Congress bestows its highest honor on the 13 troops killed during Afghanistan withdrawal

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday presented Congress' highest honor — the Congressional Gold Medal — to 13 U.S. service members who were killed during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, even as the politics of a presidential election swirled around the event.

Both Democrats and Republicans supported the legislation to posthumously honor the 13 U.S. troops, who were killed along with more than 170 Afghans in a suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate at Kabul's Airport in August 2021. President Joe Biden signed the legislation in December 2021. On Tuesday, the top Republican and Democratic leaders for both the House and Senate spoke at a somber ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, hailing the lives and sacrifices of the service members.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on the lawmakers gathered to “ensure the sacrifices of all our servicemembers were not in vain.”

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

But rather than a unifying moment, the event took place against the backdrop of a bitter back-and-forth over who is to blame for the rushed and deadly evacuation from Kabul. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and ally of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, scheduled the ceremony just hours before the first debate between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.

“They lost their lives because of this administration's catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Johnson said at a news conference minutes before the ceremony.

Then as the speaker opened the ceremony, he took another jab at how the Biden administration has defended its handling of the final months of America's longest war.

“To the families who are here, I know many of you have yet to hear these words, so I will say them: we are sorry,” Johnson said. “The United States government should have done everything to protect our troops, those fallen and wounded at Abbey Gate deserved our best efforts, and the families who have been left to pick up the pieces continue to deserve transparency, appreciation and recognition.”

Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee also released a scathing investigation on Sunday into the withdrawal that cast blame on Biden’s administration and minimized the role of Trump, who had signed the withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Monday criticized the House report as partisan and one-sided and said it revealed little new information as well as contained several inaccuracies. He noted that evacuation plans had started well before the pullout and the fall of Kabul “moved a lot faster than anyone could have anticipated.”

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

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

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

Pentagon reviews have concluded that the suicide bombing was not preventable, and that suggestions troops may have seen the would-be bomber were not true.

Regardless, Trump has thrust the withdrawal, with the backing from some of the families of the Americans killed, into the center of his campaign. Last month, his political team distributed video of him attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the fallen service members at Arlington National Cemetery on the third anniversary of the bombing, despite the cemetery’s prohibition on partisan activity on the grounds as well as an altercation with a cemetery employee who was trying to make sure the campaign followed those rules.

The Gold Star military families who invited him to the Arlington ceremony have defended Trump's actions. At a fiery news conference outside the Capitol Monday, they implored for the House report to be taken seriously and demanded accountability for those in leadership during evacuation from Kabul.

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

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

While Trump and Republicans have sought 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 watchdog reviews nor the 18-month investigation by House Republicans have identified any instance 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, needed to face accountability for the consequences of the deadly withdrawal.

“Kamala Harris wants to be the president of the United States. She wants to be commander in chief. She needs to answer for this report immediately,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

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

He cast the investigation as a “truth-seeking mission” rather than a partisan endeavor, but also bragged that out of all the investigations that House Republicans have launched into the Biden administration in the last two years “this investigation is the one they fear the most because they know ... they were wrong."

Most assessments have concluded Trump and Biden share blame for the disastrous end to the 20-year war, which saw enemy Taliban take over Afghanistan again before the last American troops even flew out of the Kabul airport. Over 2,000 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan.

The main U.S. government watchdog for the war points to Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces and military contractors as “the single most important factor” in the collapse of U.S.-allied Afghan security forces and Taliban takeover. Biden’s April 2021 announcement that he would proceed with the withdrawal set in motion by Trump was the second-biggest factor, the watchdog said.

Both Trump and Biden kept up the staged withdrawal of U.S. forces, and in Trump’s case sharply cut back important U.S. airstrikes in the Taliban, even though the Taliban failed to enter into substantive negotiations with the U.S.-backed civilian government as required by Trump’s withdrawal deal.

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

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

___

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