Afghan Terrorist Case Takes Strange Turns with a Late-Night Tweet and a French Arrest

On October 10, I presented the facts as disclosed in a federal complaint against Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi – an Afghan national living in Oklahoma City – who has been charged with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to ISIS in connection with a planned Election Day attack. I should instead say “facts”, because much of what has been disclosed about Tawhedi is of questionable veracity and the story is constantly changing and evolving. Can somebody please be honest with the American people about the threats they are facing, regardless of whether there’s an election coming up or not? 

Paragraph 9 of the Complaint in U.S. v. Tawhedi, a/k/a “@Abu_Omir”

Much of my prior analysis focused on paragraph 9 in that criminal complaint, which reads as follows: 

It is known to the affiant that TAWHEDI is a 27-year-old citizen of Afghanistan who resides in an apartment on Shartel Avenue in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (“the Shartel residence”). TAWHEDI entered the United States on September 9, 2021, on a special immigrant visa and is currently on parole pending adjudication of his immigration proceedings. TAWHEDI resides at the Shartel residence with his wife and their one child, who is approximately one year old. 

The “special immigrant visa” (SIV) in question is one that the United States began issuing in 2009 to Afghan nationals who had “provided faithful and valuable service to the U.S. government” and its allies in the country between October 2001 and December 2024, and who “experienced or are experiencing an ongoing serious threat” due to such employment. 

From a legal standpoint, that paragraph 9 narrative is confusing, because if Tawhedi entered on an SIV he would have a green card, would not need parole when he entered, and would not be in immigration proceedings. 

That said, taking all the facts in that paragraph at face value, the only logical conclusion was that some derogatory information had come to light during the screening process before he arrived in the United States that needed to be resolved, and so he was paroled in and placed into immigration proceedings to resolve it. 

Trusting the government to tell a straight story about a potential foreign terrorist weeks before a hotly contested presidential election was likely my first mistake. 

“Screened Multiple Times”

Fox News thereafter ran a story captioned “Afghan man charged with Election Day terror plot screened multiple times, worked CIA security job”. 

According to that article, Tawhedi entered on parole and only applied for an SIV – which was subsequently approved – once he got here, premised on “a security job for the CIA in Afghanistan” he had previously performed. 

Here are the two key paragraphs in that Fox News piece: 

There were no red flags that would have barred him from entry into the U.S., officials said.

“Afghan evacuees who sought to enter the United States were subject to multilayered screening and vetting against intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism information. If new information emerges after arrival, appropriate action is taken,” a DHS spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

Speaking of “red flags”, there are more of them in that excerpt than in a Moscow May Day parade, beginning with the fact that the unnamed “officials” asserted that there were none of them in this (still developing) case and continuing to the U.S. government’s praise for that “multilayered screening and vetting against intelligence” that Afghan evacuees – like Tawhedi – received.

Note that both the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Department of Defense (DoD) OIG raised their own individual red flags about the competency and sufficiency of the U.S. government’s Afghan vetting processes in separate reports. 

In its September 2022 report, DHS OIG concluded that CBP, which inspected those arrivals, sometimes lacked “critical data” (like names and dates of birth) “to properly screen, vet, or inspect Afghan evacuees”, and worse, “admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States”.

Consequently, the watchdog found, “DHS paroled at least two individuals into the United States who posed a risk to national security and the safety of local communities and may have admitted or paroled more individuals of concern.” 

That followed a February 2022 DoD OIG report, which found that certain Afghan parolees were not vetted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) using all the data DoD had at its disposal prior to their relocation to safe havens in the United States.

Given that DoD largely ran Afghanistan for the better part of 20 years, that may have been good intel for DHS to have considered during its vetting processes before evacuees were released into the United States.

Jacqui Heinrich’s Late-Night Tweet

One of the authors of that Fox News article was Jacqui Heinrich, a senior White House correspondent with the outlet, and just after midnight on October 16, she issued a tweet that calls many of the “facts” in both the complaint and her earlier article into question: 

NEWS: The Biden-Harris administration now admits that an Afghan national accused of plotting an election day terror attack did not undergo certain vetting they previously claimed he passed. Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was never vetted or approved by the State Department for special…

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 16, 2024

If the foregoing narrative didn’t concern you, that tweet should. 

Let’s start with the fact that the CIA didn’t even do a deep dive into Tawhedi’s background when they hired him “as a local guard outside” the perimeter of a U.S. base in Afghanistan. 

That said, I will readily admit that even years after troops arrived in Afghanistan, the U.S. government didn’t truly have a tight grasp on everything that was happening there, as I learned when I was staff director for the National Security Subcommittee at House Oversight. 

