Rahmanullah Lakanwal will be facing murder charges after all
In unutterably sad news, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom has died, which means that Rahmanullah Lakanwal will be facing murder charges for the DC shooting of two members of the National Guard. The other victim is in critical condition and may not survive either.
This crime brings back horrific memories of the late 60s and early 70s, when many police were ambushed and murdered. Back then the assailants were mostly home-grown, but this one was imported. The Biden administration was warned that people from Afghanistan were being let in without proper vetting after the disastrous 2021 pullout, but it happened anyway. Lakanwal came here during that influx, but was he unvetted?:
Shawn VanDiver, founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a US nonprofit run by American veterans helping to evacuate and resettle Afghan allies in the US said one man’s monstrous actions are now hurting all Afghans who risked their lives for the US in its 20-year war — and the shockwaves are hitting the Americans who helped them find safety.
“He betrayed everybody who helped him,” VanDiver said Thursday. “He betrayed his family. He betrayed every American that helped him get here. He betrayed the United States government. And he deserves to be held fully accountable.”
That article doesn’t go into Lakanwal’s personal history, however, so it doesn’t answer the question of how well he was vetted. Here’s something that speaks to that question:
“This is a deadly combination,” Kent declared, noting that the suspected terrorist “was only vetted to serve as a soldier to fight against the Taliban, AQ, & ISIS IN Afghanistan, he was NOT vetted for his suitability to come to America and live among us as a neighbor, integrate into our communities, or eventually become an American citizen.”
A senior US official confirmed that he had been “vetted to fight” alongside US forces against Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS militants between 2011 and 2021 — but that this was a “low standard” that “has never been used before to let people into the US.”
That raises some interesting questions. So Lakanwal fought to help the US defeat the Taliban – and indeed, although that’s an indication he wasn’t fond of the Taliban, it doesn’t tell us much about why, or about any of his other beliefs. However, once we were leaving Afghanistan, it put him and anyone else who had helped the US at grave risk of retaliation from Taliban forces. The idea of bringing such people here was not just to save them – although that was part of it – but also to establish the idea that if you help the US you won’t be abandoned in the end.
“Prior to Biden it took 18 months or longer for someone to be granted a Special Immigrant Visa, including the applicant needing to flee to a third country so the US government could interview and vet them,” the official noted. “Biden threw all of this out and applied tactical war time vetting to people seeking entry into the homeland.” …
Chad Robichaux, a former Force Recon Marine who deployed to Afghanistan eight times and was part of a coalition effort that evacuated 17,000 nationals from the country in 2021, claimed to The Post that there was “zero vetting” for tens of thousands of Afghans flown out of Kabul in the final days of the withdrawal.
“Probably close to 100,000 of them were flown straight from Kabul to the United States to different airfields, and they were let go into the American population. We have no idea who they are — zero vetting,” said Robichaux, who authored the 2023 book “Saving Aziz: How the Mission to Help One Became a Calling to Rescue Thousands from the Taliban.”
The Biden administration let in an estimated 80,000 such refugees, and their asylum claims were expedited as well. How did Lakanwal end up in Bellingham, Washington?:
The Kandahar Strike Force [Lakanwal] joined was a CIA-backed paramilitary group that fought alongside US forces — but was also accused of being a death squad that tortured and executed civilians.
Roughly 10,000 members of the so-called “Zero Units” eventually settled in Washington State near Seattle. Lakanwal ended up in Bellingham, Wash., with his wife and five children in September 2021.
I assume the FBI will be pretty busy in Bellingham for a while. Here’s an article featuring interviews with some of Lakanwal’s Bellingham neighbors, who seem quite clueless about him and his family except to say that the FBI has visited the apartment where he and his family lived.
Trump has made some announcements, including a “sweeping review of green card holders from 19 countries of concern.” No doubt this will be challenged in the courts.
RIP, Sarah Beckstrom. Such a tragic loss.
Maybe I’m getting old or something but watching that motorcade leave the hospital last night really hit me.
So sad.
Pray for the survival and healing of the other Guard member, Andrew Wolfe.
Lakanwal, according to the linked article at the NY Post, lives in a $2000 per month apartment with his wife and five children. They have very little furniture, sleeping on some cushions on the floor. The family speak little English. His oldest child is fourteen; Lakanwal is 29. So he left all those who are dependent on him to drive across the country to murder National Guard in the streets of our capital.
@ Kate @6:41
If the oldest child is 14, then he was 15 when she was born, maybe even 14 when he impregnated the mother. And how old now is the alleged mother? If he likely was not properly vetted (if at all) before being brought to the US, we don’t even know if she is his child. Or if any of them are his children, or if the mother is his wife. We don’t truly know (unless they’ve been DNA-ed) anything about the alleged family.
