US Congress honours 13 troops killed during Afghanistan withdrawal

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 criticised 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 US 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 Defence 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 US 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 centre 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.

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 committee.

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

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 US forces, and in Trump’s case sharply cut back important US airstrikes in the Taliban, even though the Taliban failed to enter into substantive negotiations with the US-backed civilian government as required by Trump’s withdrawal deal.

First Published: Sep 10 2024 | 12:59 PM IST