Biden Admin’s chaotic Afghan evac was marred by significant vetting failures

The Biden Administration’s chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August 2021 was marred by a lack of planning and significant security vetting flaws for the tens of thousands of Afghans airlifted out of the country amidst the Taliban takeover, according to multiple watchdog reviews and witness testimony.

The U.S. brought out tens of thousands of Afghan refugees in August 2021 during the chaotic non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) out of Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA). Inspectors for the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, as well as State Department employees, have all detailed serious flaws with vetting the Afghans who were airlifted out of the capital city of Kabul amidst the Taliban takeover of the country.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan national who has been charged with shooting two members of the West Virginia National Guard last week, was reportedly a member of the elite Afghan “Zero Unit” forces backed by the CIA — with the U.S. spy agency apparently having struck a 2021 deal with these Afghan commandos to bring thousands of the fighters and their families to the United States.

A number of top Trump administration officials have argued that Lakanwal was not properly vetted, while anonymously sourced reports have said he did receive vetting before being brought to the United States.

Zero Unit shooter and the debate over Afghan refugee vetting

The CIA appeared to have quietly cut a deal with thousands of its paramilitary-style Zero Unit forces in Afghanistan in August 2021 as the Taliban took over the country and its capital of Kabul. According to a former intelligence officer who spoke with Just the News who declined to be identified, the terms of the deal were that if the Zeroes helped secure HKIA during the NEO then, in exchange for that and for their years of coordination with the U.S. spy agency, the fighters and their families would earn an airlift to the U.S.

Lakanwal, a former member of the National Strike Unit (NSU) forces, which were tied to the CIA and to the former Afghan government’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), reportedly assisted in securing HKIA during the NEO and arrived in the U.S. with his family in September 2021. The Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021 following then-President Joe Biden’s April 2021 go-to-zero directive ordering the full withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Years later, the Afghan fighter drove thousands of miles from the West Coast of the U.S. and is accused of attacking two members of the West Virginia National Guard the day before Thanksgiving this week, killing one and critically wounding the other in what President Donald Trump called "a monstrous, ambush-style attack just steps away from the White House."

Lakanwal has been arrested, and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said he will face first-degree murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

"In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the press last week. “The individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here. Our citizens and service members deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures." 

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), tweeted on Friday that “it is true that the terrorist who conducted the attack in D.C. was ‘vetted’ by the intelligence community. However, he was only vetted to serve as a soldier to fight against the Taliban, AQ, & ISIS IN Afghanistan, he was NOT vetted for his suitability to come to America and live among us as a neighbor, integrate into our communities, or eventually become an American citizen.”

“During Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, his administration negligently used the vetting standard described above as the standard for being brought directly into the U.S., foregoing previous vetting standards applied to Special Immigrant Visas and any common sense vetting or concern for Americans,” Kent added. “As a result, over 85k Afghans — including individuals with backgrounds similar to this shooter — were rapidly admitted into our country without the rigorous vetting that has protected us in the past.”

Vice President JD Vance tweeted last week that “I remember back in 2021 criticizing the Biden policy of opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees” and that “they shouldn't have been in our country.”

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that “the suspect who shot our brave National Guardsmen is an Afghan national who was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration.”

DHS added that “the Biden Administration let this terrorist into the country” and argued that Operation Allies Welcome “let in thousands of unvetted Afghan nationals including terrorists into our country.”

FBI Director Kash Patel also said last week that “you miss all the signs when you do absolutely zero vetting, and that’s exactly what happened in this case.”

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Lakanwal “underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.” The outlet said that one anonymous source told them that Lakanwal “was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021” and that “those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA.”

Jennifer Griffin of Fox News cited anonymous sources when she reported last week that Lakanwal “began working with the CIA around 2011” and that “at the time CIA would have done its own vetting of him through a variety of databases, including NCTC database, to see if he had any known ties to terrorist groups.”

