Painful and Disorienting: The Shooter of Two National Guard Members
by Brian Carroll
Department of Justice photo of Rahmanullah Lakanwal
I don’t believe that Rahmanullah Lakanwal drove from Washington state to Washington DC, and then to within two blocks of the White House, only to fire on two young members of the West Virginia National Guard.
I do think the accusations about who did or didn’t vet Lakanwal miss the point completely. Both the Biden and Trump administrations had vetted the shooter. The Biden vetting occurred during the collapse of Kabul. There was a bipartisan race to save the Afghans who had served with US forces. We all understood that our partners and employees would be tortured and slaughtered by the incoming Taliban. Indeed, that was the sad fate of those we failed to get out.
Last year the Trump Administration again vetted Lakanwal, before granting him asylum. Even earlier, I assume the CIA vetted Lakanwal before hiring him at age 15 or 16 for their ‘Zero Unit.’ As much as partisans on each side want to lay blame, nobody scores any points over the vetting.
Vetting can never serve as a crystal ball. Vetting can spot bad associations and poor habits, but identifying the person who is six months away from cracking is only slightly more likely than RFK, Jr. being able to read someone’s mitochondria as they hurry through an airport.
I haven’t spoken with him and don’t know Lakanwal’s mindset, but I do have observations from my own experience.
By definition, a refugee is going to experience great psychological stress. This does not in any way excuse the man or lessen the evil of his crime, but it can reduce some of the silliness that we have seen in response. A refugee or asylum seeker has suffered trauma, lost everything familiar, and arrived in a strange place and culture. I have neighbors who have never been outside of California’s San Joaquin Valley, or maybe as far as Pismo Beach. Many Americans have never experienced culture shock or the trauma of forced relocation.
The closest I can compare came in 1995, when I evacuated from Colombia during their civil war. I had been teaching school at a Bible translation center. Then in short order I lost a lakeside house and garden I loved, the most rewarding job I will ever have, and the kind of close circle of friends that can only develop in a tight community that exists as an island in a foreign country. At the same time, my eldest kids left for college and my father-in-law died. I’m a pretty resilient and optimistic guy, but I responded with about five years of depression. And yet, for me, I was returning to the state where I was raised. I came back to family and friends. I owned a house that I’d rented out while I was gone, I spoke the language, and I held valid professional credentials. I hate to even imagine the experience of arriving without any of that.
The Biden Administration set up Services to Afghan Survivors Impacted by Combat (SASIC), a program that provided job placement, medical, psychological, and social work help to arriving Afghans. A family member of mine worked in this briefly and recalls the frustration over trying to find a trauma therapist who spoke either Pashto or Dari, the most common languages in Afghanistan.
However, soon after taking office, President Trump suspended federal funding for refugee resettlement agencies. This halted several kinds of help to those already in the US and stranded nearly 1,660 Afghans in intermediate countries, even though they had had already been approved for entry into the US. A portion of the 1,660 are family members of US military personnel or have a family relationship with Afghans already in the US. Trump eliminated the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) office, the Enduring Welcome program, and the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of thousands of Afghans. They could now be deported for no violations of law.
The Zero Unit, in which Lakanwal had served for about a decade, used Afghans to do the dirty jobs that Americans didn’t want to get caught doing (read: extrajudicial killings). Lakanwal’s friends have reported that memories from this work had left him with emotional distress.
I can imagine. I have a friend who served the US military by training soldiers from Central America to, as he was told, ‘Save Democracy.’ Later, he discovered that he had been training death squads. His whole outlook on life changed, as he channeled his feelings of guilt and betrayal into anti-war activism. Lakanwal’s experience would be even more painful and disorienting.
Rules to live by:
Never double-cross the assassins you have trained yourself.
And: Overseas wars never stay overseas. We always bring them home with us.
I don’t believe Lakanwal held any grudges against either of his victims, nor even against the National Guard. His grudge was against — primarily — his experience in Afghanistan while he served with the CIA, and secondarily, against the treatment that Afghans have suffered since his arrival in the US. I suspect he drove across the country hoping to gain access to the White House and the President.
Our Egocentrist-in-Chief was asked whether he would attend the memorial service for Specialist Sarah Beckstrom. Trump responded that he hadn’t thought about it, but then quickly pivoted to how much West Virginia loves him, and how that state voted strongly for him in 2024. Like all of the National Guard personnel in Washington, young Sarah served only as an expendable prop in Trump’s political drama. She was in uniform and took a bullet for Trump, but he didn’t think to order flags to be set to half staff.
Trump also promised to “permanently pause migration” from “third world countries,” and to “end all federal benefits and subsidies to non-citizens.”
In the larger picture, U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe should have been home celebrating Thanksgiving with their families. Soldiers are not trained for police work, and US District Judge Jia M. Cobb had already declared that Trump’s National Guard deployment in DC was unlawful.
Crime could better have been addressed by restoring funds to the police budget.
Funds for the DC police force had been reduced through several Trump/GOP actions. A cut to FEMA’s Urban Area Security Initiative left the city about $20 million below 2024 payments. The termination of DOJ grants made it less likely that DC could have qualified for a share. During Congressional Budget Freezes in past years, DC has been granted an exemption, but not this year. The hit might have meant $1.1 billion for the city. During their stay in the city, National Guard personnel were put to tasks filling in for furloughed city workers, doing park upkeep and such. Less expensive for the government. However, recall that these are people who were pulled away from their families and from regular civilian employment.
Sarah Beckstrom’s former boyfriend reported her describing the National Guard assignment in Washington, D.C. as “pointless.”
Beckstrom and Wolfe were chosen at random as targets. Any of the many National Guard members could have been at hand when Lakanwal began shooting. He did not know either one of them. I think he was shooting, instead, at something — or somebody — they represented. Arguing about how or by whom he was vetted misses the point.
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For more of our posts on perpetrators being traumatized, see:
PITS and Operation Southern Spear
“I Became Like a Soldier Going to Battle”: Post-Abortion Trauma
Healing for the Perpetrators: The Psychological Damage from Different Types of Killing
and see the website:
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