I never met Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan gunman accused of savagely murdering Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and wounding Andrew Wolfe, 24, both members of the West Virginia National Guard, in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving. But I was in the same CIA program as him in Afghanistan, where I served as a paramilitary case officer advising our Afghan partners.
That program, the CIA-sponsored Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, later known as Zero Units, was created in the days after 9/11 to hunt senior members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Zero Units, unlike the Afghan Army, worked directly for the U.S. government. They were recruited from throughout Afghanistan, given specific military training, and performed many dangerous missions, among them night raids against high-level targets.
