The Afghan evacuee who shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., on November 26 may have been blackmailed by the Taliban to commit terror. The possibility raises fresh alarm regarding the 76,000 Afghan refugees brought into the U.S. under President Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome.

• Citing “U.S. intelligence,” the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday that “a Taliban hit squad” may have “threatened to murder Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s family in Afghanistan unless he opened fire on American troops in the nation’s capital.”
• Regarding Afghan evacuees, one U.S. intelligence source told PJ Media: “People in this country have no idea about the level of stress these people are under. Most of them have families back home, and if the Taliban cannot get to them, they are making it very clear that they will go after their families.”

Lakanwal previously worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He had no criminal record and was vetted several times before being admitted into the United States.

“The troubling part of this theory is what it suggests about our security vulnerabilities,” PJ Media wrote. “Yet suppose the Taliban blackmail theory is correct. In that case, it exposes a nightmare scenario: even thoroughly screened allies with no ties to terrorism can be coerced through threats against family members still trapped under Taliban rule. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal didn’t just return Afghanistan to the Taliban. It created a pressure point that can turn trusted partners into potential weapons—and there’s no reliable way to screen for that kind of vulnerability.”

In 2021, Gerald Flurry called the Afghanistan withdrawal “the worst foreign-policy disaster in the nation’s history.” He said it would “mar our history, perhaps for the rest of time. Many people say it proves Joe Biden’s incompetence. But this catastrophe isn’t the result of bungling and bad judgement. It is a deliberate, planned effort to destroy America. And it has been terribly successful.”

The Washington shooting demonstrates what this means. Not only was America humiliated and ousted by the same rag-tag group it invaded Afghanistan to defeat, and not only have its promises to its allies proved worthless, but four years on, a murderous terror group has leverage against potentially tens of thousands of assets for attacks across America.

Mr. Flurry was right about the Afghan withdrawal, and the late Herbert W. Armstrong was right when he said—64 years ago—that America “has won its last war!”