How Washington’s “warlord” myth helped bring back the Taliban

On 27 November, just blocks from the White House, an Afghan evacuee named Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly opened fire on two U.S. National Guard soldiers on duty.  One of them, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, has since died; her colleague, Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition.  Lakanwal had previously worked with a U.S.-backed paramilitary unit and later entered the United States under Operation Allies Welcome after Kabul fell.  His alleged crime is his alone, but his trajectory — from US-backed unit to evacuee — points back to the kinds of political and security structures Washington helped build during the war. Within hours, politicians and pundits were blaming vetting failures and demanding a broad crackdown on Afghan immigration and a freeze on new visas. The story quickly became another argument about “dangerous Afghans” […]