Contrary to what President Trump believes, I think that Lakanwal was adequately vetted before September 2021, for the simple reason that he was a CIA and Afghan intelligence operative since 2016, and perhaps before that year. According to the BBC, Lakanwal was a “GPS tracker specialist” as part of “Unit 03 of the Kandahar Strike Force,” which was also known as the “Scorpion Unit.”
The CIA has an extremely thorough vetting process, but unfortunately, it is not 100% perfect. No vetting process can ever be infallible. According to Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, a “former commanding general of the Afghan National Special Operations,” he stated, “[Lakanwal] was known for being responsible and professional within his team and had strong anti-Taliban views.”
According to the BBC, “his whole unit was moved from Kandahar to Kabul, [which is a 300-mile drive], five days before the Taliban entered the capital. They continued to protect the airport for another six days before they, too, were airlifted out to the U.S.”
Lakanwal, who was also a former member of the ruthless and feared CIA-supervised and paid “Zero Units,” aka ”death squads,” was welcomed to the U.S. by “Operation Allies Welcome in September 2021, that allowed around 77,000 Afghans” to emigrate to the U.S. Lakanwal “applied for asylum in 2024,” and his request was approved in April 2025.
I admit that the Afghan vetting process was obviously not up to standards because of Biden’s hasty, disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Biden administration understandably and desperately did not want any stranded Afghans, who helped Americans, to be held hostage, imprisoned, or most likely executed (i.e., beheaded and/or impaled) in a possible embarrassing repeat of the Saigon debacle in April 1975.
The optics on worldwide television news would have been horrible and humiliating to America’s imperial power across the globe.
As a result, the entire evacuation at Kabul International Airport on August 30, 2021, was one big cluster f**k. Bagram Air Force Base should have been secured months earlier by the incompetent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and other Pentagon generals in June or July 2021. This would have greatly improved security, established orderly processing, incurred fewer casualties, and created a safer evacuation than Kabul International Airport.
President Trump stated that the death of Beckstrom was also a “‘terrorist attack’” as he harshly and emphatically criticized the Biden administration for allowing Afghans, who worked with U.S. forces during the Afghanistan war, to enter the U.S. in 2021. I suppose, according to Trump’s thinking, the U.S. should have just left the Afghans behind to suffer an unimaginable fate or execution?
Mr. President, I don’t think so.
In regard to the vetting of Lakanwal, this is preposterous. It is clearly obvious that “although Trump [had] maintained Lakanwal was insufficiently vetted by his predecessor, a senior U.S. official told CNN Lakanwal would have had to undergo extensive [my emphasis] vetting to work with the CIA.”
President Joe Biden, for all his myriad faults and cognitive decline, is NOT to blame for the murder of National Guardswoman Sarah Beckstrom. Sometimes President Trump needs to think before he speaks, and get his facts straight before he publicly speaks at a Rose Garden podium, Oval Office Resolute desk, or rashly texts on Truth Social.
The president needs to stop embarrassing himself before the crucial 2026 Congressional mid-term elections, and especially stop calling female reporters “stupid,” “ugly,” or “piggy.” That also includes xenophobically calling Somali-Americans “garbage” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on December 2.
Robert L. Maronic
