Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan who entered the U.S. legally in September 2021 under the Biden administration’s immigration program “Operation Allies Welcome,” worked with several U.S. agencies, including the CIA, according to Fox News.
The operation’s primary goal was to support Afghans who had worked alongside the U.S. government and military (like interpreters and translators) for the past two decades, as well as their families. About 76,000 Afghan allies and their families were resettled.
The Afghans entered the U.S. under another immigration program, “Humanitarian Parole,” which allowed foreign nationals to remain in the U.S. for two years with the option to apply for permanent immigration benefits, such as the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) status, if they qualified.
Lakanwal was among those who were allowed into the U.S. with minimal vetting. Despite Biden administration assurances at the time to Congress and the American people, the “Big Skedaddle” from Afghanistan was a national security clusterfark.
“Before anyone who is evacuated from Afghanistan comes to this country, they undergo a rigorous vet,” Price told reporters. “Unless and until they complete that vet they will not be in a position to come to the U.S,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters at the time.
This was a bald-faced lie, as a Heritage Foundation analysis authored by Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow; Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center; and Steven Bradbury, who was then a distinguished fellow at Heritage, discovered after thoroughly researching the program.
The DHS Inspector General reported that the Afghans were not adequately screened, despite Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’s contrary statements to Congress and the American public, and that DHS failed to track Afghans who independently left the U.S. military bases where they were initially housed. The Inspector General further reported that DHS did not attempt to locate all Afghans who left the bases to verify their compliance with parole conditions.
“In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox News Digital.
We have no idea what kind of assistance Lakanwal gave to the CIA and other U.S. government agencies. He was apparently not an interpreter or a translator. He was, as FoxNews reports, a member of a “partner force” in Kandahar.
Who or what was a “partner force”?
They were local military, police, or paramilitary groups trained and equipped by the U.S. and NATO forces. “These forces worked alongside or in cooperation with U.S. personnel (including military, CIA, and other agencies) to conduct missions, share intelligence, and provide security,” according to The Guardian.
They were essential for operations, particularly in regions where U.S. forces needed a local presence to deal with tribal leaders and supply valuable knowledge about a particular locality.
Thousands of these Afghan men and women risked their lives and the lives of their families for Americans. How many lives did they save? We’ll never know. But many of them were left behind because of Joe Biden’s incompetent and deadly bug-out from Afghanistan.
The evacuation from Afghanistan was criminally negligent. If it had been done correctly, we could have vetted people like Lakanwal more thoroughly. More Afghans who were at risk because they assisted Americans might have gotten out instead of the thousands of unvetted civilians who were able to clamber aboard one of the last planes leaving Kabul.
It’s overkill to deport every Afghan refugee, especially those who protected and served American soldiers. But those who were part of Operation Allies Welcome and are in the country illegally have to go.
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