Congress pays its highest honor to the 13 soldiers killed…

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday posthumously awarded Congress’ highest honor – the Congressional Gold Medal – to 13 U.S. soldiers killed during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, even as the event was dominated by political considerations surrounding the presidential election.

Both Democrats and Republicans supported the bill to honor the 13 U.S. soldiers killed along with more than 170 Afghans in a suicide attack at the Abbey Gate of Kabul airport in August 2021. President Joe Biden signed the bill in December 2021. Republican and Democratic leaders from the House and Senate spoke at a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, honoring the lives and sacrifices of the soldiers.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urged the assembled lawmakers to “make sure that the sacrifices of all our soldiers were not in vain.”

“We must take care of them and their families and defend the values ​​of freedom and democracy for which they fought so nobly,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat.

But instead of a unifying moment, the event took place against the backdrop of a bitter back-and-forth over who was responsible for the hasty and deadly evacuation from Kabul. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and ally of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, had scheduled the ceremony just hours before the first debate between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.

As the speaker opened the ceremony on Tuesday, he took a swipe at the way the Biden administration defended decisions made in the final months of America’s longest war.

“To the families here, and to many of you who have not heard these words, I say: we are sorry,” Johnson said. “The U.S. government should have done everything it could to protect our troops. The fallen and wounded at Abbey Gate deserve the best, and the families left to pick up the pieces deserve continued transparency, appreciation and recognition.”

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

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 noted that evacuation plans began long before the withdrawal and 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.

Senior military and White House officials attended the ceremony Tuesday, including Denis Richard McDonough, secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. of the Air Force, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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.

At Tuesday’s ceremony, Coral Doolittle, whose son Humberto A. Sanchez was killed, spoke on behalf of the Gold Star families and urged the American public to “always remember the 13. Say their names, say their names and tell their stories.”

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,” said Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

McCaul, the committee chairman, 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 endeavor, but also boasted that of all the investigations House Republicans have launched into the Biden administration over the past two years, “this is the one they fear most because they know they were wrong.”

Most assessments conclude that Trump and Biden are jointly responsible for the disastrous end of the 20-year war. The enemy Taliban took over Afghanistan again before the last American troops even left Kabul airport. Over 2,000 US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

The top U.S. watchdog on the war 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. Biden’s April 2021 announcement to continue the withdrawal initiated by Trump was the second most important factor, the watchdog 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.

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.

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Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Lolita Baldor contributed to this report.