Griffin reported that she was told that “there was nothing in his background when he arrived in the US on Sept 8, 2021 that suggested links to terrorism” and that “he applied for asylum last year and reportedly received asylum in April under the Trump administration.” Griffin reported that NCTC “would have vetted him during 2021 Operation Allies Welcome for any ties to terrorism before he was allowed into the U.S.” and that “he was clean then as well and did not show any ties to terror organizations.”

The Guard members apparently shot by Lakanwal mere blocks from the White House were 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, who were part of the Trump administration’s high-visibility patrol efforts in Washington, D.C., aimed at reducing crime in the nation’s capital. Trump announced on Thursday that Beckstrom, an Army specialist, had died from her gunshot wounds. Trump added that Wolfe, a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant, remained in critical condition at the hospital.

The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the vetting for Lakanwal.

Vetting failures during the NEO

The Biden administration repeatedly argued that it vetted Afghan refugees thoroughly, something seemingly belied by the evidence.

“The screening and security vetting is conducted by a combination of the intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals from across government,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki argued on August 25, 2021. She added, “What they are doing are — they’re conducting screening and security vetting for all SIV applicants and other vulnerable Afghans before they are allowed into the United States. This includes reviews of both biographic and biometric data. And if an individual is not through that vetting process, they’re not coming into the United States.”

Colin Kahl, the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, claimed to the Senate in October 2021 that “vetting was always foremost in our mind, but just keep in mind … the vetting wasn’t happening at HKIA.” He said that “all the vetting happened at what we called the lily pads.”

Kahl contended: “Teams of DHS, CBP, DOD would collect biometric information, fingerprints, et cetera, biographical information, and then that information would be fed through the NCTC [National Counterterrorism Center], CBP [Customs and Border Protection], and FBI databases, and only people who had cleared that vetting so that they didn’t have contacts with the Taliban or the Haqqanis or al Qaeda or ISIS were to be manifested and brought to the United States. And people who required further processing were not brought to the United States.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has warned about the flawed vetting procedures for Afghan refugees for years.

Grassley said in July that he had recently been informed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that  “of the more than 100,000 Afghan refugees, as of August 2022, 1.6 percent had links to terrorism or other derogatory information.”

“Now, it happens that that’s over [1,600] people who at that time posed a potential threat to our homeland and our people. At that time, all 1,600 were located in the United States. Now naturally since then, some may have left, some may have been deported and it’s unclear who remains.”

Grassley added then that “the public has a right to be made fully aware of the Biden administration’s failure to vet Afghan evacuees.”

Noem sent a letter to Grassley in September laying out more details.

The data provided by DHS laid out “potentially derogatory information” that had been found related to 6,868 Afghan refugees. The department said inquiries had been “closed” for 5,860 of the Afghan refugees, but that inquiries were still “open” related to 1,008 of the Afghan refugees.

In total, there had been “national security” concerns raised on 5,005 total Afghan refugees and “public safety” concerns raised related to 956 of them, although the vast majority of those inquiries had since been closed. DHS said that concerns about “fraud” were raised related to 876 Afghan refugees, and another 31 of them had possible derogatory information on them sent to DHS through watchlists or referrals from the U.S. government’s interagency process.

State Department vetting failures

One State Department employee told investigators that vetting of evacuees at HKIA was a huge issue, saying that the U.S. government had “no idea if people being evacuated were threats.” The employee said that “one plane left and as checks got done a few people on the plane popped red and the plane turned around and went back to Kabul.” The employee said this happened a second time, and that time the plane was allowed to leave Afghanistan and land in another country.

One employee from the State Department also told investigators that the evacuation process seemed haphazard, saying, “We had to sort them all out. We didn’t know where planes were going — Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait — the bilateral agreements for all of this had to be built on the fly.”

The House Foreign Affairs Committee assessed in 2024 that “the ad hoc nature of the Biden-Harris administration’s NEO was also evident in the failure by the State Department to maintain records of Afghan evacuees” and that “the information consular officers did collect, ended up in scattered databases with no central management system.” One State Department employee told investigators that they “had to comb through hundreds of excel spreadsheets.”

