It’s hard to imagine a more searing indictment of the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal than the news this week that an Afghan citizen who was admitted to the United States less than two weeks after U.S. troops pulled out has been charged with plotting a terrorist attack on Election Day on behalf of ISIS.
But it’s not just an indictment of Biden and Harris. It’s also an indictment of the entire neocon worldview that gave us the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which were the direct result of the dangerous and delusional idea that everyone everywhere in the world is fit for liberty and self-government. After two decades, tens of thousands of American lives lost, and trillions of dollars spent, we’re still dealing with the fallout from the unwinnable Global War on Terror and the insane ideas that launched it.
The arrest this week is a case study in the failures of America’s long-running neocon foreign policy. A 27-year-old Afghan man named Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was planning, together with an underage accomplice, to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day in which both of them planned to die as martyrs.
Tawhedi, a supporter of ISIS who had been living in Oklahoma City, got his hands on some AK-47s and planned to hit a large gathering of people on November 5, expecting to perish in what he was hoping would be a massacre, according to the Department of Justice. He also donated to ISIS and was in contact with someone he believed to be a member of ISIS who facilitated the recruitment, training, and indoctrination of terrorists.
How did someone like Tawhedi even get into the United States in the first place? According to the DOJ indictment, Tawhedi entered the country on September 9, 2021, on a special immigrant visa, or SIV. His alleged co-conspirator also came into the U.S. with an SIV in March 2018. The SIV program was created in 2009 specifically for those who worked for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan as translators, interpreters, or in some other capacity. It was supposed to include rigorous vetting, as the risk of potential terrorists gaining admittance to the U.S. through the program was especially high.
We don’t yet know what kind of vetting Tawhedi went through, but there seems to be some confusion about whether he actually came to the U.S. under the SIV program. CBS News reported this week that he was initially paroled into the country by the Department of Homeland Security and currently has a pending application with the SIV Program. On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Tawhedi worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan. Then at a White House briefing on Thursday, Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas how Tawhedi got into the U.S. and what, if any, screening he went through, given that the State Department is denying that Tawhedi was ever a part of the SIV program. Mayorkas refused to answer.
All these corporate media outlets are saying the big question here is when did Tawhedi become radicalized? Was it before or after he entered the U.S. in 2021? To no one’s surprise, anonymous Biden administration officials are citing anonymous counterintelligence officials who say Tawhedi became radicalized after he arrived in the U.S. Obviously, it would be very bad for the Biden-Harris administration if it came out that in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the federal government admitted an already radicalized ISIS member to the U.S.
But the big question is not really about when Tawhedi became radicalized. It actually doesn’t matter, because he never should have been admitted to the U.S. in the first place. The big question is why did we allow thousands of unvetted or hastily-vetted Afghan nationals into the U.S. immediately following the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban?
At the time, anyone who questioned the decision to let all these Afghan citizens into America was smeared as a racist and a xenophobe, subjected to a kind of moral blackmail. In August of 2021, as the U.S. military was retreating from Afghanistan and the country descending into chaos, my colleague Sean Davis warned that “people posing as refugees might be terrorists intent on killing Americans on U.S. soil.” He and everyone who said as much back then were denounced and condemned.
They were condemned by neocons as well as so-called Christian leaders like Russell Moore, who wrote that “we will soon hear the insistent cries of those arguing that Afghan refugees are terrorists, or at least that they might be, since they are ‘unvetted’ and we know nothing about them. These claims aren’t true.” Moore, waxing poetic, went on to declare that the mass influx of Afghans “will be like countless others who have found refuge here in the United States. You can see many of them at the Fourth of July parade in your town; they are often the ones waving the biggest American flags and weeping with patriotic joy.”
To someone with this cast of mind, we are not allowed to notice any difference between Afghan Muslims on the one hand, and previous immigrant waves of Irish and Italian Catholics, or Scottish Presbyterians and Methodists, on the other. After all, every culture is equal, all peoples yearn for freedom, and to suggest otherwise is racist and bigoted.
Well, it turns out that the exact claims Moore said weren’t true were in fact true: some of those Afghan refugees were not properly vetted, and two of them almost pulled off an Election Day massacre in the name of ISIS.
To be clear, this is not a problem with our vetting process or the internal workings of the federal bureaucracy tasked with bringing in Afghan refugees in 2021. It can’t be fixed by tweaking policy or reforming the administration of the SIV program.
The problem is conceptual and philosophical, and it has a long history in America — one that stretches back far into our history. Put bluntly, it’s the problem of thinking that the American experience with liberty and self-government is actually universal, attainable for every culture and people on earth, and that it’s possible to spread it across the globe by force. The neocon contribution to this idea is that it should be spread across the globe by force.
George W. Bush said this explicitly in his second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” He went on to say that eventually, “the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.”
Twenty years later, it strikes many people as absolutely insane that anyone would ever think this, let alone blurt it out to the entire country. Our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed the neocon idea as a delusional millenarian fantasy. It was never true that “the call of freedom comes to every mind and soul,” and it was never in the realm of possibility that the United States was going to rid the world of tyranny and bring all peoples into the light of liberty.
Yet it was the consensus view of the mainstream at the time. It never occurred to Bush and the other neocons that not all peoples and societies are fit to exercise freedom and independence as we understand it. It never occurred to them that not all men want liberty. Some would rather have justice, or revenge, or purity. Some would rather rule over their neighbors, or die trying. Some would rather slaughter their enemies than be free.
Tawhedi was a man like that. And we let him in.
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