“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies… At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on X.

Miller’s assumption about the “great lie of mass migration” was dead wrong. When I saw the suspect’s name, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, I immediately recognized that he used to work as a U.S.-trained militiaman, and it was the United States that destroyed his childhood, his life, and his home country. Lakanwal came to the United States in 2021 as a longtime member of one of the CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units. For years, Lakanwal was treated as a U.S. ally and equipped with many resources from the U.S. military and intelligence service to do some of the most brutal work on behalf of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

The Zero Units were among the most aggressive instruments of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Though some units were formally tied to Afghan intelligence, they were in practice created, trained, armed, and directed by the CIA. They operated outside Afghan law and far beyond any realistic oversight. And they became known inside the country as some of the most feared armed actors of the war.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented at least 14 major cases of abuse committed by these forces between 2017 and 2019 alone, including unlawful killings, disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. The real number is almost certainly higher; many areas where the Zero Units operated were inaccessible to journalists and rights monitors due to massive restrictions and repression.

Before the return of the Taliban in 2021, Afghan officials told me repeatedly that their government had no authority over these CIA-built militias. This was widely understood inside Afghanistan: If Zero Unit fighters arrived at your home at night, no Afghan court, police officer, or ministry could protect you.