By the Staff of AFP
As Washington warmongers try to steer the country into another regime-change war—this time on Venezuela —the country is reeling after blowback from the decades-long U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that is directly tied to the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in the nation’s capital a day before Thanksgiving.
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On Nov. 26, 29-year-old Afghan immigrant Rahmanullah Lakanwal walked casually up to National Guard soldiers, stationed in the bustling business district of downtown Washington, D.C., before drawing a pistol and trying to assassinate two of them—Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24.
As AFP goes to press a week after the incident on Dec. 4, Wolfe clings to life but Beckstrom died from her injuries on the evening of Nov. 26.
President Donald Trump announced Beckstrom’s death on Thanksgiving Day, saying in a statement, “”Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia, one of the guardsmen … a highly respected, young, magnificent person … She’s just passed away. She’s no longer with us.”
The following Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem took to the weekly talk shows to make the claim that, somehow, Lakanwal, after arriving in the United States in 2021, had become radicalized, which led him to murder two young American soldiers in cold blood.
“We believe it was through connections in his home community and state,” she told CBS News that day.
New details have come out, however, that throw cold water on Noem’s claim, indicating that the killings were the result of blowback the United States is still facing from a regime change war Washington initiated on Oct. 7, 2001 when the U.S. military invaded and occupied Afghanistan a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
It turns out that Lakanwal had been brought to the United States along with thousands of other Afghans out of concern he would face retribution from the Taliban, who currently rule the mountainous country following the U.S. military’s hasty departure under President Joe Biden.
We now know that Lakanwal, when he was still in Afghanistan, had worked under the CIA and U.S. Special Forces in one of the agency’s notorious Afghan “death squads.”
After coming to the United States in 2021, it was well-known in the community where he lived in Bellingham, Wash. with his wife and five children that he had been suffering “mental issues” that a number of U.S. reporters had linked to his service in the so-called “Zero Unit,” the Afghan National Security Directorate’s paramilitary forces the CIA created during the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.
Lakanwal worked in a unit that was designated “03,” or the Kandahar Strike Force, with a security badge that revealed an affiliation with Firebase Gecko, a CIA and U.S. Special Forces outpost in that area.
Known for their “leave no one alive” nighttime raids on suspected members of the Taliban, Zero Units have been accused of human rights abuses from summary executions to the killing of civilians, including children in religious schools.
A retired general told CBS News that Lakanwal worked with the unit for eight years, which means he had to have been recruited when he was still a boy at 17 years old.
If that’s not bad enough, according to former Texas prosecutor and author Seth Harp, the unit Lakanwal was recruited into was headed by notorious CIA thug Ahmed Wali Karzai, a highly paid killer who also profited heavily from the drug trade in Afghanistan. Karzai was also notorious for his involvement in bacha bazi, the despicable pederastic practice in Afghanistan of adolescent male sex slavery where little boys are sold and traded around the country for older men to be sexually abused.
“The D.C. shooter was basically an assassin for the biggest drug cartel in history, which the CIA created, armed, and funded,” wrote Harp. “What’s happening is blowback from a vast heroin racket.”
The D.C. shooting was not the first incident of its kind. In May 2025, another Afghan immigrant shot a police officer in Fairfax, Va., after he had been pulled over for a traffic violation.
Police body-cam video of the shooting was released, showing a disturbed young Afghan man by the name of Jamal Wali ranting about working for the U.S. government while he was in Afghanistan before coming to the United States.
Wali reportedly had come to the U.S. in 2014 after serving as a translator for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
“You people brought me to this country,” Wali can be heard yelling in excellent English. “And I’m dying every single day. I can’t get a job, and I can’t get disability. And they took my license because I’m not able to pay the insurance. … The system is broken.”
The police officer, clearly confused, responds, “Well it sounds like you’re having a really tough time.”
Wali can be heard adding, “I should have served with the Taliban.”
The traffic stop then escalates until Wali draws his pistol in what appears to be a highly trained, methodical manner and shoots two of the police officers out of the driver’s side window with one bullet. Another officer on the passenger side of the vehicle quickly responds and kills Wali.
Thankfully, the police officers were only wounded, but the incident, which did not receive national attention until the latest attack, highlighted the powder keg facing the nation as tens of thousands of Afghans who fought alongside the U.S. military were dumped and left to rot in quiet communities in the U.S. once their usefulness was over.
Ten years ago, Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator from Florida at the time, supported indefinitely continuing the occupation of Afghanistan and voiced strong opposition to ending U.S. involvement there.
Today, as secretary of state, Rubio has become one of the fiercest advocates of waging a regime change war against Venezuela.
Invoking many of the same arguments used to start costly, no-win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rubio has cited vague national-security concerns and democracy promotions for why U.S. taxpayers should spend their hard-earned money to depose a leader who is not a threat in any way to the United States.
As a result, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the U.S. military currently has 11 warships and 15,000 troops positioned in the Caribbean to support a regime change operation that the United States cannot afford and only a tiny minority even wants.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to be the president of peace, but he is now enthusiastically supporting the war on Venezuela.
While Americans continue to struggle with record-high prices for everything from food to housing to healthcare, on Nov. 21, Trump reportedly took time out to talk on the phone with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and threaten him with regime change.
“You can save yourself and those closest to you, but you must leave the country now,” Trump reportedly told Maduro, before offering safe passage for him, his wife and his son “only if he agreed to resign right away.”
A recent poll of Americans, who say they voted for Trump in 2024, conducted by YouGov, found that less than a third of them want the U.S. to wage war on Venezuela.
In addition, 71% of Americans in the survey believe Trump needs to get authorization from Congress for a war with Venezuela—that includes 57% of Trump voters.
If Trump does decide to start dropping bombs on Venezuela, it will most likely be the end of his presidency and will leave U.S. citizens to deal with the blowback here at home and abroad for decades to come.
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