Walworth: Afghan Asylee Accused in Shooting Was “Exactly the Kind of Person We Don’t Leave Behind”
Monday on the RCP podcast, co-host Andrew Walworth comments on the case of 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan asylum recipient who reportedly shot two members of the National Guard in the capital last week:
ANDREW WALWORTH: He came here in 2021 under this humanitarian parole. He was granted asylum. What’s so difficult about this is that when they say he was heavily vetted, I kind of believe them, because you are vetted when you come in on these programs. He’s just the kind of person, when you hear his background, that we don’t leave behind, because if you leave them behind, they’re going to get killed. And these are people who have helped. These are usually translators, they’re embassy personnel, they’re people like this who have been informants or helped the CIA in some way. We bring them here because when we leave them behind, we know what happens in places like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. They do not fare well after we leave those countries. So I think we have to have, if we’re gonna be successful overseas, we have to have programs where we bring these people with us when we leave, if we lose, that seems to be an important part of our foreign policy. So we’re gonna have to keep that.
