An Afghan man who once wore the label “ally” of the United States is now accused of ambushing National Guard soldiers in the heart of Washington, D.C. That brutal turn from asset to alleged attacker captures something essential about how America wages war, processes its defeats, and then repurposes the fallout for domestic politics.

In late November, two Guard members from West Virginia were on a routine foot patrol near Farragut Square, just a few blocks from the White House, when a man opened fire on them in what officials quickly described as a targeted ambush. One soldier, a 26‑year‑old specialist, later died of her wounds; her colleague remains in critical condition. The suspect, a 29‑year‑old Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, allegedly drove across the country before the attack and was shot and arrested at the scene after grabbing a Guard member’s weapon and continuing to fire.

The details that have trickled out about Lakanwal are what turned this from a tragic local crime into a geopolitical Rorschach test. According to U.S. officials and his relatives, he had worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, including as part of a CIA‑linked partner unit during the long war. He was not an anonymous refugee plucked at random from a camp on the Pakistani border. He was part of the human machinery of occupation: one of the thousands of Afghans enlisted as interpreters, fixers, informants, militia members and “special” forces who enabled the U.S. project on the ground.

When Kabul fell and the last American planes clawed up into the sky, men like him became a liability as much as a responsibility. In 2021 he entered the United States through Operation Allies Welcome, the rushed effort to resettle those Afghans who had worked with the American military and intelligence services. On paper, that program was a moral commitment: you bleed with us, we won’t leave you behind. In practice, it came after years of neglect. Long before the last airlift, studies and human-rights organizations had documented how Afghan interpreters and local staff were trapped in a labyrinthine visa system that was so slow and restrictive that many were killed while waiting, or simply abandoned when the U.S. political appetite for their cause evaporated.

That history matters now because Washington is already rewriting it in real time. Within hours of the D.C. shooting dominating the news cycle, the incident was reframed not as a possible symptom of two decades of war and betrayal, but as proof that the gates had been left dangerously open. The White House moved to suspend new immigration requests from Afghans and floated far broader restrictions on arrivals from poorer countries. Officials pointed to Lakanwal’s case as evidence that previous vetting, especially during the Biden years was too lenient.

This is a familiar maneuver. For years, those same programs were condemned for doing “more harm than good,” not because they let in too many Afghans, but because they trapped them in limbo. Thousands who had risked their lives for U.S. forces were told, effectively, to wait indefinitely while Washington dithered. Some scholars have described how these local “brokers” were chewed up by the system: indispensable while the war machine was humming, dispensable once domestic politics turned inward. Now, with one man’s alleged crime, a pipeline once notorious for being too tight is being retroactively cast as recklessly loose.

In online spaces, that whiplash is feeding suspicions that go further than policy critique. The suspect’s wartime links to U.S. agencies, the symbolic location of the attack, and the political convenience of an “Afghan evacuee gone rogue” narrative have combined into a perfect storm of false‑flag speculation. People are asking: was this engineered to justify slamming the door on refugees, to supercharge a new round of security laws, to prepare the ground for the next foreign adventure?

There is, at least publicly, no hard evidence to sustain that leap. Investigators are treating Lakanwal as a lone suspect. They have not announced any coherent ideological motive, and they say he has refused to cooperate. But even if this is not a staged operation, the reflexive urge to see one is a tell. It speaks to a deep, earned distrust of a security state that has repeatedly used moments of panic from 9/11 onward to push through sweeping measures that long outlast the crisis.

The real story here is not whether this specific shooting was a covert plot. The real story is that because the United States has normalized a system in which entire populations are treated as raw material for war, it is no longer far‑fetched for people to suspect that the same logic might be applied on home soil. When you invade and occupy a country, pay locals to fight your enemies, expose them to death and trauma, then yank some of them out and drop them into under‑supported lives in the West, you are manufacturing volatility. When you then use any instance of that volatility to argue that the doors should never have been opened at all, you are weaponizing the very human debris your policies created.

It is important to be precise here. Most Afghans resettled in the United States after 2021 are not security threats. They are over‑vetted and under‑resourced families trying to rebuild from nothing in unfamiliar suburbs, often with little mental‑health care, unstable housing, and jobs far below their skills. Collective punishment whether in the form of blanket immigration bans, demonizing rhetoric, or cuts to support programs does nothing to make anyone safer. It does, however, send a clear message that their sacrifice in America’s war was always conditional, always revocable.

At the same time, it is also important not to romanticize the relationship. The U.S. did not recruit Afghans as an act of charity; it did so because it needed them to extend its reach into villages, languages and networks it could not otherwise penetrate. They were tools in a war that most Americans had stopped thinking about long before the last C‑17 took off. Now, in the wake of the D.C. shooting, they risk becoming tools again this time in a domestic battle over who gets to belong, who gets to be feared, and who gets to be forgotten.

The public deserves better than two equally lazy storylines: “see, the refugees are dangerous” on one side, and “it must all be a scripted psy‑op” on the other. A serious reckoning starts by holding several truths at once. The ambush of Guard members near the White House was horrific, and the dead and wounded deserve justice. The security questions around one man’s path into the country should be answered. But a country that spent twenty years building and then discarding local allies also has to look in the mirror and ask what it means to convert those same people first into instruments of an occupation, and now into symbols for whatever policy the moment demands.

If this episode ends with another round of bans and scapegoating, rather than a hard look at how easily America discards the people it recruits for its wars, then the cycle will simply reset. The next time the U.S. goes shopping for local partners in some distant conflict, the promise of protection will ring a little more hollow and the blowback, whatever form it takes, will be spun as an inexplicable shock rather than the predictable consequence of a system that treats human beings as expendable extensions of power.

