Emran Feroz, an Austrian-Afghan journalist who has written extensively on the war in Afghanistan, makes the case that the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., was not the result of the Biden administration’s bad immigration policy, as President Donald Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed. Rather, it stemmed from a problem created by the CIA’s use of paramilitary units that it organized in Afghanistan, which were violent and operated without any accountability whatsoever.
“The Zero Units were among the most aggressive instruments of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan,” Feroz writes in an article published yesterday in Truthout. “Though some units were formally tied to Afghan intelligence, they were in practice created, trained, armed, and directed by the CIA. They operated outside Afghan law and far beyond any realistic oversight. And they became known inside the country as some of the most feared armed actors of the war.”
“In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented at least 14 major cases of abuse committed by these forces between 2017 and 2019 alone, including unlawful killings, disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities,” he adds.