An internal State Department memo in late August 2021 said biometric screening was still not available to help vet evacuees at the Kabul airport, with a House Foreign Affairs Committee report from 2022 stating that there were at least five cases of Afghans who presented U.S. passports which did not belong to them, a fact that reportedly “highlighted fraud concerns” and complicated the process of screening Afghans as they attempted to enter the airport.

James DeHart, a State Department official who helped lead the evacuation, later wrote that the population at Kabul airport swelled “uncontrollably” and “so we pushed hard for every seat on every outbound flight to be filled.” He said: “I didn’t care who got on which plane, where they flew, or how they landed. Those were other people’s problems. Let them sort it out elsewhere.” But when the evacuation was over, DeHart was asked to lead the Afghanistan Task Force, and wrote that “suddenly I cared who had gotten on which plane, where they had flown, and how they had landed. I was ‘elsewhere’ now, and I had to help sort it out.”

Jean Akers, another consular team leader at HKIA, later wrote that her primary role “was to determine whether people who made it to Hamid Karzai International Airport met the criteria — as defined by the White House and State Department leadership — for evacuation on a U.S. flight.” But she admitted that “we didn’t have access to systems or databases” when making such determinations.

Marjon Kamrani, a Foreign Service political officer at Al Udeid Air Base, wrote that “we did what midlevel State department officers could in an environment with little guidance, no computers, and only a few other State Department staff.”

Ambassador Greta Holtz, a now-former Chargé d'Affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Doha, later described more of the vetting issues that arose when thousands of Afghan evacuees arrived at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar during the NEO. Holtz said she volunteered to assist the U.S. embassy in Doha with handling the thousands of evacuees arriving in Qatar after the State Department put out a request for volunteers following the Taliban takeover of Kabul. Holtz said that huge numbers of Afghan evacuees had no real identification, and that confirming the identities of many of them was next to impossible for the U.S. government officials given that task.

Holtz said that the U.S. government had to screen the evacuees against the National Counterterrorism Center screening database, and so NCTC sent six or seven temporary duty officers along with a lead agent. She said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration also had officers on the ground, and so “we had the whole panoply of DHS entities out there doing this screening process, in order for us to be able to put them on a plane that would eventually land in the U.S.”

But she stressed: “It was complicated, because half the people had no ID whatsoever. They could have been al Qaeda or Taliban. Who knows whether the name they gave us had anything to do with their actual name. Most of these guys had never been fingerprinted for any reason or retina scanned. So it was a matter of this very dedicated and talented team of DHS professionals from across all the elements of DHS doing the interviews, inputting the data. If there were documents, they would document check, but again, no translators, and doing their best to run these names, which could have been fake through the NCTC.”

“These folks would meet the plane, they just made lines, and they would ask the people coming off the planes their names, or if they had a piece of identification, they would look at that and would write it down. We didn’t have translators. This was all with sign language. We had a couple of translators, but they were mostly at the army base. We didn’t have many translators, and we didn’t have any to greet these flights,” Holtz said. “I would say that probably half of these people had IDs, but you couldn’t know if it was their ID. And the other half had no ID. So if the guy told you his name was John Smith, you would just write down John Smith.”

Holtz said that the State Department and DHS created what she dubbed “temporary passports” on the spot.

“We didn’t have documentation. We created these pieces of paper. So we’d have a picture taken of the evacuee if they had no documentation. And we’d write down whatever name they gave us and put it with their picture,” Holtz said. “Then they took that piece of paper with them and the Qataris stamped it as a sort of entry point into Qatar, because when you enter Al Udeid Air Base, if you go to the other airbase, you’ve now crossed a border. Like at any airport in the U.S., you’d go through customs and immigration. So we created these temporary passports, literally a piece of paper with a photo that was taken right then and there at the flightline.”

