The tragic National Guard shootings and the folly of Afghanistan

PUBLISHED: November 28, 2025 | www.baltimoresun.com

Are headlines misleading because they are invariably divorced from context? Do they magnify fleas into elephants, shrink elephants into fleas and ignore lessons to be learned?

The latest headlines feature the shootings near the White House of two members of the West Virginia National Guard, allegedly committed by a legal Afghan immigrant who fled to the United States in 2021 on President Joe Biden’s watch, after we spent more than $2 trillion in the shooter’s homeland on a fool’s errand over two decades, hoping to turn Afghans into Canadians.

President Donald Trump immediately suspended all immigration requests from Afghans and denounced the shootings as a “crime against humanity.”

The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national, arrived in the United States under the aegis of Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era program to resettle as many as 85,000 Afghans who assisted American forces during the 20-year, pointless United States war against the Afghan Taliban. These Afghans who participated in the U.S. mission feared retribution after the withdrawal of American troops in August 2021. The suspect had worked with CIA-supported military units during our Afghan misadventure.

The dastardly alleged shootings by Mr. Lakanwal, who had no prior criminal history, will be brandished by the Trump administration to further assail immigrants, including re-vetting of every one of the Operation Allies Welcome refugees to discover or invent reasons for deportation. But data from 2017 shows that Afghan immigrants aged 18-54 were incarcerated at a rate of 127 per 100,000, compared with 1,477 per 100,000 for native-born Americans in the same age range. In other words, native-born Americans were over 11 times more likely to be incarcerated.

The bigger story lost in the preoccupation with the shootings is the stupendous folly of invading Afghanistan in the first place. This was not terra incognita. The British had failed three times. The Soviet Union had failed as recently as 1989. Afghanistan was a known graveyard of empires. We had befriended and armed the Afghan Taliban to defeat the 1979 Soviet invasion. Remember the 2007 drama “Charlie Wilson’s War.” President Trump, during his first term, had dropped the “mother of all bombs” on April 13, 2017, on an ISIS tunnel complex without strategic result. Mr. Lakanwal would never have been in the United States if the United States had not invaded his country to fight the same Taliban that we had nurtured — a variation of infanticide.

Mr. Lakanwal should be a lesson in the stupidity and hazards of empire. But like the French Bourbon dynasty, we learn nothing and forget nothing. We are poised to invade Venezuela — a dilapidated, bankrupt, failed state incapable of feeding its own people. We are hallucinating that Nobel Peace Prize winner, Venezuelan dissident Maria Corina Machado, will metamorphose the nation into a flowering democracy with the statesmanship and political genius of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. We forget that the United States was a miracle unlikely to be repeated in thousands of years. We need to tend to our own garden like Candide. We forget that Ms. Machado’s predecessor, Juan Guaido, an opponent of Venezuelan despot Nicolas Maduro previously recognized by Trump as Venezuela’s legitimate president, proved a false dawn.

To justify empire, we habitually exaggerate or invent the democratic credentials of ostensible allies abroad. Exemplary was President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 New Year’s Day lavish praise of the Shah of Iran on the eve of the Iranian Revolution: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.” And then came the Iranian hostage crisis that destroyed Mr. Carter’s presidency.

Headline news is characteristically the tip of the iceberg that conceals more than it reveals. First impressions are regularly false or misleading. Be forewarned.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

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