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I'm Isabella Royal, Internet Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for December 7, 2025.

Yesterday's archive episode opened with a review of the Trump administration's halt on visa processing for Afghan nationals, citing the need for further vetting after an Afghanisili allegedly shot two National Guard members in D.C., killing one and critically injuring the other.

The suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakhanwal, had served in an elite CIA-backed counterterrorism unit in Afghanistan

during the Afghan war before arriving in the U.S. in 2021. For today's archive, I chose an episode

from January 24, 2003, in which Lindsay Billing spoke with Tyler McBrion about the relationship

between Afghanistan's elite zero units and the CIA,

the difficulty of securing accountability for actions taken in a, quote, classified war, end quote,

why U.S. forces and Afghan partners relied heavily on night raids and more. I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare podcast, January 24th, 2023.

In 2019, investigative journalist and photographer Lindsay Billing went to Afghanistan to investigate a very personal story, her own past.

In the process, she discovered what she came to call a classified war, one with lines of

accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong.

I sat down with Lindsay to talk through her sprawling four-year investigation, published

last month in ProPublica.

We discussed Afghanistan's shady zero units and their relationship with the CIA, the traumatic ripple effects caused by this lack

of accountability, and why the U.S. continues to rely on a strategy of night raids, which Lindsay

describes as quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S.

has acknowledged.

We also discussed why Lindsay decided to tell this story when few others would.

...