An Afghan man who once wore the label “ally” of the United States is now accused of ambushing National Guard soldiers in the heart of Washington, D.C. That brutal turn from asset to alleged attacker captures something essential about how America wages war, processes its defeats, and then repurposes the fallout for domestic politics.

In late November, two Guard members from West Virginia were on a routine foot patrol near Farragut Square, just a few blocks from the White House, when a man opened fire on them in what officials quickly described as a targeted ambush. One soldier, a 26‑year‑old specialist, later died of her wounds; her colleague remains in critical condition. The suspect, a 29‑year‑old Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, allegedly drove across the country before the attack and was shot and arrested at the scene after grabbing a Guard member’s weapon and continuing to fire.

The details that have trickled out about Lakanwal are what turned this from a tragic local crime into a geopolitical Rorschach test. According to U.S. officials and his relatives, he had worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, including as part of a CIA‑linked partner unit during the long war. He was not an anonymous refugee plucked at random from a camp on the Pakistani border. He was part of the human machinery of occupation: one of the thousands of Afghans enlisted as interpreters, fixers, informants, militia members and “special” forces who enabled the U.S. project on the ground.

When Kabul fell and the last American planes clawed up into the sky, men like him became a liability as much as a responsibility. In 2021 he entered the United States through Operation Allies Welcome, the rushed effort to resettle those Afghans who had worked with the American military and intelligence services. On paper, that program was a moral commitment: you bleed with us, we won’t leave you behind. In practice, it came after years of neglect. Long before the last airlift, studies and human-rights organizations had documented how Afghan interpreters and local staff were trapped in a labyrinthine visa system that was so slow and restrictive that many were killed while waiting, or simply abandoned when the U.S. political appetite for their cause evaporated.

That history matters now because Washington is already rewriting it in real time. Within hours of the D.C. shooting dominating the news cycle, the incident was reframed not as a possible symptom of two decades of war and betrayal, but as proof that the gates had been left dangerously open. The White House moved to suspend new immigration requests from Afghans and floated far broader restrictions on arrivals from poorer countries. Officials pointed to Lakanwal’s case as evidence that previous vetting, especially during the Biden years was too lenient.

This is a familiar maneuver. For years, those same programs were condemned for doing “more harm than good,” not because they let in too many Afghans, but because they trapped them in limbo. Thousands who had risked their lives for U.S. forces were told, effectively, to wait indefinitely while Washington dithered. Some scholars have described how these local “brokers” were chewed up by the system: indispensable while the war machine was humming, dispensable once domestic politics turned inward. Now, with one man’s alleged crime, a pipeline once notorious for being too tight is being retroactively cast as recklessly loose.

In online spaces, that whiplash is feeding suspicions that go further than policy critique. The suspect’s wartime links to U.S. agencies, the symbolic location of the attack, and the political convenience of an “Afghan evacuee gone rogue” narrative have combined into a perfect storm of false‑flag speculation. People are asking: was this engineered to justify slamming the door on refugees, to supercharge a new round of security laws, to prepare the ground for the next foreign adventure?

There is, at least publicly, no hard evidence to sustain that leap. Investigators are treating Lakanwal as a lone suspect. They have not announced any coherent ideological motive, and they say he has refused to cooperate. But even if this is not a staged operation, the reflexive urge to see one is a tell. It speaks to a deep, earned distrust of a security state that has repeatedly used moments of panic from 9/11 onward to push through sweeping measures that long outlast the crisis.

The real story here is not whether this specific shooting was a covert plot. The real story is that because the United States has normalized a system in which entire populations are treated as raw material for war, it is no longer far‑fetched for people to suspect that the same logic might be applied on home soil. When you invade and occupy a country, pay locals to fight your enemies, expose them to death and trauma, then yank some of them out and drop them into under‑supported lives in the West, you are manufacturing volatility. When you then use any instance of that volatility to argue that the doors should never have been opened at all, you are weaponizing the very human debris your policies created.

It is important to be precise here. Most Afghans resettled in the United States after 2021 are not security threats. They are over‑vetted and under‑resourced families trying to rebuild from nothing in unfamiliar suburbs, often with little mental‑health care, unstable housing, and jobs far below their skills. Collective punishment whether in the form of blanket immigration bans, demonizing rhetoric, or cuts to support programs does nothing to make anyone safer. It does, however, send a clear message that their sacrifice in America’s war was always conditional, always revocable.

At the same time, it is also important not to romanticize the relationship. The U.S. did not recruit Afghans as an act of charity; it did so because it needed them to extend its reach into villages, languages and networks it could not otherwise penetrate. They were tools in a war that most Americans had stopped thinking about long before the last C‑17 took off. Now, in the wake of the D.C. shooting, they risk becoming tools again this time in a domestic battle over who gets to belong, who gets to be feared, and who gets to be forgotten.

The public deserves better than two equally lazy storylines: “see, the refugees are dangerous” on one side, and “it must all be a scripted psy‑op” on the other. A serious reckoning starts by holding several truths at once. The ambush of Guard members near the White House was horrific, and the dead and wounded deserve justice. The security questions around one man’s path into the country should be answered. But a country that spent twenty years building and then discarding local allies also has to look in the mirror and ask what it means to convert those same people first into instruments of an occupation, and now into symbols for whatever policy the moment demands.

If this episode ends with another round of bans and scapegoating, rather than a hard look at how easily America discards the people it recruits for its wars, then the cycle will simply reset. The next time the U.S. goes shopping for local partners in some distant conflict, the promise of protection will ring a little more hollow and the blowback, whatever form it takes, will be spun as an inexplicable shock rather than the predictable consequence of a system that treats human beings as expendable extensions of power.