Assimilation or Removal

On November 26, 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who entered the United States following the fall of Kabul and the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country in the summer of 2021, allegedly shot two West Virginia National Guard troops at the entrance to the Farragut West Metro in Washington, D.C., killing one. The case raises questions about the vetting of purported “allies” and underscores the need to either assimilate the Afghans Joe Biden brought to this country or remove them all. Both options come with costs. 

Warning Signs

Following the September 11, 2001, attacks by Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda terrorists, then-President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of the Central Asian country in early October 2021.

As the George W. Bush Library explains:

Critically, the United States supported the Northern Alliance, a group of mujahideen rebels within Afghanistan who resisted the Taliban’s control. After a series of victories against the Taliban, on November 13, forces of the Northern Alliance claimed Kabul, the nation’s capital. The Taliban lost control of Kandahar, the most populous city in Afghanistan, on December 6. 

While the successful invasion of the country was comparatively quick work, the “peace” was a more complicated matter, and the Northern Alliance wasn’t the only group the United States enlisted in the effort. 

In a June 2013 backgrounder, NATO claimed the pro-U.S. Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) consisted of “approximately 183,000 personnel including nearly 10,500 special forces” in the Afghan National Army (ANA), about 151,000 members of the Afghan National Police (ANP), and around 6,700 members of the Afghan Air Force (AAF), “including aircrew and maintenance and support personnel”. 

I say “claimed” because in April 2015 congressional testimony, John Sopko, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) noted his office’s audits had “highlight[ed] concerns that neither the United States nor its Afghan allies truly know how many Afghan soldiers and police are available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities”. 

There were also concerns about the reliability of those ANSF members who were actually “available for duty”. 

As my colleague Dan Cadman reported in October 2018: “United States military forces in Afghanistan” had “implemented a policy limiting contact with their Afghan counterparts, following some disturbing insider attacks involving what appear to be jihadist infiltrators of that country’s military and security forces.” 

Those so-called “green-on-blue” attacks (green for ANSF, blue for NATO) plainly reflected deficiencies in the capacity of the U.S. government and its allies to vet would-be Afghan forces, which wasn’t much of a surprise given the lack of reliable on-the-ground intelligence in a country that had been in conflict since Soviet troops invaded in December 1979.

There’s a reason the Hindu Kush has been referred to as the “graveyard of empires” for centuries; the United States was just the latest one to get the message, and the deeper you dig into SIGAR’s reports, the more costly you’ll realize that lesson was.

SIVs and the “Largest Air Evacuation in History”

The Taliban who sheltered al-Qaeda prior to September 11th battled NATO forces throughout the period of U.S. presence there, and in February 2020, the Trump I administration entered into an agreement with the group to transition Afghanistan back to the Taliban control.

The Biden administration kept that agreement even as Taliban attacks on ANSF forces continued and escalated (and even though it kept harboring al Qaeda), although the then-White House did push the deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces back to August 31, 2021. 

That month, my colleague Nayla Rush described the Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) the United States was offering Afghan nationals who assisted the U.S. government in the country, and about the unique refugee access accorded to U.S.-affiliated Afghans who are not eligible for SIVs.

Rush noted that there were three special statuses which Afghans who worked with U.S. forces could use to immigrate here:

SIV for Afghan translators/interpreters, or the “Translators program”;

SIV for Afghan nationals who were employed by/on behalf of the U.S. government, or the “Allies program”; and

Direct Access P-2 Program under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for U.S.-affiliated Afghans who are not eligible for an SIV.

In discussing the U.S. wind-down on July 8, 2021, President Biden pledged to honor those commitments to Afghan nationals who had assisted American efforts: “Our message to those women and men is clear. … There is a home for you in the United States if you so choose, and we will stand with you just as you stood with us.” 

Subsequently, on July 14, Biden announced “Operation Allies Refuge” (OAR), an effort to relocate Afghan nationals and their immediate families who qualified for SIV status. 

Directly thereafter, the State Department activated a task force to coordinate efforts to bring applicants who qualified for SIVs to the United States after vetting. 

OAR was intended to be an orderly resettlement program, but as Taliban forces pressed closer to the Afghan capital of Kabul, it began to spin wildly out of control. 

Thirteen U.S. troops were killed in a terror attack on August 26, 2021, while attempting to provide order and screen applicants at the Abbey Gate entrance to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, and by the time the “largest air evacuation in history” was over, 124,000 people – mostly unvetted – had been flown out of the country. 

“Operation Allies Welcome”

On August 29, Biden directed DHS to lead and coordinate the evacuation process, now known as “Operation Allies Welcome”. DHS stood up a unified coordination group (UCG) to head up that effort, and as the department’s website explained at the time:

The UCG reports directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security and coordinates the implementation of a broad range of services, including initial processing, COVID-19 testing, isolation of COVID-positive individuals, vaccinations, additional medical services, and screening and support for individuals who are neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents.

As part of that effort, the then-Department of Defense (DoD) transported SIV applicants and other Afghan evacuees “to intermediate staging bases”, called “lily pads”. 

Those lily pads were scattered across the globe, including in the Middle East and Europe, and operated as “emergency processing centers”. Once screened, those individuals were then transported to one of eight “safe havens” at military bases throughout the United States.

Then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed all Afghan nationals subsequently released into the United States would be thoroughly screened through a “multi-layered, multi-agency screening and vetting process” to ensure those who posed a danger to the national security would not make it in.

By October 2021, however, reports suggested certain steps in the vetting process for Afghan evacuees, from in-person interviews to document verification, had been “skipped or delayed”.

