Posted on 12/01/2025 6:22:02 AM PST by MtnClimber
The video of the ambush is brief and sickening. Two young National Guard soldiers, barely into adulthood, walk their post near the White House. An Islamic terrorist rounds the corner, raises a revolver, and opens fire. By the time other guardsmen tackle him, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom is fatally wounded and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is fighting for his life. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is not some random drifter. He is a former member of the CIA’s elite Afghan “Zero Units,” a paramilitary strike force trained for kill capture missions in the Taliban heartland. He came here through President Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome program and was later granted asylum. The war in Afghanistan did not stay over there. We flew a piece of it into our own neighborhoods.
To see why this matters, we have to understand what the Zero Units were. During the later years of the Afghan war, the CIA quietly created Afghan only commando teams that operated outside Afghanistan’s ordinary military chain of command. Human Rights Watch describes these formations as CIA backed strike forces that conducted high risk night raids, often without meaningful Afghan government oversight, and documents repeated allegations of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. ProPublica’s multi year investigation into one of these units concluded that its night raids killed hundreds of civilians even in a limited four year sample, with total casualties likely far higher. These are not speculative claims from partisan blogs, they are the product of painstaking field reporting, interviews with survivors, and cross checking with morgue records and satellite imagery.
The Kandahar based 03 Unit, where Lakanwal served, operated out of Firebase Gecko, a former Taliban compound repurposed as a CIA hub. Journalists and human rights investigators have chronicled raids in Kandahar and Helmand in which 03 operators separated women and children, dragged men from homes, and left bodies in courtyards. Afghan witnesses spoke of school principals executed in front of their families and detainees taken away and never seen again. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report listed at least 14 separate Zero Unit operations with credible evidence of war crimes, including the killing of women and children during night raids. ProPublica’s Lynzy Billing, who spent years interviewing Zero Unit soldiers and their victims, quotes one fighter saying bluntly that Americans pointed out the targets and Afghans “hit them,” then signed battle damage assessments that reported no civilian deaths even when women and children lay in the rubble.
The defenders of these units reply that they were also extremely effective against Taliban and ISIS commanders. That is likely true. CIA officers and US special operators did not invest years in training useless proxies. But the moral problem is not efficiency, it is method. These units were built to be deniable, to operate in the shadows, to shoot first and count bodies later, if at all. The whole architecture was designed to insulate American political leadership from hard questions about who was being killed in the dead of night. It is one thing, though already questionable, to use such forces on foreign soil in an existential war. It is quite another thing to fly them, with minimal rethinking and minimal safeguards, into US suburbs.
Operation Allies Welcome was Biden’s signature evacuation policy in the chaotic weeks after Kabul fell. By the administration’s own count, almost 100,000 Afghans were brought to the US under its umbrella. Among them were interpreters and embassy staff, but also large numbers of Afghan special operators, including at least 2,000 Zero Unit members. Major outlets now report that whole clusters of Zero Unit veterans were resettled in and around Seattle and other major US cities. Rolling Stone describes the Zero Unit diaspora in America as “the CIA’s secret Afghan army starting new lives in the US,” with many still in touch with former handlers. There is something deeply strange about that phrase. Secret armies are not supposed to have American zip codes.
The case for evacuation was presented in moral terms. These men fought beside us, we were told, and so we owed them a safe haven. There is an emotional appeal here, and it is strongest in cases where Afghans risked their lives as linguists or civil society allies. Yet moral debts are not unlimited IOUs, and they do not negate governments’ first obligation to protect their own citizens. Even if we bracket, for the sake of argument, the contested human rights record of the Zero Units, it takes only a moment’s reflection to see the hazard in resettling thousands of heavily conditioned commandos into a civilian culture they do not know, in a language they barely speak, with no plan beyond dropping them in apartments and wishing them good luck.
The facts emerging about Lakanwal’s life in the US are depressingly predictable. He arrived with his wife and five children and settled in Bellingham, Washington. Reports from local advocates and landlords describe a man drifting into isolation, cycling through unstable jobs, taking sudden long road trips, and sinking into what one email called “dark depression.” The Associated Press obtained correspondence from a community worker who repeatedly warned that he was becoming severely withdrawn, neglecting his children, and showing signs of self harm. At the same time, national security officials now say, he was almost certainly radicalized after arrival, consuming online material that reinforced a sense of grievance and martyrdom.
In other words, we took a man whose only adult skill set was lethal violence in a CIA designed environment of deniability, dropped him into an alien culture with minimal support, and then hoped that social services and refugee nonprofits would do what years of discipline, trauma, and ideological conflict could not. This is not a serious immigration system. It is a wish.
The problem is not that Afghans, as a people, are uniquely prone to violence. The problem is that the Zero Units are not a random cross section of Afghans. They are a very specific population, selected precisely because they could be turned into uncompromising instruments of violence, taught to kick in doors at night, trained to push past the inhibitions most human beings feel when a rifle is pointed at another man’s chest in front of his children.
