After an Afghan national was charged in the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would pause all asylum decisions and halt issuing visas to people from Afghanistan.
On Saturday, Matt Zeller, CEO and co-founder of No One Left Behind, a nonprofit dedicated to resettling Afghan and Iraqi translators, joined “The Weekend: Primetime” to discuss his concerns about the new policy, which he said would effectively make all Afghans a scapegoat for one man’s crime.
According to law enforcement officials, the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who worked with U.S. forces during the war in Afghanistan, ambushed two West Virginia National Guard members in a targeted attack on Wednesday. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in critical condition.
“This is a horrific event,” Zeller said Saturday. “And let’s be clear, every single member of the Afghan diaspora and the veterans community in this country, our hearts and our thoughts and our prayers are with the deceased soldier, her family, the injured soldier, who we hope fights and makes it, and their family as well. This is a tragedy of unspeakable proportions.”
But Zeller said it was unfair for the Trump administration to punish all Afghans for the actions of one individual. “My biggest fear is this: I’ve seen how the administration is reacting, and I fear that they’re going to try and make every single Afghan who served alongside us a scapegoat, and that’s the last thing that we need to be doing,” he said.
“I’m only sitting here alive, talking to you today, because my Afghan interpreter killed two Taliban fighters who were about to kill me in a battle,” Zeller told the MS NOW hosts, referring to his experience working with Janis Shinwari, who served as an interpreter for nine years.
“He did that because he believed that the Americans he served with were honorable people who kept their promise,” Zeller added. “Let’s be clear, it was people like me in uniform who looked our Afghan allies in the eye and said, ‘If your time of duress comes, our country will not abandon you. We will take care of you.’”
“It’s simply not fair to point to every Afghan and say, ‘Well, you’re at fault for this,’” he said.
Zeller said that the U.S. is abandoning its promise and that, by doing so, it could put other troops in jeopardy in the future. “My fear is that if we continue down this path where we make every Afghan a pariah, we’re going to get U.S. soldiers killed in far larger numbers in future wars, because in the next conflict, the next American service member in harm’s way won’t have their Janis, like I did, protecting them, watching their back.”
The former Army captain called Lakanwal “one bad apple,” adding, “If we’re going to judge the entire Afghan population on this one guy, then we should judge the entire American population on members of the KKK. Everybody has a bad apple in their society.”
You can watch Zeller’s full interview on “The Weekend: Primetime” in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.