On 27 November, just blocks from the White House, an Afghan evacuee named Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly opened fire on two U.S. National Guard soldiers on duty.  One of them, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, has since died; her colleague, Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition.  Lakanwal had previously worked with a U.S.-backed paramilitary unit and later entered the United States under Operation Allies Welcome after Kabul fell.  His alleged crime is his alone, but his trajectory — from US-backed unit to evacuee — points back to the kinds of political and security structures Washington helped build during the war.

Within hours, politicians and pundits were blaming vetting failures and demanding a broad crackdown on Afghan immigration and a freeze on new visas. The story quickly became another argument about “dangerous Afghans” versus “worthy allies,” replaying a familiar script from the war itself.

What is missing from this debate is the same thing that was missing during two decades of intervention in Afghanistan: a willingness to look honestly at the political structures and ethnic projects that Washington helped build, and at the myths it chose to believe.

For nearly twenty years, Western governments let themselves be guided by a narrow Afghan elite — mostly Pashtun technocrats and power brokers — who sold a simple story about “modern reformers versus warlords.” That story did more than distort reality. It helped dismantle the only forces that had ever successfully resisted the Taliban and cleared the way for the restoration of an ethnically dominated regime, now reborn as the “Islamic Emirate.”

I write this not as an outside analyst, but as someone who served in senior positions in the Afghan government and later worked with the United Nations in Afghanistan. From that vantage point, the fall of the Republic was not a sudden collapse. It was the predictable end of a political project Washington endorsed and funded.

 The “warlord” as a political weapon

From about 2003 onward, the new........

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