Afghans without paperwork or biometric or biographic identification allegedly were “allowed to give their own names and dates of birth for entry into U.S. government tracking systems”, while the screenings that did occur “didn’t include an assessment of the individual’s ties to the U.S.” 

In mid-December 2021, in response to reports that “virtually none of the 82,000 individuals flown from Afghanistan to the United States were properly vetted”, congressional Republicans demanded answers from Mayorkas about the screening and vetting process.

Then-Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, stated that his staff, thanks to “in-person oversight of the vetting operations” had determined “the vetting and screening process consisted of nothing more than ‘providing fingerprints and your name and many times, a facial image.’”

In February 2022, the DoD Office of Inspector General issued a report revealing large numbers of Afghan parolees had not been vetted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) using all the data DoD had at its disposal in its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) database prior to their relocation to safe havens in the United States. The report chillingly warned: 

As a result of the NCTC not vetting Afghan evacuees against all available data, the United States faces potential security risks if individuals with derogatory information are allowed to stay in the country. In addition, the U.S. Government could mistakenly grant SIV or parolee status to ineligible Afghan evacuees with derogatory information gathered from the DoD ABIS database. 

Threats Emerge

As I noted after that report was released: 

Legal and official immigration channels exist for a reason — to keep inadmissible aliens, and in particular, aliens who are inadmissible on criminal grounds out of the United States. In bypassing those official immigration channels and simply evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans to lily pads and safe havens, the Biden administration has created an unacceptable risk for the American people.

Perhaps, Afghans who were eligible for SIV status could have been transported to intermediate staging bases abroad, where they should have remained until their applications were adjudicated. Like hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, however, the remaining evacuees should have been placed in camps near Afghanistan for regular refugee processing.

Not that anybody in the Biden administration solicited my advice. In any event, threats posed by Afghans relocated to the United States and released into this country quickly emerged. 

The most notable threat prior to the Thanksgiving Eve shooting involved Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, who came to the United States in September 2021. 

Tawhedi, who had been living in Oklahoma City, pled guilty in June to conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), “a designated foreign terrorist organization”, and to “receiving, attempting to receive, and conspiring to receive firearms and ammunition in furtherance of a federal crime of terrorism”, with the ultimate aim of “carry[ing] out a violent terror attack on Election Day in 2024”. 

Tawhedi was among the Afghans listed in the following November 29 DHS tweet, but he was far from the only one:

Tens of thousands of unvetted Afghan aliens have hurt and terrorized Americans after the Biden administration flooded our communities with criminals, terrorists, and other threats. 

These are just a few of the criminals who have rewarded American generosity with violence:

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) November 29, 2025

And notably, on November 29, the New York Post reported the federal government had “uncovered ‘potential derogatory information’ on a total of 6,868 people who came from Afghanistan as part of President Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome in 2021”, including 5,005 who were flagged as posing a “national security concern”. 

Rahmanullah Lakanwal

Which brings me to the shooting at the Farragut Square Metro stop on November 26. 

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the alleged attacker, was paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, after reportedly leading an ANSF special forces “Zero Unit” group in Afghanistan under the aegis of the CIA. 

For reasons that aren’t clear, he did not receive an SIV but instead was granted asylum in April and had been living in Bellingham, Wash., with his wife and five children and working until August as a driver for Amazon Flex.

Some have attempted to cast blame on the Trump administration for the attack given the timing of Lakanwal’s asylum grant, but as a former immigration judge and prosecutor, I can assure you of two things. 

The first is that if the U.S. government hasn’t uncovered information indicating an alien is a security risk prior to an asylum hearing, the likelihood that evidence uncovered at that hearing will uncover terror ties is close to zero. 

The second is that the worse – and more conflicted – the country from which an asylum applicant is seeking protection, the more likely that application will be granted.

And with only few notable exceptions, Afghanistan has been in some form of conflict since Darius I of Babylon showed up there 2500 years ago. 

Much has also been made of the fact that, as a Zero Unit member, Lakanwal would have been “among the most extensively vetted of any Afghans who worked with American forces”, but I’ll note he purportedly starting working with the CIA in 2011, when – by my math – he would have been around 15 years old.

Radical “Connections” in the United States

I doubt how much good vetting does when the subject is barely able to shave, but in any event DHS Secretary Kristi Noem went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to suggest Lakanwal may have been “radicalized” after he got here – not before he arrived.

“We do believe it [Lakanwal’s radicalization] was through connections in his home community and state,” the secretary stated, “and we’re going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him”. 

Similar claims were made about Tawhedi (though the facts are still not clear), but last October, NBC News warned that ISIS “has ramped up its recruitment efforts in the past year . . . rolling out a sophisticated propaganda campaign designed to persuade disaffected Muslims to carry out terrorist plots in the U.S. and other Western countries.”

ISIS is just one terrorist organization attempting to undermine the United States, and its leaders and others would be perfectly happy to see more attacks like the Farragut Square shooting. The same is true of countless state actors that aren’t exactly rooting for American success. 

Consequently, our government must either double down on efforts to assimilate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were brought to his country during the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul or DHS will have to isolate and remove them to a third country. 

The former option is likely impossible without the expenditure of significant resources (and even then, far from foolproof), while the latter would be met with howls that the United States is “abandoning” its erstwhile “allies”. 

The best and only way to protect the homeland from aliens who pose threats is to stop them before they enter. The careless way Joe Biden brought tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans here was recklessness bordering on insanity, and now it’s up to his successor to make the difficult choices required to clean up the mess.