A more shocking prosecution of the Biden-Harris government’s disastrous 2021 withdrawal is hard to imagine than the media this week that an Afghan national who was detained and charged with plotting a terrorist attack on Election Day for ISIS.
But it’s not just an accusation of Biden and Harris. It also serves as an indictment of the neocon worldview that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were the direct outcome of the hazardous and insane notion that everyone on earth is fit for liberty and self-government. We’re also dealing with the repercussions of the insurmountable Global War on Terror and the crazy ideas that led to it after 20 years, tens of thousands of American life lost, and trillions of dollars spent.
The imprisonment this week is a case study in the problems of America’s long-running neocon foreign policy. A 27-year-old Armenian person named Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was planning, together with an young friend, to have out , a mass shooting on Election Day , in which both of them planned to kill as victims.
Tawhedi, a pro-ISIS resident who had been living in Oklahoma City, planned to launch an AK-47 attack on November 5th, with the intention of persuading that it would turn out in what he was hoping would be a slaughter. He even donated to ISIS and was in touch with someone he believed to be a part of ISIS who facilitated the recruitment, coaching, and education of terrorists.
How did a person with the same name as Tawhedi actually enter the country? According to the DOJ , accusation, Tawhedi entered the country on September 9, 2021, on a particular immigrant card, or SIV. His reported co-conspirator even entered the country in March 2018 with an SIV. The SIV program was created in 2009 especially for those who worked for the U. S. defense in Iraq and Afghanistan as translators, speakers, or in some other power. Due to the high potential for possible terrorists to gain admission to the United States through the system, it was supposed to include thorough vetting.
There is still some uncertainty about whether Tawhedi actually arrived in the U.S. under the SIV program, though we are n’t yet sure what kind of vetting Tawhedi went through. This year, CBS News reported that the Department of Homeland Security had him on probation and that he is now awaiting an app with the SIV Program. On Wednesday, NBC News , reported , that Tawhedi worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan. The State Department denies that Tawhedi actually participated in the SIV system, so Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at a White House presentation on Thursday.  , Mayorkas refused to answer.
The great question, according to all these corporate media outlets, is when Tawhedi resurrected? Was it before or after he entered the U. S. in 2021? To no one’s surprise, private Biden administration officials are citing unnamed intelligence officials who say Tawhedi became radicalized , after , he arrived in the U. S. Certainly, it would be very poor for the Biden-Harris leadership if it came out that in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the federal government admitted an , now radicalized , ISIS member to the U. S.
However, the big question is never really about when Tawhedi resurrected. It actually does n’t matter, because he never should have been admitted to the U. S. in the first place. The big question is why, right away after the Taliban’s invasion of Afghanistan, we allowed thousands of Afghan citizens who were unvetted or had been duly vetted into the United States.
People who questioned the legality of allowing all these Afghan citizens into America at the time was labeled as a discriminatory and xenophobe, and was subjected to a form of spiritual smuggling. In August of 2021, as the U. S. army was retreating from Afghanistan and the state descending into chaos, my partner Sean Davis , warned , that “people posing as migrants may be terrorists intent on killing American on U. S. soil”. He and anyone else who made similar remarks at the time were denounced and condemned.
Neocons and so-called Christian rulers like Russell Moore criticized them, saying” we will quickly discover the persistent cries of those claiming Afghan refugees are terrorists, or at least that they may be, because they are “unvetted” and we know little about them. These states are n’t real”. In a literary way, Moore continued,” The large influx of Afghans will be like many others who have found shelter here in the United States. Many of them can be seen at your town’s Fourth of July festival, where they frequently wave the biggest American flags and cheer their way as they “leap nationalist joy.”
We are not allowed to notice any difference between Afghan Islam on the one hand and past expat waves of British and European Catholics, or Scottish Presbyterians and Methodists, to someone with this solid of thinking. After all, every tradition is identical, all citizens yearn for liberty, and to suggest otherwise is sexist and bigoted.
Well, it turns out that the specific states Moore made were real: some of those Afghan migrants were not thoroughly checked, and two of them nearly committed an election-day murder in the name of ISIS.
To be clear, this is not a problem with our vetting process or the internal workings of the federal bureaucracy tasked with bringing in Afghan refugees in 2021. It cannot be corrected by changing the SIV program’s structure or changing policy.
The issue has a long history in America, one that dates back far into our history, and is conceptual and philosophical. It’s a myth that the American experience of liberty and self-government is actually universal, accessible for all cultures and people on earth, and that it can be used to spread it across the globe by force. The neocon contribution to this idea is that it , should  , be spread across the globe by force.
In his second inaugural address, George W. Bush stated in bold detail that” the viability of liberty in our country increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The expansion of freedom in every country is the best chance for peace in our world. He continued to claim that eventually,” the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul.” We do not accept permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Those who love it will experience liberty.
Twenty years later, it seems to many people to be completely insane that anyone would ever consider this, let alone mention it in detail to the entire nation. Our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq have exposed the neocon concept as a delusional millenarian fantasy. It was never possible for the United States to end tyranny and bring all peoples to the light of liberty, and it was never true that” the call of freedom comes every mind and soul.”
However, it was the general opinion at the time. Bush and the other neocons never realized that not all peoples and societies are fit to exercise freedom and independence as we understand it. They never realized that not all men desire liberty. Some would rather have justice, or revenge, or purity. Some would rather rule over their neighbors, or die trying. Some prefer to be free from their enemies.
Tawhedi was a man like that. And we entered.