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FIRST ON FOX: Former Army aviator Rep. Matt Van Epps, R-Tenn., said he “vividly” remembers the moment five years ago when he heard the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan with scant shreds of a plan in place.
“I remember my boss at the time in Tennessee state government asked me, like, ‘Hey Matt, are you OK?’ And, you know, I think the frank answer is no, I’m very upset about this,” he told Fox News Digital in an interview. “And as I talked to my colleagues, some who were serving with me in government, others that were still active-duty army and in the military, I think the feeling was generally the same, that we spent so much time and effort and to see that unfold the way that it did was just beyond frustrating.”
To this day, Van Epps believes neither the Biden administration nor former President Joe Biden himself have been “adequately held responsible in the aftermath of just an absolutely chaotic withdrawal that did not have to happen.”
It’s part of what motivated him to introduce a resolution marking Wednesday’s fifth anniversary of the tragic bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, which took the lives of 13 U.S. service members in addition to over 100 Afghanis near the Abbey Gate.
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“We’ve introduced this resolution, first and foremost, to remember that, coming up on five years ago, those 13 brave service members made the ultimate sacrifice at Abbey Gate,” Van Epps said. “And then second to that is that the Biden-Harris administration absolutely failed to withdraw in Afghanistan, and it didn’t have to be that way. And it’s important for the American people to remember what the Biden-Harris administration did in that abject failure, withdrawing from Afghanistan.”
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Van Epps served 10 years of active duty that included deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, spending part of that time as an air mission commander. He then served in the Tennessee Army National Guard.
And his ties to the withdrawal are personal, Van Epps said — two of his friends were on the ground in Kabul when the evacuation was taking place.
“I had two very close friends who were there as part of that evacuation. And they served honorably and heroically and did incredible work with the hand that they were dealt, they just should never have been put in that situation to begin with,” he said.
The Biden administration faced bipartisan backlash for how it handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan amid the Taliban’s lightning-fast takeover of the country.
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The majority of Democrats, however, have defended Biden. Many have said he was carrying out the work of President Donald Trump’s agreement with the Taliban during his first administration in February 2020, which called for the U.S. to withdraw within 14 months.
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Van Epps defended Trump’s peace deal, arguing it cleared the way for a “very deliberate withdrawal from Afghanistan that had conditions that the Taliban and the Afghan government had to meet for us to withdraw our soldiers.”
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“And then the Biden team gets in, totally ignores the Doha agreement where they could have enforced those accountability measures on the Taliban, totally missed and ignored all of these warning signals as the Taliban was gaining ground across the country. They were more interested in optics than operations,” he said.
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