A Hard Truth About the DC Shooting

Wednesday: CIA asset shoots two soldiers in DC. Friday: Trump moves to pardon a man who trafficked 400 tons of cocaine. Saturday: Trump gets us closer to war with Venezuela over “drugs.”

Last Wednesday, two West Virginia National Guard members were shot near the White House. One of them, 20-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, died. The other remains in critical condition.

The shooter was a 29-year-old Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal. He worked for us. For a decade. He was part of what the CIA calls a “Zero Unit”—paramilitary forces trained and backed by American intelligence. Human rights groups have another name for these units: death squads.

According to the New York Times, a childhood friend of Lakanwal’s said he “suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused.” His family told investigators he has PTSD from the fighting he did on our behalf.

We trained him to kill. We pointed him at targets. We made him part of a unit known for brutality. And then when the war ended and the Taliban took over, we brought him here—and apparently did nothing to address what we’d done to his mind.

And now a young woman from West Virginia is dead.

Here’s what nobody wants to say: Rahmanullah Lakanwal is not an immigration story. He’s a war story. The same story we’ve been living with American veterans for twenty years.

Since 9/11, at least 15 confirmed mass shootings and targeted attacks on police or military personnel have been perpetrated by U.S. military veterans. These attacks have killed 128 people and wounded nearly 200 more. Veterans make up about 7% of the adult population—but they account for 26% of mass shooters.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a cost. The cost of what we ask people to do.

Lakanwal served in a death squad. American veterans were sent to Iraq to kick down doors, raid homes, and kill people’s families. They were sent to Afghanistan to call in drone strikes on wedding parties. They served at checkpoints where the rules of engagement meant shooting first and asking questions never. We ask human beings to do inhuman things, and then we act surprised when they can’t just switch it off.

The evidence is overwhelming: what we make people do in these wars destroys them. And destroyed people do violence. Doesn’t matter if they were born in Kandahar or Kentucky—the damage is the same.

Look at who they target. Veterans don’t just commit mass shootings at higher rates—they shoot their fellow soldiers. They ambush police officers. They attack the very institutions they served. In Dallas in 2016, a veteran killed five cops. Ten days later in Baton Rouge, another veteran killed three more. Fort Hood has been the site of two mass shootings by service members targeting their own.

And now an Afghan who served alongside U.S. forces shot two National Guard members in D.C.

The violence turns inward—toward the uniforms, toward the system. American or Afghan, the pattern holds. What does that tell you about what we’re doing to these people?

We break them. Then we lose track of them. Then we act surprised when they break others.

And what are we doing right now? Starting another one. While supporting genocide in Gaza. While arming the Israelis to do things we’d call war crimes if anyone else did them.

Donald Trump—the guy who promised to end the forever wars—has spent the last several months building up the largest U.S. military presence in the Caribbean since the Cold War. He says it’s about drugs. He’s been sinking boats off the coast of Venezuela. At least 21 strikes since September. More than 80 people killed. And we’ve seen no evidence that most of these people were trafficking anything.

Now he’s declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety.” Venezuela called it what it is: a colonialist threat. International law experts say it’s illegal. And Trump is telling service members we’ll have “land operations” there “very soon.”

This is about power. It’s about oil. It’s about regime change. Trump isn’t even pretending otherwise.

Here’s how you know the drug thing is bullshit. The same man who announced Saturday that Venezuelan airspace is closed? On Friday he announced he’s pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández.

You might not know that name. Hernández is the former president of Honduras. He’s sitting in a U.S. federal prison right now—convicted of conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. Prosecutors said he took “cocaine-fueled bribes” and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state.”

Four hundred tons of cocaine. And Trump is pardoning him while claiming he’s going to war with Venezuela over drugs.

Trump is also working to put a narco-government back in power in Honduras. He endorsed the right-wing candidate in their upcoming election—the same party that Hernández led. He’s threatened to withhold U.S. aid if the left-wing candidate wins.

This is what “war on drugs” looks like in 2025: pardoning convicted drug traffickers and propping up their political parties while sinking fishing boats in the Caribbean and calling it national security.

I’ve been at this for ten years. I helped recruit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress. I worked on Bernie’s campaigns. I thought we were building something that could stop this machine.

Still, here we are again. Another young woman dead in D.C. at the hands of a man we trained to kill and then abandoned to his trauma. Another war being manufactured on lies. Another generation about to learn what we learned in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Vietnam—that the blood doesn’t stay over there. It comes home. It always comes home.

An estimated 29% of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will develop PTSD at some point in their lives. That’s nearly one in three. And we’re about to create a new generation of broken minds in Venezuela, for what? So Trump can tweet about being tough? So Chevron can get access to oil fields?

The shooter in D.C. had a wife and five children that we are considering deporting. They bear no responsibility for the actions of their father or husband. Correctly, we wouldn’t dream of doing that to the family of a war veteran.

Trump is using this tragedy to justify cracking down on Afghan refugees. That’s the wrong lesson. This isn’t an immigration problem. It’s an endless-war problem.

Lakanwal caved to the same emotional wounds that many American veterans have borne since we started these wars. He’s not an outlier—he’s part of the pattern. The pattern is what happens when you train people to kill, expose them to the worst of humanity, and then abandon them to figure it out on their own.

We keep creating the conditions for this violence—American and Afghan alike—and then pointing fingers at the individuals who carry it out. We blame the broken instead of the machine that breaks them.

How about we stop the damn war machine?

Look, if we’re going to send people to fight, we owe them something when they come home. Real support. Not a check and a waiting list. Not a brief psychiatric hold and their gun handed back to them.

And the people we recruit to help us in these wars—the interpreters, the soldiers, the families who risked everything—we owe them the same. We made the trauma. We own it.

Are these wars worth the price we continue to pay?

Iraq wasn’t worth it. Afghanistan wasn’t worth it. Twenty years. Trillions of dollars. Millions dead. Minds shattered on both sides. For what?

And war with Venezuela won’t be worth it either. There is no amount of oil, no political victory, no strongman fantasy that justifies what we’re considering.

The blood will come home. It always does.

How many more Sarah Beckstroms are we willing to sacrifice before we figure that out?

It’s time to build, not destroy.

There is so much we could be building here at home. We need more healthcare. We need housing. We need modern infrastructure. We need high-quality childcare centers. We need affordable food.

Neither Venezuela nor Maduro are standing between the American people and prosperity. In fact, the people taking from us at home are the same ones itching for yet another profitable war.

We can build a better nation or we can do this again. Another war. Another generation of trauma. Another round of violence coming home.

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