Congress honors 13 servicemembers killed as US pulled out of Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — House and Senate leaders on Tuesday commemorated 13 U.S. servicemembers killed by a suicide bomber three years ago at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, pausing for an hour the ongoing partisan blame-casting over the attack.

The four leaders headlined the solemn ceremony in a packed Capitol Rotunda at which the sacrifice of each of the fallen servicemembers was memorialized with Congress’ highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

The ceremony occurred amid a presidential election campaign in which the oversight of extracting U.S. troops from Afghanistan, not just in 2021 but also in the years leading up to it, has drawn intense scrutiny. The matter may arise Tuesday evening when former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris face off in a televised debate.

Most of the remarks at the ceremony mirrored those of Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who called the 13 servicemembers “heroes, guardians and saviors who were fighting for a cause far bigger than themselves.” Schumer also noted that some were “younger than the war in Afghanistan itself.”

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., made one of the only indirect suggestions that a debate was raging outside over stewardship of the 2021 Afghanistan pullout, telling the families of the servicemembers: “We are sorry. The United States government should have done everything to protect our troops.”

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., issued a more direct statement Tuesday just before the ceremony, saying “the Biden-Harris administration” made an ill-advised policy of slashing U.S. troop levels worse with its execution of the final extraction of troops and Afghan partners in August 2021.

Biden and Harris “turned a bad idea into a historic debacle, leaving valuable American weaponry for our enemies to use and abandoning thousands of our long-time Afghan friends,” Wicker said.

Electoral backdrop

In addition to the fallen Americans, an estimated 170 Afghan civilians were killed on Aug. 26, 2021, at Abbey Gate, just outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. U.S. officials have said a member of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State terrorist group carried out the attack.

Tuesday’s ceremony took place as Republicans try to pin responsibility on Harris for not doing enough to prevent the deadly attack. The GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report Monday that blamed President Joe Biden and Harris for the security breakdown. Democrats on the panel shot back with a rebuttal.

Trump has said of Biden and Harris that it was “just like they pulled the trigger.”

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported in 2022 that the Biden administration mishandled the final days of U.S. involvement in the war, but it said “the most important factor” was Trump’s agreement with the Taliban in 2020 to a withdrawal in 2021.

Trump had significantly reduced U.S. troops in the country during his term. The former president has acknowledged agreeing with Biden that American forces should leave Afghanistan but has contended in hindsight that he would have left more U.S. troops in Kabul in the final days.

Trump has sought to ally himself with the distraught families of the fallen U.S. soldiers. But his visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 26 to honor them became engulfed in controversy over his staff capturing images in an area of the cemetery where that is forbidden and then using them in a campaign video.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont.; and Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., also spoke at the ceremony.