Congress pays tribute to 13 soldiers killed during withdrawal from Kabul, while politicians argue over who is to blame

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Mike Johnson will host a ceremony Tuesday to posthumously award Congress’ highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, to 13 U.S. soldiers killed during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, amid political deliberations ahead of a presidential election.

Both Democrats and Republicans supported the bill to honor the 13 U.S. service members killed along with more than 170 Afghans in a suicide attack at Abbey Gate near Kabul airport in August 2021. President Joe Biden signed the bill in December 2021. Republican and Democratic leaders from the House and Senate are expected to speak at Tuesday’s ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda.

The event comes amid a bitter back-and-forth over who is responsible 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.

On Sunday, Republicans in the House of Representatives also released a scathing investigation into the withdrawal, placing blame on the Biden administration and downplaying the role of Trump, who signed the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban.

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

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

White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Monday criticized the House report as biased and one-sided, saying it contained little new information and several inaccuracies. He pointed out that evacuation plans began long before the withdrawal and the U.S. had not given the Taliban any equipment. He said the fall of Kabul “progressed much faster than anyone could have expected.”

He also acknowledged that during the evacuation, “not everything went according to plan. That never happens.”

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

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

The leading Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, New York Representative Gregory Meeks, also released a memorandum in response to the Republican report, expressing concern about “attempts to politicize the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

“Republicans’ partisan attempts to grab headlines rather than acknowledge all the facts and substance of their investigation have only increased in the heat of election season,” Meeks said.

Pentagon investigations concluded that the suicide attack was unavoidable and that the assumption that troops had seen the potential assassin was incorrect.

Regardless, Trump has made the withdrawal, which is supported by some families of the Americans killed, a central focus of his campaign. Last month, his political team distributed a video showing him laying a wreath for the fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery on the third anniversary of the bombing, despite the cemetery banning partisan political activity on the grounds and an altercation with a cemetery employee who wanted to ensure the campaign followed those rules.

The Gold Star military families who invited him to the ceremony in Arlington defended Trump’s actions. At a heated news conference outside the Capitol on Monday, they pleaded for the House report to be taken seriously and demanded that those responsible be held accountable during the evacuation from Kabul.

“President Trump is certainly not perfect. But he is, in my opinion, a far better choice than the chaos that Biden and Harris have caused since Kabul,” said Paula Knauss Selph, whose son Ryan Knauss died in the Abbey Gate attack.

Trump and Republicans have tried to link Harris to the withdrawal, and Harris has said she was the last person in the room when Biden made his decision. But neither the regulator’s review nor the 18-month investigation by House Republicans have found a case in which the vice president had a significant influence on the decision-making.

Still, Republicans in the House argued that Harris and Biden’s national security team must be held accountable for the consequences of the deadly withdrawal.

“Kamala Harris wants to be president of the United States. She wants to be commander in chief. She must answer for this report immediately,” Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told the committee.

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

He called the investigation a “truth-finding mission” rather than a partisan political endeavor, but also boasted that of all the investigations into the Biden administration that House Republicans have launched over the past two years, “this is the one they fear most.”

Most assessments conclude that Trump and Biden are jointly responsible for the disastrous end to the United States’ longest war, a war in which the enemy Taliban re-took control of Afghanistan before the last American troops even left Kabul airport. The U.S. government’s main war watchdog calls Trump’s 2020 agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces and military contractors “the single most important factor” in the collapse of U.S.-allied Afghan security forces and the Taliban’s takeover of power.

The second most important factor was Biden’s announcement in April 2021 to continue the withdrawal initiated by Trump, the regulator said.

Both Trump and Biden maintained the gradual withdrawal of US troops, and in Trump’s case, they even drastically reduced key US airstrikes on the Taliban, despite the Taliban’s failure to enter into substantive negotiations with the US-backed civilian government, as Trump’s withdrawal agreement called for.

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Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.