The Devil’s Chickens Back in the Barnyard?

The death of the National Guard soldier Sgt. Beckstrom in Washington, DC was an easily averted tragedy that should never have occurred. To begin with, the Guard should never have been deployed in DC. Their presence in the District was motivated by some combination of Trump’s racism, his hatred of Democrats and the fascist posturing of Stephen Miller, Peter Hegseth and the rest of the White House sycophant crowd. Instead of her parents spending their holiday in a hospital room praying their daughter would survive, the family should have been celebrating it at their home in West Virginia. That’s the obvious element of this tragedy that didn’t have to be.

The less obvious element, yet more fundamental one, is who the alleged shooter was and what history could have brought him to commit the murder. When one delves into this part of the story, the story they discover is one that indicts not jut the alleged killer, but the Pentagon, the White House, Congress, the CIA and the US political system; in other words, the US war machine. Let’s start somewhere near the beginning.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the accused shooter, was twenty-nine years old. That means he was born in 1996 and was five years old when the events of 9-11 occurred. That also means he was five years old when the US attacked his country of birth and began a war and occupation and war that encompassed his entire life. Sometime in his late teens or early twenties, he signed up with the invaders’ army, joining a program that featured units known as National Strike Units—known colloquially as Zero Units—that was composed of death squads whose task was killing those deemed to be targets by the invaders. Many of the killings undertaken by these groups were face to face—no bombs or missiles coming from the sky or ordnance fired from tanks and armored personnel carriers; just straight up killing of Afghans by other Afghans and all directed by US Special Forces and the CIA. Human Rights Watch published a report on October 31, 2019 titled “They’ve Shot Many Like This,’ which detailed fourteen incidents these death squads were involved in. Many others were left out of the report, while many more were probably never reported or the paper trail was erased. The psychological effects of this kind of killing are well-documented by military psychologists around the world. Many US families that include veterans know these effects all too well.

Afghanistan was not the first theater of war where Washington hired locals for its death squads. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed under what was called the Phoenix Program, a program known among US warmakers at the time as a civilian assassination program. Similar programs were used in Iraq, including one known as Task Force 121, which, according to the Guardian newspaper secretly worked together with Israeli Defense Forces targeting and killing insurgent groups and civilians during the height of combat in Iraq (Dec. 8,2003). The latter program was often referred to as the Salvador option—a reference to US-trained death squads working together with the El Salvadoran military and US special forces in the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s. A former Marine I know worked with some Afghan squads during his tour of duty west of Kabul near Herat. His stories of his time there indicate that the Afghans were part of this program; they did most of the killing and capturing of those deemed the enemy. The US troops were charged with providing location information, weapons and with transporting those captured back to detention and interrogation centers. These centers usually involved the presence of CIA agents and Afghans working with the CIA. Torture was often part of the interrogation regimen. Another man I know works with Afghan resettlement programs in the Baltimore-Washington region. His work mostly involves finding housing for those refugees, helping them register their children in school and helping adults find work. He has told me of the frustration and anger felt by those who killed for Washington in Afghanistan and are now trying to find work that provides them with enough money to support their families. Men like the alleged killer Lakanwal were paid fairly well while they served as hit men for the Pentagon in Afghanistan. If they find work in the US, their pay certainly doesn’t go as far as their pay in Afghanistan went.

None of the above is meant to excuse the actions for which Mr. Lakanwal is accused of. However, it is meant to provide some context for them. Of course, we may never truly know why he shot the troops in Washington, DC. Their presence on the streets of DC, while of questionable legality and utility, was not the cause of whatever problems he might have had. If anything, the military presence in DC and Lakanwal’s life in the United States share a common cause—US militarism. The arrogance of a nation whose history is defined by endless war and an ever-vaster war machine is why the National Guard is walking the streets of DC fully armed and why Mr. Lakanwal killed his countrymen and ended up in the United States after his side lost the war in Afghanistan. The White House (like so many administrations before it) decided to spend millions on a show of force instead of addressing the issues that created whatever situation the National Guard was sent to address in DC. It seems redundant to remind the reader that Washington was the primary reason the war in Afghanistan occurred in the first place. It is also why that the war went on for as long as it did. One can certainly paint Donald Trump as a villain for his deployment of US troops into US cities (among a multitude of other criminal actions), but pretending that he’s an anomaly is misrepresenting the truth. The US government was a criminal organization long before Donald Trump ran for office in 2016. This is especially true as regards its foreign policy. Perhaps it was this criminality that convinced Mr. Trump to run for office, given his penchant for activities of questionable morality and his dismissal of the law when it doesn’t serve his designs.

After US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Black liberation leader Malcolm X observed, “l don’t think anybody here would deny that when you send chickens out in the morning from your barnyard, those chickens will return that evening to your barnyard, not your neighbor’s barnyard. I think this is a prime example of the devil’s chickens coming back home to roost. That the chickens that he sent out, the violence that he’s perpetrated in other countries, here and abroad, four children in Birmingham, or Medgar Evers, or the mangrove in Africa. I think this same violence has come back to claim one of their own.” Over sixty years later, violence perpetrated by the US in other counties has intensified exponentially and shows no sign of diminishing—with US warplanes doing overflights of Venezuela, an armada of warships shooting civilians in the Caribbean and prepping for a greater onslaught, more CIA operations underway inside Venezuela, the usual misadventures in tandem with Israel in Palestine and the rest of the region some call the Middle East and now with US forces kidnapping, detaining and occasionally shooting US residents in the cities where they live. There may soon not be enough room on the roosting bars if more and more of those chickens make their way back to the barnyard we call the United States.

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