Capitalism’s Disposable Soldier: How American Imperialism Destroyed an Afghan CIA Fighter
Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s story is the story of American imperialism in miniature: extract labor from the Global South, exploit brown Muslim bodies for capitalist war-making, discard the worker when he is no longer profitable, then criminalize him when the contradictions of the system inevitably produce violence. Lakanwal spent eight years as a CIA operative hunting Taliban commanders in Afghanistan. The American ruling class repaid him with four years of deliberate immiseration, no work permit, and systematic abandonment designed to maintain the reserve army of unemployed labor that keeps wages depressed and workers desperate.
On November 26, 2025, after America denied him the means of production necessary to survive, Lakanwal allegedly shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., killing 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and critically wounding 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe. The capitalist state’s response has been predictable: intensify racist border controls, expand the deportation apparatus, and blame brown Muslim refugees for the violence inherent in a system built on exploitation.
Imperial Extraction and the Disposable Colonized Subject
American imperialism operates through extraction: natural resources from the Global South, labor from colonized populations, military service from desperate workers who have no other options. The CIA recruited Lakanwal into the Zero Units, elite counterterrorism forces that served American imperial interests in Afghanistan. These units were tools of imperialist domination, enforcing American hegemony over Afghan territory and resources through violence.
For eight years, Lakanwal provided his labor to the American security state. He was vetted extensively, trained at American expense, and deployed in the most dangerous missions. His value to the capitalist state was purely instrumental: he could kill America’s enemies. The moment the imperial project in Afghanistan collapsed in 2021, that value evaporated. The CIA evacuated nearly 10,000 Zero Unit members not out of moral obligation, but because leaving trained fighters behind would destabilize the withdrawal and create future security risks for American interests.
Once on American soil, Lakanwal discovered the fundamental truth of capitalism: workers are disposable. He was granted humanitarian parole, a legal status deliberately designed to create a permanent underclass of workers who cannot access the means of production, cannot work legally, and exist in perpetual precarity. This is not a bug in the system; it is the system working exactly as designed.
The Reserve Army of Unemployed Labor
As of July 2025, approximately 3,000 Zero Unit veterans had no work permits and no legal certainty about their status. This is not administrative incompetence. This is deliberate creation of what Marx called the reserve army of labor: a pool of desperate, unemployed workers whose existence drives down wages and working conditions for everyone. When refugees cannot work legally, they must work in the informal economy at below-minimum wages with no labor protections, or they starve. Either outcome serves capital.
The bourgeois state could have passed the Afghan Adjustment Act at any point over four years. This bipartisan legislation would have provided pathways to permanent legal status and work authorization. It failed repeatedly because the capitalist class benefits from maintaining a desperate, legally vulnerable underclass. Refugees with work permits can demand fair wages. Refugees in legal limbo will accept any conditions to survive.
Lakanwal could not work legally for years. By January 2024, his family faced eviction for nonpayment of rent. This is the violence of capitalism: a man who risked his life for American imperialism could not afford housing in the richest country in human history because the ruling class denied him the ability to sell his labor power. The contradiction is stark and deliberate.
Primitive Accumulation and Imperial Violence
The United States spent twenty years in Afghanistan pursuing what Marxists understand as primitive accumulation on a global scale: the violent seizure of territory, resources, and strategic position necessary for capitalist expansion. The war in Afghanistan was never about democracy or women’s rights; those were ideological justifications for imperialist resource extraction and geopolitical dominance.
Afghan workers like Lakanwal were recruited to provide the muscle for this imperial project. The Zero Units operated under CIA command, conducting operations that served American hegemony. When the imperial project collapsed, these workers were abandoned because capital has no loyalty to labor. The ruling class extracts value from workers and discards them when they are no longer profitable.
Former CIA officers praised Zero Unit members for taking “malignant actors off the battlefield and saved American lives.” But whose lives? The lives of working-class American soldiers sent to fight for oil companies and defense contractors? Or the lives of the capitalist class whose profits depend on permanent war? The Afghan war generated trillions in profits for the military-industrial complex while Afghan and American workers died for capital’s expansion.
The Feminization of Imperial Violence
From a feminist Marxist perspective, Lakanwal’s story exposes how imperialism relies on the exploitation of gendered labor. His wife raised five children while watching her husband deteriorate, denied the means to support her family. She performed the unwaged reproductive labor that capitalism depends on while the state criminalized her husband’s inability to perform waged labor.
Muslim women in refugee families bear the brunt of capitalist abandonment. They care for traumatized husbands, raise children in poverty, navigate hostile bureaucracies, and receive no compensation for this essential labor. The American refugee resettlement system is deliberately underfunded because capitalism treats reproductive labor as worthless even though it is the foundation of all production.
When volunteers raised alarms about Lakanwal’s mental health crisis throughout 2024, they were describing a man trapped in the contradictions of capitalism: denied the ability to perform his social role as provider, unable to access mental health care because that care is commodified and unaffordable, isolated by language barriers that the state refuses to address. His wife watched him disappear into darkness while the capitalist state did nothing.