Human rights groups that are generally sympathetic to refugees have been warning about this design flaw for years. When Biden announced evacuation flights, Human Rights Watch stressed that members of abusive Afghan forces, including Zero Unit veterans, might themselves require third country relocation or prosecution, not quiet importation into Western cities. Billing’s reporting in ProPublica documents how some Zero Unit soldiers, wracked by guilt, described themselves as “broken men” who struggled to sleep and drank heavily between missions. Kurdish German trauma specialists interviewed for those investigations warned that repeated exposure to violence produces complex, multi generational trauma and that without structured treatment, the risk of self destruction or outward violence remains high.
The administration’s answer has been that Operation Allies Welcome vetting was “multi layered” and “rigorous,” involving intelligence databases, biometric checks, and interviews. We should be clear about what such vetting can and cannot do. It can sometimes catch known terrorists, known criminals, and individuals flagged by existing records. It cannot see inside someone’s mind. It cannot tell you which of two Zero Unit team leaders is quietly unraveling, or which one will process the loss of a comrade by reading his way into extremist forums. To rely on vetting alone is to confuse a background check with a psychological evaluation.
Defenders also stress that Zero Unit fighters were among the most thoroughly vetted Afghans during the war itself. That simply proves the point. The same system that supposedly vetted them overseas also produced, by every serious independent account, a record of civilian killings, botched raids, and unaccountable night operations that poisoned local support for the Afghan government. ProPublica’s tally of at least 452 civilians killed by only one Zero Unit, the 02 force in Nangarhar, over four years is likely an undercount, yet it was enough to shock even members of Congress who saw the numbers. If that is what “thoroughly vetted” looked like overseas, we should not be reassured by the claim that those very same systems filtered who got on the evacuation flights.
One might ask what the alternative was. Should we simply have left Zero Unit members to face Taliban revenge? The Taliban have in fact hunted and killed former 03 officers, as Human Rights Watch documented after the fall of Kandahar. So the danger to them is real. Yet granting that fact does not force the conclusion that the only humane response is permanent admission to the US......SNIP
It is exactly the kind of decision that I would expect the Biden administration to make.
Definitely no mistake. It was intentional.
Think Jimmy Carter bringing the Shah into the country for treatment not knowing how the Iranians will react.
All muslims are members of Death Squads. They are just waiting for the word to go into action.
I would trust rattlesnake before I would trust a muslim.
The people at Fort Hood trusted a muslim.
The girl at Washington D.C.
Look at where they are now.
Biden had no idea what was going on. Klain and other staff members were running the entire show.
Yes. This man’s life was spiralling out of control but what prompted him to take a plane to D.C. to specifically kill a national guardsman? He could have easily just went off in Seattle. This wasn’t by happenstance.
Definitely no mistake. It was intentional.
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so how many “zero units” did brandon bring in from other countries?
TDA
MS13
Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif
ISIS
Taliban
Boko Haram
Al-Shabaab
Like all the fraud in MN, this was also not a mistake.
I hope Trump actually keeps his word, shuts down all third foreign immigration and asylum requests and starts kicking these people out. Bringing your foreign trained assassins into your own country is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard of, only a complete fool would think this is a good idea!
Spontaneous islam Combustion.
“ Among them were interpreters and embassy staff, but also large numbers of Afghan special operators, including at least 2,000 Zero Unit members.”
This is horrifying, both the number of these hired killers, and the concept of their program. I wonder why I had never even heard of these CIA outfits before.
Please, president Trump, no more foreign wars that are not in our national interest. We are so blessed to have President Trump.
“Definitely no mistake. It was intentional.”
My first thought was exactly the same. When the consequences of a proposed action are highly predictable, and a person chooses to take that action, the consequences are deliberate. No amount of wishing away harsh reality changes that.
Shakespeare said that “the evil men do lives after them.” That will certainly be the case with Biden’s legacy.
Thanks for posting!
US Tier 1 operators are not well supported by VA programs to address the same issues described for Zero Unit special operators. Who will pay for treatment of the latter for PTSD and other combat-related trauma? That Biden imported these time bombs willy nilly into CONUS is infuriating and should be cause for deep alarm among Americans. Sarah Carter, a former Agency targeter, has warned about this on the Shawn Ryan podcast. Our readers here would be well advised to go to SRS to listen to her on this topic.
Note: Sarah Adams, not Sarah Carter…
But apparently their identities are known. They can be surveilled, and they dang sure better be.
"War is hell" all right, but I don't think the country is ready for, say, public congressional hearings on Zero Unit operations and their aftermath.
I read the piece waiting for the question of what we are to do with these men once their value as tools was over.
God, that is a tough question.
You are correct. Look at what the military did to the Blackwater contractors in Iraq, or Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, to understand how bad it could get with Congressional hearings on Agency operations involving Zero Unit cells.
Regardless, the Zero Unit folks should not have been brought over to the USA. They are ticking time bombs of uncertain loyalties.
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