That he would leave them like this makes me wonder if he has any familial (or emotional) connection to them at all. In the chaos of the 2021 withdrawal, and the unwillingness of the Biden misadministration to vet people, he could have claimed anyone as his family, and all of the bleeding hearts in the Biden gang wouldn’t care. He could have brought the real Osama Bin Laden with him as his “father” and that gang would have looked the other way.
I know of what I speak, because the withdrawal was the last task force I worked before retiring from State a few months later. It was the biggest fiasco I’ve ever seen, run by the most incompetent ideologues ever seen in the USG.
All true, Telemachus. Certainly his desertion of them doesn’t argue for a strong connection.
Humans aren’t that good at reasoning, but we are good at pattern-recognition.
Democrats can’t keep tap-dancing away violent immigrants forever. Likewise violent leftists.
The left news media are gleefully reporting that Lakanwal was granted asylum by the Trump administration. His timeline in the United States sheds some light on this. He was admitted to the United States on September 8, 2021. He applied for asylum in December 2024 and it was granted in April 2025. This implies that he was in the United States mostly under the Biden regime. The investigation was conducted by Biden regime personnel and they made the asylum grant. With the obstruction by the Democrats in the Senate, the President was not able to get his picks into many positions a few months into his administration.
Neo: “… also to establish the idea that if you help the US you won’t be abandoned in the end.”
If countries don’t have friends but only interests …
We can probably blame Biden and company for their terrible handling of the exit from Afghanistan, presumably hoping to beat the 20 year clock for 9/11/2021. An awful lot of very bad decision making, vs. Trump’s negotiated and step wise plan with the Taliban.
But this result does suggest we need to be more resolute in our engaging with locals when we ask them to work against their fellow residents (citizens? denizens? enemies? clans?). If they are helping us it presumably should also be in aid of them helping themselves to achieve a suitable regime change to a democratic constitutional republic. They have to have real skin in the game. There could be other reasons for such engagement, based only on our own self interest, but then the “contract” should be “your on your own when we leave”.
In re the murderer (I will NOT call him alleged): miguel linked to this post by El Gato Malo on a prior thread, but I’m putting it up again for the section relevant to this post.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/backing-up-the-shark-truck
*from a commenter, I have not verified the assertion:
“Sarah Beckstrom, one of the murdered National Guard, *volunteered* to work so that others would not have to over the holiday. Saying she was picking up trash is really … gross, even for the media.”
Here’s how the official story will read forevermore by our betters: The killer was a Trump supporter and granted asylum by his hero, but became disillusioned by his criminal plan to place the national guard in DC. The brave migrant took it upon himself to fight these unlawful fascist forces and was ultimately found to be “not guilty” of murder by a jury of his peers in DC.
“That article doesn’t go into Lakanwal’s personal history, however, so it doesn’t answer the question of how well he was vetted.”
There’s a really good chance that vetting him wouldn’t have turned up anything anyway.
He fought for the US against the Taliban at the risk of his life and the lives of his family members. Not the actions of someone with a past that would have popped during the vetting process.
But…how did that particular effort end? Who’s in charge in Afghanistan now?
If someone cared enough about his country to ally himself with a foreign nation to try to free it from oppression, think he might be a little bitter that the nation who was supposedly helping them, just gave up and abandoned their country to the enemy? Even if he and his immediate family was provided passage to the US, what about extended family? His friends? His country? Maybe he felt a bit betrayed?
Remember why Osama Bin Laden was annoyed at us? He fought with the Taliban against Russia in Afghanistan back when our policy was “the enemy of our enemy is our friend” and supported the Taliban…until we stopped. Which didn’t sit well with Osama.
Not saying we’re the bad guys here. Only they are responsible for their actions. But we have made mistakes and what I’m saying is perhaps we should learn a lesson from this (unlike in the past) and be a bit more circumspect about who we ally with when we start a war we’re not serious about winning. Or, better yet, don’t start wars unless we’re serious about winning them.
BTW: I wonder if there are any other Afghan refugees we took in who feel a bit betrayed about how we abandoned their country to the very people we went in there to punish. Food for thought
The enemy of my enemy is not automatically a Boy Scout with rifle training. He may be a sketchy character. Being annoyed at the Taliban may be for some reason other than not having a New England town meeting democracy.
It could be totally irrational, completely personal. Been said Astan is not a country but a place on a map surrounded by countries. IOW, national loyalty isn’t necessarily in the water supply. Possibly lots of personal gripes and local issues.
Or maybe some guys just like to do that stuff and we give them weapons and some intel.