Mental Health Under Capitalism
Emails from January 2024 described Lakanwal spending weeks “in his darkened bedroom, not speaking to anyone, not even his wife and older kids.” Volunteers believed he was suffering from PTSD from his work with the US military. They reached out to refugee aid organizations seeking mental health support. They received minimal response because mental health care under capitalism is a commodity, not a right.
Healthcare in America is rationed by ability to pay. Lakanwal had no work permit, no income, no insurance. The capitalist state gave him PTSD through imperial violence, then denied him treatment because treatment is only available to those who can afford it. Beginning in 2023, he would disappear for weeks in the family car, driving aimlessly across the country. This is textbook dissociative behavior resulting from untreated trauma.
One volunteer told NPR, “My biggest concern was that he would harm himself. I worried he would be suicidal because he was so withdrawn.” The volunteer was correct to worry. But under capitalism, suicide is understood as individual failure rather than systemic violence. When workers kill themselves because the system denies them healthcare, housing, and dignity, the ruling class blames personal weakness rather than acknowledging that capitalism kills.
The Racist Character of American Capitalism
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson blamed “Joe Biden’s dangerous policies which allowed countless unvetted criminals to invade our country.” This racist rhetoric serves a specific class function: it divides the working class along racial and religious lines, preventing solidarity between white American workers and brown Muslim refugees who share common interests in opposing capitalist exploitation.
Lakanwal was vetted more extensively than any American citizen. He underwent CIA screening, National Counterterrorism Center database checks, humanitarian parole processing, and asylum interviews. The “insufficient vetting” narrative is a lie designed to justify racist border controls that serve capital’s interests in maintaining exploitable underclasses.
President Trump called Afghanistan “a hellhole on Earth” and ordered reviews of Afghan refugees, conveniently ignoring that his own administration granted Lakanwal asylum in April 2025. Trump has halted all Afghan visa processing and ordered reviews of green card cases for immigrants from 19 countries. This is not security policy; it is the racialization of immigration enforcement to maintain the reserve army of undocumented labor.
Racism under capitalism is not simply prejudice; it is a material system that extracts surplus value from racialized workers while denying them legal protections. When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Lakanwal was “radicalized” in the United States, she was deploying racist ideology to obscure the material conditions that produced this tragedy: four years of unemployment, poverty, untreated PTSD, and systematic abandonment.
Class Warfare Disguised as Immigration Policy
The failure of the Afghan Adjustment Act was not legislative incompetence. Both parties serve the capitalist class, and the capitalist class benefits from keeping refugees in legal limbo. Workers with uncertain legal status cannot organize unions, cannot demand fair wages, cannot access labor protections. They form a super-exploitable underclass that drives down conditions for all workers.
More than 190,000 Afghans have been resettled in the United States since 2021. Thousands remain without work authorization. This creates a pool of desperate workers who will accept any wage, any conditions, to survive. When American workers see their wages stagnate and conditions deteriorate, the ruling class blames immigrants rather than the capitalists who profit from exploitation. This is class warfare disguised as immigration policy.
The contradiction is obvious: America needs cheap, exploitable labor to maintain profit rates. Refugees provide that labor. But allowing refugees permanent status and work authorization would give them bargaining power. So the state creates humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, and asylum systems designed to keep workers in permanent precarity. Lakanwal was trapped in this system for four years.
The Military-Industrial Complex and Disposable Soldiers
CIA Director John Ratcliffe claimed Lakanwal “should have never been allowed to come here,” a statement of breathtaking hypocrisy. The CIA recruited Lakanwal, trained him, commanded his operations, and evacuated him because he served the interests of American imperialism. Now the same security apparatus claims he was a threat.
This is how imperialism treats colonized subjects: useful when killing for empire, disposable when seeking basic survival. The military-industrial complex generated trillions in profits from the Afghan war. Defense contractors, oil companies, and security firms extracted enormous wealth. Afghan workers who provided the labor for this extraction received poverty, PTSD, and abandonment.
The Zero Units were described as Afghanistan’s most trusted forces, operating from bases like Firebase Gecko deep in Taliban territory. They conducted the most dangerous missions under CIA command. When Kabul fell, the CIA evacuated 10,000 of these fighters not out of gratitude, but because abandoning trained combatants would create future security risks. Everything serves the security state’s interests; workers’ lives matter only insofar as they serve capital.
Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe: Working-Class Casualties
Sarah Beckstrom is dead. Andrew Wolfe remains in serious condition. They were working-class soldiers serving in the National Guard, part of the reserve military force that capitalism uses to maintain domestic order and supplement imperial adventures abroad. Their deaths are tragedies, but they are not unique tragedies. They are the inevitable result of a system that generates violence at every level.
