of the war targeting Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders plotting to attack the U.S., according to CIA officials who served with the units. Often, members of Joint Special Operations Command, including Seal Team Six, would be part of the mission to call in airstrikes, but the bulk of the fighting was done by Afghan soldiers led by CIA ground branch officers.”
It’s clear from the feature that nobody involved with the Zero Units, at least on the American side, really wanted to talk about what they got up to. “Even now, U.S. officials cannot officially acknowledge the connection between the intelligence agency and the Zero Units.”
“The only news about their operations came in the aftermath of the killing of a terrorist leader or in accusations of war crimes.”
Of accusations, there were plenty. In 2018, The New York Times published a report exposing serious human-rights abuses. The NGO Human Rights Watch documented dozens of civilian deaths at the hands of the Zero Units. In 2022, ProPublica alleged that hundreds of civilians in remote villages were killed during raids, and that, far from helping the Afghan and US cause, these killings were hardening resistance and driving ordinary Afghans into support for the Taliban.
As well as refusing to comment on its connection to the Zero Units, the CIA also dismisses all claims they were involved in anything that wasn’t strictly “by the book.”
But then you remember the CIA was bribing aging Afghan warlords with viagra so they could keep on fucking little boys—yes, really—and it’s hard to take their protestations quite so seriously.
I don’t have any doubt the Zero Units were knee deep in gore and did some pretty heinous shit, just like every other CIA-backed native black-bag team from Nicaragua to Indonesia via Ukraine.
A “childhood friend” of Lakanwal’s who spoke to The New York Times said he “suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused.”
The big bombshell, of course, is that 10,000 of these dudes were settled in the US, many of them in Washington state but also in Texas and elsewhere, by the Biden administration.
Ten thousand.
I don’t want to get drawn into a discussion of military ethics or what the US owes its allies and collaborators in a moral minefield like the 20-year Afghan war. My view is simply that, whatever obligation the US government has to foreign hatchet-men like Rahmanullah Lakanwal, they come a very distant second to the things it owes the American people, safety and protection being paramount among them.
The questions we should be asking now are whether other Afghans brought to the US by the Biden administration pose a threat like Rahmanullah Lakanwal, and how many.
The answer to that first question is obviously yes, and the answer to the second is—who knows?
Alejandro Mayorkas, Kristi Noem’s criminal predecessor at the DHS, confidently assured Congress that every single Afghan brought to the US under Operation Allies Welcome was fully vetted. He was then reminded he was testifying under oath and swiftly changed his answer to something far more equivocal.
In 2024, the DoJ assessed the FBI’s role in the relocations, and came to a very worrying conclusion.
“According to the FBI, the need to immediately evacuate Afghans overtook the normal processes required to determine whether individuals attempting to enter the United States pose a threat to national security, which increased the risk that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation.”
The DoJ identified at least 55 individuals evacuated from Afghanistan who were on terrorism watch lists.
As far as we can tell, Lakanwal did everything he was told to do by his masters in the CIA for the better part of a decade; he received promotions and authority within his Zero Unit; he was relocated to the US and given permanent asylum for his service—and yet still he decided, in what was obviously a premeditated attack, to drive to Washington and kill American soldiers.
Why he did this is still unclear. According to The New York Times, Lakanwal and his family “kept to themselves” in their apartment block in Bellingham. None of the neighbours knew a thing about them.
There’s no social-media trail to suggest a motive, or the degree to which Lakanwal was in full possession of his mind.
Did he fear having his asylum revoked?
Did he feel betrayed somehow?
Was he suffering from psychosis or delusions?
We simply don’t know. But we can be certain of one thing: The case of Rahmanullah Lakanwal throws into doubt the claim that anybody who served with the Zero Units is really fit to live in the US.
Better to be safe than sorry, I say. Thankfully, it looks like President Trump agrees.
