The Imperial Boomerang

The news hit me with the numbers first. But now I have the names.

Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20 years old, is dead. Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24 years old, is fighting for his life in critical condition.

They were right. These units—like the Kandahar Strike Force (Zero Unit 03) that the shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, belonged to—were often recruited from one province and deployed to another. Lakanwal himself was reportedly from Khost but deployed to Kandahar. We intentionally imported them as outsiders so they wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on the local population. We built a sectarian, unaccountable force to do the dirty work.

That 29-year-old shooter? In 2014, when I was in Ghazni and Gardez watching us scramble to hold the line, he would have been about 19. He was the exact demographic we were recruiting.

The Accelerant To be clear: The decisions made after 9/11 started this wheel turning. We spent decades breaking a country and weaponizing its people. The boomerang was always going to come back.

But Donald Trump and his administration took that inevitable recoil and made it a thousand times worse. They stripped away the safeguards and turned a tragedy into a catastrophe.

1. The Betrayal (2020) You can draw a straight line from this shooting back to the 2020 Doha Agreement. That deal, signed by the Trump administration, set the timeline for our exit and the Afghan government’s collapse. It told militias like Lakanwal’s that their expiration date was coming. It created the vacuum that eventually sent guys like him scrambling onto planes, carrying ten years of trauma and violence with them.

2. The Pressure Cooker (2025) Fast forward to today. Lakanwal was reportedly driven by a severe paranoia that he was about to be deported. Why? Because the current administration—led by the same man who signed the deal that started the exit—has ramped up a “mass deportation” agenda that is specifically targeting the very allies we abandoned. We trained this man to be a weapon, brought him here, and then told him he was being hunted again. They created a psychological pressure cooker for a man whose mind was already stuck in survival mode.

3. The Target And then, they provided the target. Why were Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe even in D.C.? They weren’t there for a natural disaster. They were deployed in August because President Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the capital—a political move to send troops into a Democratic city to “restore order.”

It creates a perfect, tragic circle:

• The Bush/Obama years built the weapon (the militia)

• Trump’s Doha deal broke the weapon’s world.

• Trump’s deportation threats broke the weapon’s mind.

• Trump’s political deployment placed the victims in the weapon’s path.

Sarah and Andrew were standing post because of a policy decision, shot by a man broken by a policy decision. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now ordering another 500 National Guardsmen to D.C. It’s a political stunt. It’s dumb. And it won’t do a single thing to change the dynamics that led to this shooting.

If there is one hard lesson we should have learned from twenty years of the War on Terror, it is this:

Might does not make right. You cannot solve a complex, deep-rooted problem created by bad policy simply by throwing more boots on the ground. You can’t shoot your way out of a psychological and political trap you built yourself. Doubling down on the same failed approach isn’t strength; it’s a refusal to learn.

I feel like an old war horse these days—watching Ken Burns documentaries, seeing the same history repeat itself. You look at those interviews from Vietnam and you see men talking with this heavy, distant look in their eyes.

One day, I might be the one in the chair. One day, we might be the ones explaining how this happened. But for Sarah Beckstrom, that day will never come. And for Andrew Wolfe, we can only pray he gets the chance.

The young Americans who fell are casualties of a long, spinning arc. I’m 41, and the war continues. It has just changed venues. We aren’t just living in the recoil of the weapons; we are living in the recoil of the political decisions made when I was the age of soldiers who were just following orders and wound up laying in a pool of their own blood in our nations Capitol.

Tom Baker IV

Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, Wake Forest’s only independent local newsroom. A Wake Forest native, Navy veteran, and intelligence professional, Tom launched Wake Forest Matters to bring serious accountability journalism to his hometown. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com