16 Years of Presidents Talking About the War in Afghanistan

President Trump said Tuesday the U.S. military would not be hamstrung by “artificial timelines” in Afghanistan, an acknowledgment of the deteriorating security situation there by a leader who previously called for a withdrawal of the American military from the country.

“Our warriors in Afghanistan also have new rules of engagement,” Trump said in his State of the Union address. “Along with their heroic Afghan partners, our military is no longer undermined by artificial timelines, and we no longer tell our enemies our plans.”

Those remarks follow three separate attacks by the Taliban and ISIS in or near Kabul, the Afghan capital. More than 100 people, including Americans, died in those attacks, which targeted a luxury hotel, an area restricted to Afghan government workers, and an Afghan army outpost.

This is President Trump’s first State of the Union address—his address to a joint session of Congress last year was not a State of the Union because, traditionally, the president must be in office for a year giving an official State of the Union. During the speech last year, Trump didn’t mention Afghanistan. But in the time since then, he unveiled his Afghan strategy and, reluctantly, approved the deployment of additional U.S. troops to the country. There are now 14,000 of them there, with plans to send an additional 1,000.

Since 2002, Afghanistan has made appearances in each of the presidential speeches to Congress, corresponding to nearly every year the U.S.His successor’s remarks on Tuesday show that that was not exactly true