Bill Hagerty criticizes Biden letting a calendar drive US withdrawal from Afghanistan

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US shouldn't have let the calendar drive the Afghanistan evacuation: Bill Hagerty

Tennessee Republican slams the U.S. response to the crisis in Afghanistan on 'Fox News Live'

Sen. Bill Hagerty criticized Biden for leaving Americans in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover on ‘Fox News Live,’ saying the United States should not have let a calendar dictate the timing of the troop withdrawal. 

SENATOR BILL HAGERTY: You know, this is a product of this evacuation that has been handled in such a haphazard fashion. I think the State Department is really incapable of assessing the situation on the ground right now because they’ve evacuated. What’s happened though is we’ve left American citizens behind just as you’ve noted here and that is extremely concerning. I’ve just returned from a trip to London and to Brussels, meeting with allies in the U.K. and at NATO. We’ve got British citizens that have been left behind too. This activity that is taking place is not just with Americans but it's also with our allies who are suffering in exactly the same means and we have left them in this condition. I mean, the frustration that they conveyed to me was palpable. What they talked about was a situation where we let a calendar drive our approach to Afghanistan rather than the conditions on the ground and that’s what yields a situation precisely like the one that you just showed with this lady whose expecting a child trying to get out and not knowing what her future may be. We should have never let a calendar drive it. We shouldn’t let local domestic politics drive it. That’s the perception overseas. We should have been driving this based on the conditions on the ground and that’s not what happened here.  

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