DHS vetting failures

The DHS inspector general later concluded that DHS “encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees” arriving in the U.S. as part of Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome. The watchdog said Customs and Border Protection “did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees” and that some of the information used to vet evacuees — such as such as name, date of birth, identification number, and travel documents — was “inaccurate, incomplete, or missing.”

 The watchdog found “missing, incomplete, or inaccurate first and last names, DOBs, travel document numbers, travel document types, and visa data” in the DHS system known as TECS. Among the findings were that 417 records had an unknown first name, 242 records had an unknown last name, 11,110 records had the DOB recorded as January 1st, and 7,800 records had invalid or missing document numbers.

The inspector general said 36,400 records also had “facilitation document” as the travel document type, but that “CBP could not define or provide an explanation for this document type, indicating potential inaccuracies.”

The inspector general concluded that CBP “admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States” and that DHS “may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.” The watchdog found that DHS paroled at least two Afghan evacuees “who posed a risk to national security and the safety of local communities” and “may have admitted or paroled more individuals of concern.”

The watchdog also said CBP “admitted or paroled dozens of evacuees with derogatory information into the country” and highlighted two main cases. The first example was CBP paroling an Afghan evacuee into the U.S. who “had been liberated from prison in Afghanistan by the Taliban in August 2021.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement eventually removed him from the United States. The second example was CBP paroling into the U.S. an Afghan evacuee “who posed national security concerns.” ICE eventually moved to remove him from the U.S. too.

Pentagon's vetting failures 

A Pentagon watchdog report from 2022 found that 50 Afghans who had arrived in the U.S. during the evacuation had information about them in the Defense Department’s databases that indicated they would present “potentially significant security concerns.” The report added that the U.S. government could only locate three Afghans who had derogatory information in their files and had arrived in the continental United States, and that some 28 other Afghans with similar such information in the databases could not be located.

The Pentagon inspector general also found in 2023 that Defense Department supported the requests of other federal agencies for the screening of Afghan evacuees, including by “conducting biometric enrollments of approximately two‑thirds of all Afghans at intermediate staging bases overseas” and by “conducting counterintelligence screening interviews of Afghans who were identified as a match” to the Pentagon’s Biometrically Enabled Watch List (BEWL).

The inspector general said that the Pentagon’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) analysts also “conducted biometric assessments of all watch list encounters and biographic analysis of over 84,000 Afghan evacuee records” and “sent out rapid notifications to a wide distribution list to identify evacuees who may pose a threat to national security.”

But the inspector general found some significant problems, including that “the NGIC did not consistently follow the BEWL Guide and NGIC standard operating procedures” when it was deciding to retain or remove Afghan evacuees from the BEWL.

The watchdog said that NGIC analysts “incorrectly applied removal criteria for U.S. persons to Afghan evacuees who had not been confirmed to have U.S. person status, removed Afghans from the BEWL for reasons not cited in their standard operating procedures, and inconsistently applied the BEWL Guide and SOPs requiring the use of detailed removal justifications that follow analytic tradecraft standards.” The inspector general found that, as a result of these errors, the NGIC “might have removed from the BEWL some Afghan identities that should have been retained on the list.”

The Pentagon inspector general also found that Afghan refugees were not vetted by the National Counterterrorism Center using “all DOD data” prior to their arrival in the United States. This allegedly happened because CBP compared its enrollments against DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) data, which “did not initially include” all of the biometric data found in the Pentagon’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) database and because the U.S. military’s NGIC “has agreements with foreign partners that prohibits the sharing of some ABIS data with U.S. agencies outside of the DoD.”

The watchdog said Defense Department personnel “could not locate some Afghan evacuees whom NGIC personnel identified as having derogatory information that would make them ineligible for the parolee program” and that NGIC personnel “stated that they could not locate some Afghan evacuees when attempting to report derogatory information to the DoD and U.S. Government agencies” which were supporting U.S. safe havens.

“President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals traveling on Afghan passports,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X on Friday. “The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.”