The Afghan Zero Units were the CIA-run Afghan paramilitary formations of the occupation period, drawn from local men who served the Karzai and Ghani governments. John Kiriakou discussed them in December 2025 after reporting that the Afghan man accused of shooting two National Guardsmen in Washington, one fatally, had been a veteran of one — and that he was one of many who had suffered mental health breakdowns after arriving in the United States.[1][2]
The failure of expectation
Rall’s own hypothesis, drawn from his time in Afghanistan in 2001, was about disappointment. Afghans then believed the United States would work miracles — highways rebuilt, skyscrapers everywhere, everything beautiful within months — because their own state was so bleak that they radically overestimated American competence. He wondered whether the gap between that expectation and the reality had made the men crack.[3][4][5]
Kiriakou’s answer
Kiriakou rejected it as insufficient. “I think that it’s darker than that.”[5]
His account begins with recruitment into not just the CIA but a very specific CIA unit, and then with what the unit did: taking men out in the middle of the night to do raids and to kill their fellow tribesmen — “People who are members of your extended family just because the CIA disagrees with them politically.”[5][6]
What was provided alongside that, in his description, was nothing. “You’re given no training. You’re given no treatment no therapy no nothing. Just come with us and shoot that guy.” And his conclusion: “it’s enough to make people crazy. You know most people can’t take the pressure of of committing serial murder which is really what it comes down to or mass murder.”[6]
The promise and the arrival
The second half of the account is the resettlement. The men were told not to worry, that they would be brought to the United States, that it would be the land of milk and honey, that they would be fine, and that therapy would be available if they needed it.[7]
What they found instead, in Kiriakou’s summary, is that there is nothing efficient about the United States: no therapy is being given, there is no work permit, there is no nothing. They are thrown into a country whose language they barely speak if they speak it at all; they cannot work, they do not know anybody, and they are completely out of their element.[7] Rall’s reporting supplied the administrative texture — men told they cannot be found in the computer, and denied work permits because their names are slightly misspelled — and noted at least four suicides.[2][3]
Kiriakou’s closing image is of the dislocation itself: “Can you imagine leaving the the Afghan desert and then ending up in let’s say Denver? What the heck are you going to do?”[8] Both men added that the resettlement also reduces an Afghan extended family to a nuclear one, which is a further culture shock in its own right.[8][9]