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

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson is hosting a ceremony Tuesday to posthumously present 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 swirl around the event.

Both Democrats and Republicans supported the legislation to honor the 13 U.S. troops, who were killed along with more than 170 Afghans in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate near Kabul’s Airport in August 2021. President Joe Biden signed the legislation in December 2021. The 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 is taking place against the backdrop of a bitter back and forth over who is to blame for the rushed and deadly evacuation from Kabul. Johnson scheduled the ceremony just hours before the first debate between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

House Republicans 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.

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

“We must not allow the Biden-Harris Administration to rewrite history,” Johnson said in a statement. “The families of the 13 fallen servicemembers and the allies we abandoned in Afghanistan deserve better.”

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 several inaccuracies. He noted that evacuation plans had started well before the pullout and the U.S. did not hand over equipment to the Taliban. He said 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.

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

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.

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.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-withdrawal-trump-harris-a68d5e5c551037123aa2ed691773d6c0