Beckstrom and Wolfe were casualties of American imperialism just as surely as Lakanwal was. All three are working-class people ground up by the machinery of capitalism: Lakanwal exploited for imperial violence then discarded, Beckstrom and Wolfe killed by a man that imperialism broke. The capitalist class bears responsibility for all three. The ruling class sent American soldiers to Afghanistan, recruited Afghan fighters, abandoned both groups, and now uses their deaths to justify intensified border militarization.
The state will prosecute Lakanwal for murder. It will not prosecute the CIA directors who recruited him. It will not prosecute the members of Congress who refused to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act. It will not prosecute the capitalists who profit from maintaining a desperate, legally vulnerable underclass. Under capitalism, the violence of the ruling class is always legal; the violence of the working class is always criminal.
Imperialism Creates the Conditions It Condemns
From a Marxist analysis, this tragedy was not only predictable but inevitable. American imperialism invaded Afghanistan to secure geopolitical dominance and extract resources. It recruited Afghan workers to fight its wars. When the imperial project collapsed, it abandoned those workers to poverty and legal limbo. When one worker, broken by untreated PTSD and four years of immiseration, committed an act of violence, the state blamed him rather than the system.
This is how imperialism operates: it creates the conditions of violence, then criminalizes the inevitable results. America gave Lakanwal PTSD through imperial warfare. America denied him work authorization. America ignored his mental health crisis. America created the material conditions that produced this tragedy, then claimed he was “radicalized” rather than acknowledging that capitalism kills.
A former Afghan commando told CBS News that Lakanwal was deeply troubled by the death of a close friend and fellow commander in 2024, who had unsuccessfully sought asylum in the United States. This detail is crucial: Lakanwal watched his friend die after America refused him refuge. This is the message American imperialism sends to colonized subjects: serve us, risk your life, and we will abandon you anyway.
The Dialectic of Violence
Marxist analysis understands that violence under capitalism is not aberrant but systemic. The violence of poverty, the violence of unemployment, the violence of denying healthcare, the violence of racism, the violence of imperialism – these forms of violence are continuous and constant. They are the violence of a ruling class maintaining its dominance over workers.
When workers respond to systemic violence with individual acts of violence, the capitalist state expresses shock and horror. But there is no mystery here. If you train a man to kill, give him PTSD, deny him the means to survive, ignore his deteriorating mental health, and trap him in legal limbo for four years, violence is the predictable outcome. The dialectic is clear: the violence of the system produces the violence of individuals, and the system then uses that individual violence to justify intensifying its own violence.
Thousands of Zero Unit veterans remain in identical conditions. No work permits. No legal certainty. Families facing eviction. Mental health deteriorating. The capitalist state is running an experiment in how much immiseration workers can endure before they break. When they break, the state blames Islam, blames insufficient vetting, blames anything except the material conditions that produced the crisis.
The Solution Capitalism Refuses
The solution is obvious from a Marxist perspective: dismantle imperialism, provide work authorization to all refugees, fund comprehensive mental health care, abolish the reserve army of unemployed labor that keeps wages depressed. But capitalism cannot implement these solutions because they would undermine the exploitation that generates profit.
Instead, the Trump administration has frozen all Afghan processing, ordered reviews of immigrants from 19 countries, and intensified racist border enforcement. Not addressed: the systemic extraction of labor from the Global South, the abandonment of workers who serve imperial interests, the deliberate creation of legal limbo to maintain exploitable underclasses, or the structural violence of capitalism itself.
The capitalist class will not reform immigration policy because that policy serves their interests. They will not fund mental health care because commodified healthcare generates profit. They will not pass the Afghan Adjustment Act because desperate, legally vulnerable workers are more profitable than workers with legal protections. The contradictions of capitalism cannot be resolved within capitalism.
Feminist Muslim Marxist Solidarity
From a feminist Muslim Marxist position, the path forward requires international working-class solidarity that transcends the racial and religious divisions the ruling class deploys to prevent that solidarity. Muslim refugees and white American workers share common class interests in opposing capitalist exploitation. Women performing reproductive labor in refugee families and women performing waged labor in American cities both suffer under patriarchal capitalism.
The capitalist class uses racism, Islamophobia, and nationalist ideology to divide workers who should be united against their common exploiters. When white American workers blame Muslim refugees for wage stagnation, they are falling for ruling-class propaganda. The capitalist class suppresses wages, not refugees. When Americans support Muslim bans, they are supporting policies that harm all workers by creating exploitable underclasses.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal was failed by imperialism, by capitalism, by racism, and by a political system that serves only the ruling class. Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe were failed by the same system that sent them to guard the capital of an empire built on exploitation. All three are working-class casualties of a system that cannot be reformed, only overthrown.
The violence will continue until the system is dismantled. The solution is not better vetting or reformed immigration policy. The solution is the abolition of imperialism, the dismantling of capitalism, and the construction of a society organized around human needs rather than profit extraction.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.
