WASHINGTON — A Marine Force Reconnaissance soldier who served eight tours in Afghanistan told The Post Friday that some locals who fought the Taliban were “disloyal” to the US forces they partnered with — and that it “happens a lot more than people suspect.”
Chad Robichaux, 50, in an exclusive interview noted that said he’s been sounding the alarm about the risk of Afghan evacuees ever since the Biden administration’s botched bugout from the Middle East nation in 2021 — and how the US faces an elevated threat of terrorism as a result of poor refugee vetting.
Issues related to the August 2021 withdrawal of US forces and refugees have resurfaced this week as an Afghan national is facing charges for shooting two National Guard members — and killing one of them — in Washington, DC, on Thanksgiving eve as part of a suspected terror attack.
The alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, served for at least a decade alongside US forces fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS as part of an elite, CIA-backed paramilitary group known as the Kandahar Strike Force, according to US officials.
“When you talk about someone that’s, like, worked with the CIA or worked with special operations, just works through our troops,” Robichaux said, “you have to understand, like, when you go work in another country with local nationals, there’s an inherent risk to that. You have to depend on these people.”
“The vetting’s fast. You have to utilize local nationals. So there’s always gonna be a segment of the population that’s gonna be disloyal and … turn on you,” he added. “And it happens a lot more than people suspect.”
As a Marine in Afghanistan and later the leader of a “coalition effort” that evacuated locals from the nation amid the US pullout, Robichaux saw firsthand how quickly some of the US-backed Afghans were willing to sell them out — or “turn on” them and “shoot everybody in their team.”
“In my program, we had CIA-trained guys,” he recalled. “I slept on the side of mountains with this guy … and one other Afghan numerous times. I trusted him with my life. He turns on us, has a vehicle bomb driven into my house, has 12 of our teammates rolled up, captured and killed, and I got abducted by a foreign intelligence agency because of this guy.”
“Just because someone worked with the CIA or special operations unit doesn’t automatically mean they should be allowed to come to the United States,” he added. “The State Department still has to have their immigration process for that and do due diligence to vet them out.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Thursday that “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.”
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent posted on X Friday that Lakanwal “was only vetted to serve as a soldier to fight against the Taliban, AQ, & ISIS IN Afghanistan.”
“[H]e 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,” Kent added.
A senior US official also said that while Lakanwal had been “vetted to fight” for the US from 2011 to 2021, the Biden administration solely used that vetting to allow the Afghan entry to the US — a “low standard [that] has never been used before.”
The only other intelligence-related checks on the shooter were done to screen for ties to terror groups before letting Lakanwal emigrate to Washington State, where he settled with his wife and five children in September 2021.
As many as 85,000 Afghans came into the country that year as part of “Operation Allies Welcome,” and of those, 10,000 who were part of the same CIA-backed “death squads” that Lakanwal fought with settled near Seattle.
Lakanwal applied for a special immigration visa but was never granted lawful permanent residence. He also applied for asylum in December 2024 and was granted it the following April by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is part of Department of Homeland Security.
The department’s Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has blamed the Biden administration’s “humanitarian parole” program for letting the Afghan evacuee remain in the US.
“Biden signed into law that parole program, and then entered into the 2023 Ahmed Court Settlement, which bound USCIS to adjudicate his asylum claim on an expedited basis,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
The Trump administration has since “stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols” any immigration requests “relating to Afghan nationals,” she added.
“The Trump Administration is also reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden Administration, which failed to vet these applicants on a massive scale.”
At the time of the evacuation, US officials “did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees” from Afghanistan, according to a 2022 DHS Office of Inspector General’s report.
USCIS would have reviewed Lakanwal’s background, done biometric vetting and an in-person interview to assess potential risks and determine whether he was eligible for asylum, according to #AfghanEvac, a nonprofit group by American veterans helping resettle Afghan allies in the US.
The senior US official disputed this, saying that “none of the checks done on the shooter from 2011 to now checked his suitability to live here.”
“Prior to Biden it took 18 months or longer for someone to be granted a Special Immigrant Visa, including the applicant needing to flee to a third country so the US government could interview and vet them,” the official noted. “Biden threw all of this out and applied tactical war time vetting to people seeking entry into the homeland.”
Robichaux, who served as part of a Joint Special Operations Command task force in Afghanistan, claimed that the number of nationals “flown straight from Kabul to the United States” may have been as high as 100,000 — and that “they were let go into the American population” with “zero vetting.”
“They didn’t know who was on those planes. He could have worked for the CIA. He could have worked for the Taliban,” he said, sharing about how he had partnered at the time with a non-governmental organization to get up to 17,000 Afghans out of their home country.
“We got them out of Afghanistan. We brought them to a third-party lily pad country. The State Department would have done the vetting, and most of that vetting took almost over a year,” explained Robichaux, who authored a 2023 book on the mission to rescue his former interpreter.
“Just because you’re approved to work with special operations of the CIA, that doesn’t give you a pathway to the United States. You still have to go through the State Department. You still have to apply. He would still have to have applied for a special immigrant visa process,” he added.
“What happened simultaneously is the [Biden] White House is getting all this pressure,” he said, “and they forced our military to load those planes with anybody, first come, first served, that could get through that HKIA [Hamid Karzai International Airport] gate.”
