In a ceremony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Congress posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the 13 U.S. service members killed during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
On August 26, 2021, a suicide bombing attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul killed 13 U.S. service members, including 11 U.S. Marines, one sailor and one soldier, as well as 170 Afghans attempting to leave the country after the Taliban regained power following the U.S. exit. Forty-five service members were also wounded in the blast.
The ceremony, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican and ally of former President Donald Trump, took place just hours before a scheduled debate between Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee and Trump, the GOP presidential nominee.
The event brought together Democratic and Republican leaders, all of whom expressed support for honoring the soldiers, but the underlying tensions surrounding the political fallout from the withdrawal remain at the forefront as House GOP members have been trying to highlight Harris’ role in the withdrawal, framing her as a key player in its execution.
A display showing fallen American military members is displayed for a news conference by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, as he releases his panel’s Afghanistan Report and the findings of its three-year investigation into the deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, at the Capitol in Washington on September 9, 2024. On Tuesday, Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the 13 U.S. service members killed during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
A Republican-led investigation into the withdrawal released a lengthy report just days before the ceremony that accused President Joe Biden‘s administration of mismanaging the pullout and deflecting blame from Trump’s role in the initial withdrawal agreement.
However, Pentagon reviews have concluded that the suicide bombing was not preventable.
Newsweek reached out to the White House via email on Tuesday for comment.
While the House report, led by Republican Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, divulged little new information, it wrapped up a three-year investigation involving heated public hearings and clashes with senior Biden officials over document access.
In the McCaul report, Harris’ name is mentioned 28 times in the executive summary alone, while Trump’s name is cited twice. The report repeatedly refers to the “Biden-Harris administration.”
However, House Democrats in a statement said the report by their Republican colleagues ignored facts about Trump’s role and accused Republicans of using the investigation as a political weapon against Harris’ presidential campaign. McCaul’s team denies those charges.
The decision to withdraw U.S. military from Afghanistan in 2021 is widely seen as a direct result of the timeline that the Trump administration developed, but Biden’s call was the culmination of years of skepticism over the U.S. military’s ability to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby also criticized the GOP report as “partisan and inaccurate.” He emphasized that while the evacuation was far from perfect, the Biden administration had taken responsibility for the challenges and that several factors, including Trump’s 2020 agreement with the Taliban, played key roles in the chaotic exit.
For his part, Trump has frequently criticized the Afghan withdrawal. In a recent speech to National Guard members in Detroit, the former president said that the exit “set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.”
Meanwhile, in a news conference outside the Capitol on Monday, families of the fallen service members, many of whom have defended Trump, demanded accountability for the withdrawal’s failures.
