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The shooting in America of two National Guards by an Afghan suspect has generated the usual knee jerk U.S. administration reaction. U.S. President Donald Trump has halted all asylum requests from Afghans, suspended immigration processes and is threatening to investigate and possibly rescind U.S. green cards.
The crime of one Afghan has been used to paint all Afghans with the same brush, to see all Afghans through the prism of a shooter, who shares their nationality.Pledge your support
Imagine if that same practice of painting everyone with the same brush was applied to Americans. In March 2012, a U.S. Army Staff-Sergeant Robert Bales, massacred 16 people, most of them children, in southern Afghanistan. One witness said the American soldier killed her husband, punched her 7-year-old son and stuck a pistol in the mouth of her baby child.
In 2011, a U.S. contractor with the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan shot and killed two people on the streets of the deeply congested city of eastern Lahore. He shot multiple times from inside his black SUV at two men, he claimed were trying to rob him. The police later said one was shot running away. The American contractor was whisked out of the country, and faced no charges despite Pakistani officials saying his story was suspect.
The American shooter, clearly a man with anger issues, was charged with assault two years later back home in America, and went to jail, but in Pakistan he did not even face trial.
But neither Afghanistan, nor Pakistan reacted like President Trump, or like a big chunk of Trump’s base, who are using the Washington DC shooting to demonize Afghans and add hate-filled fuel to their often unlawful assault on all immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Perhaps the most hate-filled assault on immigrants came from America’s twice elected president in his Thanksgiving Day message .
It is easy to see that he and his base could learn much from Afghans and Pakistanis.
When that American soldier massacred 16 Afghans as they slept, Afghans did not immediately become suspicious of all Americans, nor did they inflict them with the humiliation of being targeted for the actions of a few. The same was true in Pakistan where Pakistanis did not look at all Americans with fear after one of their own carried out a frightening broad daylight shooting in the middle of one of the most congested streets in a city of 14 million people.
That brings me back to the Afghan who is charged with carrying out the DC shooting.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, bears the scars of the chaotic evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Afghans following the Taliban return in 2021, his involvement with shadowy CIA-trained commando units accused of atrocities and exposure to an American gun culture, that looks to an outsider, like firearms seem central to resolving conflicts.
So prolific are shootings in America, by Americans, that in June last year the U.S. Surgeon General “declared firearm violence a public health crisis,” according to the 107-year-old Commonwealth Fund. The Pew Institute also last year reported 1 in 4 American teachers said their schools went into gun-related lockdowns. It’s in this proud American gun culture that a disillusioned and deeply disturbed Lakanwal found himself.
Following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 an international community, in need of assuaging its guilt at abandoning Afghans after a failed 20-year intervention, encouraged, helped and airlifted hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Little to no follow through thought was given to what the future might look like for these Afghans fleeing their homeland, so focused were they to just ‘get them out”
The result was the international community’s good intentions effectively paved the road to hell for many Afghans. Tens of thousands of those Afghans are still stuck in Pakistan and are unlikely to ever get to the United States or Europe. Instead they are in hiding, as Pakistan searches to deport them back to their country. Thousands more are seeking alternate and often dangerous and deadly ways to get to America and to Europe.
Lakanwal also started on his own journey down that road in 2021.
His journey, as told in an AP story, was a painful one filled with struggles to hold down a job and to assimilate in his new American home. Instead of streets paved in gold, a false vision most poor and desperate refugees hold of America, Lakanwal found a country and life he neither knew nor understood and from where he saw no hope.
The many “foreign friends” who helped Afghans flee, did so without warning them of the life they might find outside their homeland __ of the isolation, of the poverty, of the harsh reality of a tight job market, of trying to survive while still trying to learn a language, and trying to navigate bureaucracies that frighten even the most proficient at unlocking government benefits.
While many Afghans fleeing the return of the Taliban were leaving, not out of fear for their lives, but in search of a better, freer life, that was not so for Lakanwal. He had reason to be afraid. He needed to leave.
As a member of the deadly CIA-trained commando units known as “zero “ units , Lakanwal had much to be afraid of, not just from the Taliban, but from most Afghans, who saw these units as marauding gangs of heavily armed Afghan soldiers, aligned with America, who could get away with murder and often did.
The units were a shadowy military group that operated with near impunity. Their operations were rarely questioned, but investigations conducted by human rights groups revealed a military group whose actions and methods defied international law and most certainly Afghan law.
According to a Human Rights Watch report it “documents 14 cases in which CIA-backed Afghan strike forces committed serious abuses between late 2017 and mid-2019. They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations—some amounting to war crimes—that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity.”
The report went on to say: “In the course of researching this report, Afghan officials, civil society and human rights activists, Afghan and foreign healthcare workers, journalists, and community elders all described abusive raids and indiscriminate airstrikes as having become a daily fact of life for many communities—often with devastating consequences. Speaking to Human Rights Watch, one diplomat familiar with Afghan strike force operations referred to them as “death squads.”
They were the best paid and best outfitted of Afghan commando units operating alongside U.S. and NATO forces . In 2017 in a departure from previous policy, the U.S. authorized these Afghan commandos to call in airstrikes on suspected terrorist locations resulting in indiscriminate airstrikes terrorizing many communities across Afghanistan.
By 2019 the United Nations reported more Afghans were killed by international forces and their Afghan allies Afghan than by the Taliban and other militants.
Yes Lakanwal had much to fear from remaining in Afghanistan and as it turned out much to fear from leaving.