As the Wilson Center explained in a June 2015 analysis of U.S. operations captioned “America’s Shocking Ignorance of Afghanistan”: “Afghan culture, especially its ‘tribal’ element with its penchant for violence and religious extremism, remains unfathomable to Western policymakers and publics alike”. 

“Unfathomable” or not, I guess somebody had to watch the outer perimeters of our Afghanistan bases, so I’ll assume the CIA vetting Tawhedi received was consistent with agency’s assessment of the threat he could have posed there.

But it raises the question why Tawhedi was allowed to enter this country despite the fact that we really didn’t know that much about him. Respectfully, there’s a big difference between trusting some local foreign national enough to serve as a tertiary local guard at a U.S. base abroad and knowing enough about him to set him loose in the United States. 

Such concerns are only heightened by the fact that Tawhedi’s been in the United States for more than three years and has yet to be vetted for the SIV that was – ostensibly – the reason the U.S. government brought him here to begin with.

How many Afghan nationals like Tawhedi – lightly vetted, hastily evacuated, and largely unwatched – are living on Shartel Avenues all around the United States right now? 

Remember: the sole reason why the United States invaded Afghanistan was because terrorist extremists there posed an existential threat to our homeland. Given that, shouldn’t the Biden-Harris administration have done just a little bit more to ensure that we weren’t bringing that threat home with us when we left?

The Politics and the Confusion

Consider the many shifting narratives in this case. First, Tawhedi had an SIV when he arrived, then he didn’t apply for an SIV until after he got here but he has one now and has been thoroughly vetted without raising any red flags, and now he hasn’t really been vetted and actually doesn’t have an SIV. 

Why all the confusion? DHS, DOJ, the FBI, and the State Department know all that there is to know about Tawhedi’s status – even if they’re not really sure when he became an ISIS-loving would-be terrorist – so why don’t they just tell us so we can assess the other possible risks? 

The simplest answer is politics. 

Many congressional Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee), have long questioned the adequacy of the so-called “multilayered screening and vetting” that Afghan evacuees have been subject to.

Given that we went into Afghanistan because terrorists there posed a threat to our homeland, shouldn’t the Biden-Harris administration have done just a little bit more to ensure that we weren’t bringing that threat home with us when we left?

If their concerns are well-founded – and every conclusion of both the DHS and DoD OIGs suggests that they are – the potential terrorist threat would not only undermine the administration’s claims about adequacy of the vetting that the Afghans it brought here received, but it would also dredge up the shameful calamity that was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Let me explain why that’s a problem. 

In an August 12, 2021, Reuters/Ipsos poll, President Biden enjoyed a 51-percent approval rating, with just 43 percent of respondents disapproving of the job that he was doing. 

Kabul fell days later, and on August 16, the president gave a speech in which he said: “I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan”. Evacuees, including Tawhedi, began arriving shortly after. 

In a poll it conducted a month later, Reuters/Ipsos revealed that Biden’s approval ratings had fallen to 44 percent, with 50 percent of respondents disapproving of the job he was doing as president – a 14-point swing. The Biden-Harris administration has really never recovered its footing since.

Consequently, the last thing the Harris-Walz campaign wants three weeks out from the election is any discussion of Afghanistan, and certainly not reports that one of the evacuees from that country: (1) was planning an Election Day terrorist attack; or (2) wasn’t properly vetted either before or after he got here.

“Look”, the White House would likely argue, “we foiled any threat Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi may have posed. We will explain why and how he came to be here once our investigation is fully completed” – likely well after November 5.

“Relative of Afghan Accused in US Election Terror Plot Nabbed in France for Similar Scheme”

There’s no reason why the American public should have to wait to find out whether improperly vetted Afghan evacuees may be planning terrorist attacks, particularly given that reports suggesting Tawhedi’s alleged planned attack wasn’t an isolated affair. 

On October 14, the New York Post reported that French authorities have indicted an unidentified 22-year-old Afghan national “on charges of ‘foment[ing]’ a ‘plan for violent action’ at a soccer match or shopping center”.

As the paper notes, there are suggestions that the suspect in question (a purported ISIS supporter) is Tawhedi’s brother, although French prosecutors have not confirmed that fact.

If true, however, that suggests that Tawhedi was no “lone wolf” allegedly planning a one-off – albeit spectacular – attack that had been scheduled to occur three weeks from now.

The federal government has a responsibility to be honest with the American people about the potential terrorist threats that they may face. That responsibility doesn’t – or shouldn’t – stop simply because a presidential election is in the offing, especially if the threat is planned for Election Day itself.