WASHINGTON (CN) — Two years after a deadly terrorist bombing at a Kabul airport punctuated the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the families of soldiers slain in the attack had sharp words for Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley and other White House officials who oversaw the operation.
“I want General Milley’s stars … in my hand,” said Darin Hoover, whose son Taylor was a Marine Corps staff sergeant killed at the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021.
“None of you have the respect of your men and women anymore. Do what is right. It is past time.”
Hoover and more than a dozen family members of soldiers killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal spoke Tuesday at a roundtable discussion held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The panel’s chairman, Texas Republican Michael McCaul, has been a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s stewardship of the 2021 operation; alongside many of his GOP colleagues he has painted the exit as both a military and diplomatic failure.
McCaul counted this week’s roundtable as part of his ongoing investigation into the White House’s approach to the Afghanistan withdrawal.
“[T]wo years later, we are still here seeking answers,” the lawmaker said. “What went wrong? Why couldn’t this tragedy have been prevented? These questions remain unanswered because this administration wants to sweep what happened under the rug.”
The Texas Republican referred to the Abbey Gate attack as a “self-inflicted wound” and blasted what he said was a decision by the administration to work alongside Afghanistan’s nascent Taliban government.
“Simply put, it was hell on earth,” McCaul said, “and the saddest part is, it all could have been prevented.”
The White House has long blamed the rocky withdrawal on a lack of planning done under the Trump administration, which struck a deal with the Taliban in 2020 and agreed to have U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by May 2021.
Despite that, the group of Gold Star families — a title given to those who have lost family members during a military conflict — were intensely critical on Tuesday of what they saw as the failures of both military leadership and the Biden administration during the withdrawal.
U.S. service members “carried out this humanitarian evacuation in the worst of circumstances,” said Christy Shamblin, mother-in-law of Marine Corps Sergeant Nicole Gee, who was killed in the Abbey gate attack. “But there were failures, and I can count over half a dozen opportunities to stop this tragic ending. Systems we have in place were ignored.”
Paula Knauss Selph, mother of Army Staff Sergeant Ryan Knauss, laid blame directly at President Joe Biden’s feet.
“President Biden and his executive cabinet must accept responsibility publicly for the chaotic withdrawal at the end of this 20-year war,” said Selph, pushing back on claims that the Trump White House bears some responsibility for the debacle. “Several presidents preceded Mr. Biden, but none of them are to be held accountable for the withdrawal. That is his and his alone.”
Selph also demanded that Congress take action.
“No mother or father needs to sit at this table again and tell you that you failed in some way,” she said. “Somebody did. Now let’s find out who those people are and let them be held publicly accountable.”
General Milley meanwhile said that the Pentagon owes transparency to the families of those killed at Abbey Gate.
“We owe them honesty,” Milley said in a statement read at the roundtable by Congressman McCaul. “We owe them accountability. We owe them the truth about what happened to their loved ones.”
The Defense Department has said it intends to cooperate with Congress’ investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal.
While congressional Republicans led Tuesday’s roundtable, the event had bipartisan attendance. Pennsylvania Democrat Madeleine Dean offered words of support to the Gold Star families, joining her colleagues in repeating the names of the 13 service members killed at Abbey Gate.
Dean, however, defended the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, posing it as a necessary end to a protracted conflict.
“This 20-year war cost us so much,” Dean said. “We could not continue to send Americans to fight a war no longer in the Americans vital interest.”
The lawmaker also acknowledged that “decisions over multiple administrations” led to the ultimate end of military intervention in Afghanistan.
“It is a fact that the end was devastatingly heartbreaking,” Dean said. “Still, it was necessary to bring this war to a close.”
The August 2021 Abbey Gate bombing killed not only 13 U.S. service members but also took the lives of more than 150 Afghan citizens. ISIS-K, the terrorist group’s affiliate based in Afghanistan’s Khorasan Province, later claimed responsibility for the attack.
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