But to have a former CIA officer as one of the Seditious Six suggesting the Guard are going to be shooting civilians and….a CIA asset shoots a couple of Guardsmen. Not sure of any connection but it’s a bad look for Slotkin, except among democrats, of course.
now if we had confidence in our intellligence services, I would say they would have these persons in reserve in the event we were to have to ‘re-engage against the Taliban, like supposedly some of the Northern Alliance figures across the border in Tajikistan, but who would really trust their word, on that score,
Bin Laden didn’t seem to be very grateful to the assistance we supplied through the ISI, but that apparently the reason why Colonel Imam, and his superiors, worked with us ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is only true up to a point,
those associates of his, like Hekmatyar or the Haqquanis to cite two examples,
seem to have an animus toward us fromt he beginning, largely because of our secular orientation,
as daniel greenfield has noted, this habit of irregular habits, among these newcomers is not a one off, and the numbers are rather striking, how many men, did it take, to almost strike down the towers, the first time, the Sheikh Rahman cell,
that remark about the late miss beckstrom’s motivation is attributed to pam bondi,
the Haqquanis are largely in charge, along with other factions like the Mehsud clan,of Afghanistan, the ones whose father, grandfather made the first deal with the Company and the ISI,
I think I first heard of him in Bearden’s book about the mole hunt, that went awry,
Seems to me that the best choice for Afghans who helped us when we were there would have been to assist them in relocating to another majority-Muslim country, not to the USA, where they are alien to the culture.
Sorry Kate. That makes way too much sense. We’re talking politicians here.
Kate, you clearly have had much greater experience living in some other Muslim societies than almost any of us, but somehow I don’t see (say) Egypt or Morocco being especially welcoming to Afghans, or most of the prior USSR Stans? Perhaps Pakistan by “near-by” default?
If they are sufficiently clannish/tribal I would think any move away from that support environment would be made hesitantly and only as a last resort? But the vast majority of us in the US do indeed live very sheltered lives. For which we have just been giving Thanksgiving.
Afghanistan is populated with Pathans (the majority population in Pakistan’s northwest frontier), Tajiks (the majority in Tajikistan, Hazaras (kin to the Tajiks), Balochs (the majority in one province in Iran and another in Pakistan), and UZbeks (who dominate Uzbekistan).
Interesting perspective posted on RS McCain’s page, although I think it’s rather farfetched:
“Say this guy was America’s biggest fan. He liked America so much he worked with us in Afghanistan, his own homeland, then came over to America after the abandonment.
Well he’s not going to have the context a lot of natives citizens have but he would be devoted to America. So what if we imagine he was hearing all the fascism talk and how the national guard troops were the new gestapo and this guy took it seriously? If he was willing to fight the totalitarian Taliban in his home nation, why wouldn’t he decide to pick up a gun and fight what everyone is telling him is the same thing in his new nation?
is the man really crazy? Or is he devoted? Sure we might say “he should know all that fascism talk wasn’t serious” but… how would he? Given the circumstances why wouldn’t he take the news at face value and accept their word?”
”Remember why Osama Bin Laden was annoyed at us?”
Yes. We saved Saudi Arabia from invasion and conquest by the Iraqi army. That Islam’s holiest land had to be saved by infidels was an insult to Islam, as was our very presence on that land.
”He fought with the Taliban against Russia in Afghanistan…”
He did no such thing. Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan lasted from 1979 to 1989. The Taliban didn’t come into existence until 1994.
”…back when our policy…supported the Taliban…”
In our near 250-year history we have never supported the Taliban.
”…be a bit more circumspect about who we ally with when we start a war we’re not serious about winning.”
We didn’t start the Afghan War, but we did win it.
”Or, better yet, don’t start wars unless we’re serious about winning them.”
We haven’t started any wars since, arguably, 1898, though given what was known at time time, 1812 is a better figure.
Public hanging. Deport entire family.
@Mkent: You are absolutely correct about the Taliban. I was conflating that with the Mujahideen. Hazards of relying on memory when getting older and the memory ain’t what it used to be.
“We didn’t start the Afghan War, but we did win it.”
Seriously? The warfighters may have won every major engagement…just like in Vietnam…but, also just like Vietnam, our political leaders gave up, surrendered, and ordered the military to flee. That’s not what I’d call winning.
“We haven’t started any wars since, arguably, 1898, though given what was known at time time, 1812 is a better figure.”
I guess that depends on what you mean by “starting”, and my point isn’t that we shouldn’t necessarily have been involved in those conflicts (at least some of them anyway) but that when we decide to go to war, we should go to war. Period. Not pussyfoot around war with ROE and “objectives” that preclude our military from winning.
Thank you for the correction, but my overall point stands.
”That’s not what I’d call winning.”
Let’s review. On 9-11-2001 nineteen men from Afghanistan hijacked four American airliners and flew them into the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The men were members of Al Qaeda, led by a man named Osama bin Laden, and trained at one of dozens of terrorist training camps spread throughout Afghanistan.
Since then America has killed Osama bin Laden, his generals, most of his lieutenants, and thousands of his men. It utterly destroyed every Al Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan and dozens of others around the world. The destruction was so complete that the Al Qaeda organization no longer exists. By the time the American military withdrew the greatest danger to their lives was traffic accidents.
That’s a victory, and a near complete one.