Congress honors 13 troops killed during Kabul withdrawal as politics swirl around who is to blame

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson will hold a ceremony Tuesday to posthumously award Congress’ highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, to 13 U.S. service members killed during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, amid the politics of a presidential elections swirl around the event.

Both Democrats and Republicans supported the legislation to honor the 13 U.S. soldiers who were killed along with more than 170 Afghans in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, near Kabul airport in August 2021. President Joe Biden signed the legislation in December 2021. Top Republican and Democratic leaders for both the House and Senate are expected to speak at Tuesday’s ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda.

The event comes against the backdrop of a bitter battle over who bears blame for the hasty and deadly evacuation from Kabul. Johnson scheduled the ceremony just hours before the first debate between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

Republicans in the House of Representatives also a damning investigation released Sunday about the withdrawal, blaming Biden’s administration and downplaying the role of Trump, who signed the withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and a Trump ally, praised the House report, which was led by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul.

“We cannot allow the Biden-Harris administration to rewrite history,” Johnson said in a statement. “The families of the 13 fallen service members and the allies we failed in Afghanistan deserve better.”

White House national security spokesman John Kirby criticized the House report Monday as biased and one-sided, saying it revealed little new information and contained several inaccuracies. He noted that evacuation plans had been underway long before the withdrawal and that the U.S. had not transferred any equipment to the Taliban. He said the fall of Kabul “happened much more quickly than anyone could have anticipated.”

He also acknowledged that during the evacuation, “not everything went according to plan. Nothing ever goes according to plan.”

“We all hold ourselves responsible for that situation,” he said of the deaths.

Kirby added that “quite a few” people from the Department of Defense would be at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, also issued a memo in response to the GOP report, saying he was concerned about “attempts to politicize the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

“The partisan efforts by Republicans to grab headlines instead of acknowledging the full facts and substance of their investigation have only intensified in the heat of the election season,” Meeks said.

Pentagon reviews are complete that the suicide attack could not have been prevented and that claims that troops had seen the potential terrorist were untrue.

Anyway, Trump has push the withdrawalwith the support of some of the families of the Americans killed, at the center of his campaign. Last month, his political team distributed videos of him attending a wreath laying ceremony for the fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery on the third anniversary of the bombing, despite the ban on cemeteries about partisan activities on the grounds and an altercation with a cemetery employee who wanted to ensure that the campaign complied with the rules.

The Military Families with a Gold Star Those who invited him to the Arlington ceremony have defended Trump’s actions. At a fiery news conference outside the Capitol on Monday, they pleaded for the House report to be taken seriously and demanded accountability for leaders during the evacuation from Kabul.

“President Trump is certainly not perfect. But he is, to me, a much better choice than the mess that Biden and Harris have created since Kabul,” said Paula Knauss Selph, whose son Ryan Knauss was killed in the Abbey Gate attack.

Although Trump and Republicans have tried to link Harris to the withdrawal as a campaign issue, and Harris has said she was the last person in the room when Biden made his decision, neither the oversight reviews nor the 18-month investigation by House Republicans have found any instances where the vice president had a significant impact on decision-making.

Still, House Republicans argued that Harris, as well as Biden’s national security team, should be held accountable for the consequences of the deadly withdrawal.

“Kamala Harris is running for president of the United States. She is running for commander in chief. She needs to answer to this report immediately,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican on the committee.

McCaul, the chairman, also defended the timing of the report, saying the committee’s investigation had to overcome resistance from the Biden administration.

He presented the investigation as a “mission to get to the truth” rather than a partisan endeavor, but also boasted that of all the investigations House Republicans have launched into the Biden administration in the past two years, “this is the one they fear the most.”

Most assessments have concluded that Trump and Biden share blame for the disastrous end to America’s longest war, which saw hostile Taliban retake control of Afghanistan before the last U.S. troops had even left Kabul airport. The top U.S. government watchdog on the war points to Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. troops and military contractors as “the single most important factor” in the collapse of U.S.-allied Afghan security forces and the Taliban takeover.

Biden’s announcement in April 2021 that he would continue the withdrawal initiated by Trump was the second-biggest factor, the watchdog said.

Both Trump and Biden continued to phase in U.S. troop withdrawals. In Trump’s case, major U.S. airstrikes against the Taliban were drastically scaled back. This despite the fact that the Taliban has not entered into substantive negotiations with the U.S.-backed civilian government, as required by Trump’s withdrawal agreement.

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Associated Press editor Colleen Long contributed to this report.