A Botched Withdrawal And Interventionism.

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were gunned down in an ambush-style attack near the White House. Other Guard members rushed toward the gunfire, returning shots and subduing the gunman before anyone else could be killed. Two Guardsmen are in critical condition, and one, Sarah Beckstrom, tragically lost her life in the attack.

What followed was depressingly predictable. Empty prayers, checked boxes, the requisite expressions of concern for families who will now spend Thanksgiving and every holiday after with empty chairs. But that wasn’t what took center stage. Before the story had even fully unfolded, Republicans and Democrats were already racing to pin this on Biden or Trump, on one administration’s program or another’s approval. The Guardsmen faded into the background. The blame game came front and center.

What both parties miss is that this goes beyond any single policy or president. It traces back decades - to our interventionist approach, to twenty years in Afghanistan, to the chaos of withdrawal that put everyone in that moment on that street. But even that only explains how we got here. It doesn’t assign blame.

In the end, the blame belongs to one person: Rahmanullah Lakanwal.

To understand how we got here, we have to look back at Afghanistan. What started as a focused mission to strike Al-Qaeda and the Taliban veered into something else entirely: nation-building. We spent trillions trying to turn Afghanistan into a centralized state, propping up corrupt partners who enriched themselves on our dollar while becoming entirely dependent on American support. Without us, collapse was inevitable.

And collapse came. We had locked ourselves into a mistake, spending coerced tax dollars to centrally plan another country’s political system - a mission that had nothing to do with protecting America. The withdrawal was always coming. It was just a matter of when we finally admitted the original mission was gone and pulled the ripcord.

Here’s what the collapse looked like: Kabul fell on August 15, 2021. The US had already abandoned Bagram, leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport as the only way out - a bottleneck in hostile territory. Massive crowds formed. The Taliban circled the perimeter. Then came the ISIS-K suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, killing 13 US troops and 170 Afghans while personnel scrambled to move people to safety.

In two weeks, the US airlifted over 120,000 people - including tens of thousands of Afghans, roughly 70,000 to 80,000 under the main program - in an emergency evacuation that looked nothing like standard visa-driven resettlement. Speed and optics drove everything. Oversight reports later found that criteria for “at-risk Afghans” were inconsistently defined, and the data needed for proper vetting was often incomplete.

Here’s how he got here. Rahmanullah Lakanwal spent years working with US forces through CIA-linked formations like the “Zero Unit” or Kandahar Strike Force. After the Taliban takeover, he evacuated through Operation Allies Welcome - the program designed for those who had worked with US military and intelligence. On September 8, 2021, he entered on humanitarian parole.

He settled in Washington State with his family from 2021 to 2023. Neighbors described him positively - a soldier who fought alongside Americans and suffered trauma from war. He subsequently pursued permanent status in the US, with his application approved months before the shooting.

Nothing in the system flagged him as a threat. He had credentials. He had worked alongside our military. The real danger may have come from rescuing partner forces quickly rather than slow, confidence-building vetting.

Here’s the honest assessment: once he was here, both Biden and Trump had reason to believe he wouldn’t be a threat. But there shouldn’t have been a threat to begin with. We never should’ve been knee-deep in that mess the way we were - something we can point to Bush as the source and Obama as a continuation of the same failed policy, followed by Biden’s botched withdrawal. It’s tough to pin this squarely on Trump when Bush, Obama, and Biden had already fumbled the ball for two decades.

If this moment is going to mean anything, it should force a rethink of the policies that created him and brought him here in the first place.

This was a culmination of many variables - decades of intervention, a botched withdrawal, rushed vetting, and failures across multiple administrations. But instead of looking at the full picture and learning from it, we’re watching another race to assign blame. Republicans point at Biden. Democrats point at Trump. Neither side wants to confront the deeper problem: we never should’ve been knee-deep in that mess the way we were.

We can’t blame all Muslims. We can’t cleanly blame one party. The shooter is responsible for what he did. But if we want to prevent the next tragedy, the lesson isn’t about which administration to punish - it’s about the consequences of intervention itself.

Learn from this. Correct the policy. Stop the blame game.