by Laura Bush
We had our own transition as 2005 dawned. A second Scottish terrier, two-month-old Miss Beazley, a relative of Barney's, joined us in the White House. George had a new valet, Robert Favela, who grew up outside El Paso; the U.S. Navy had posted him to work for George in the White House. In an amazing coincidence, Robert had joined the Navy with his best friend, Carlos Medina. Carlos's parents owned the four-square orange-brick house in Canutillo that had been Grammee and Papa's home, where Grammee had laid each brick by hand.
Condi Rice was departing the West Wing for the State Department, as secretary of state. The new national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, is one of the nicest men I have ever met. His even temperament, dedication, and unmatched sense of fairness and balance made him a perfect advisor, and his compassion makes him a great person.
Inside the White House, Karl Rove was named deputy chief of staff. Karl had been with us in the trenches of Republican politics for years. Not only did we respect his thoughtful and intuitive understanding of the political world, but his interests spanned well beyond vote counts and elections. As a person, Karl is funny and warm. He was invaluable to George as an advisor and would remain one of our closest friends.
My chief of staff, Andi Ball, who had been with me for a decade, since our first days in the Governor's Mansion and through the horrors of 9-11, and who had become a treasured friend, was going home to her husband in Texas. Replacing her would be the very talented Anita McBride, who had worked for Ronald Reagan and Gampy, and had most recently been at the State Department. We had a new social secretary, Lea Berman, a warm and gracious hostess; and I already had a second, sweet assistant, Lindsey Lineweaver. My first, the always cheerful Sarah Moss, had departed before the campaign and was now the married Sarah Garrison.
When I interviewed Anita, I told her there was one thing I wanted to do above all else: I wanted to travel to Afghanistan.
I had wanted to go to Afghanistan for years. My regular meetings in the United States with Afghan teachers and parliamentarians, lawyers and judges, as well as my work with the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council, had heightened my interest in seeing the country for myself.
I had tried to visit in previous years, but there were either security concerns or problems with planning. I did not want to divert vital military assets, such as helicopters or security, from the battlefield to accommodate one of my trips. I did not want people in our military to have to pay attention to me when they had other jobs and other duties. We needed to pick an optimum time for our military, but I was eager to go.
All the trip planning was done in secret, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the same underground set of rooms where we had taken shelter on the evening of 9-11. A few representatives from the Secret Service and the White House Military Office worked with Anita on the arrangements; as did Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs; and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin. Andy Card, George's chief of staff, had signed off on the trip, but on my staff, only Anita knew. The trip was so classified that she couldn't tell her own husband.
We had decided that I would travel to the Afghan capital of Kabul on the day of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council meeting. The council, a unique public-private partnership that George and Afghan president Hamid Karzai had established in 2002, meets twice a year, once in Washington and once in Kabul. Through the council, American women partner with women in Afghanistan to share their expertise in education, business, politics, the law, and health care. Among its accomplishments the council has provided opportunities for Afghan women to open businesses, secure an education for themselves and their children, and begin to assume leadership roles inside Afghanistan. This is a sea change in a nation where, under the Taliban, women who had been widowed or left without fathers or brothers following years of war could not leave the house because they had no male relative to accompany them.
Many of the security assets that I would need would already be in place for the council's March meeting in Kabul. I could slip in under their cover. And that is exactly what we did. The members of the press who would accompany me on this trip did not know where we were going until thirty-six hours before our departure, and they were sworn to secrecy. American members of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council were told that I was coming only after their plane had finished a refueling stop in England.
My plane left Andrews Air Force Base at 10:15 in the morning. Traveling with me were Anita; Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education; and Paula Dobriansky. To reach Kabul we would cross nine and a half time zones in fourteen hours. We would land at 11:35 a.m. local time at Bagram Airfield, our plane twisting like a corkscrew as we descended to evade any rounds of insurgent gunfire. Waiting to greet me upon arrival were a group of allied commanders from the United States, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, Australia, Egypt, Estonia, and France. All had troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
I had a chance to personally thank the commanders before boarding a Nighthawk helicopter. Blades churning, it lifted off for the thirty-minute ride to Kabul. In the distance the Hindu Kush mountains rose, their pointed white snowcaps piercing the sky. Below us stretched brown dust and flat building compounds made of rough mud brick. Some looked like little more than stacked earth or ruins. I had the sense that I was flying over a scene out of the Bible, gazing down upon an ancient civilization and the distant footprint it had left behind.
Though we were far removed from shifting sands, the miles of ground looked like a desert. Afghanistan had once been renowned for its grapes and pomegranates; its fruits were favorite delicacies on the British ambassador's table in India. Remarkably, from my window, I could not glimpse even a blade of green. What trees had not been destroyed in the Russian invasion had been burned by the Afghans during the biting cold winters. Now, for heat, they burned things like trash or tires, whatever they could find, whatever would catch fire.
After years of war and Taliban rule, the country was decimated. Kabul was a shell of bombed-out buildings. Very few people had electricity. Water was carried by hand. Roads were collections of rubble. The country's physical infrastructure had been ruined, and the social infrastructure was worse. The most basic laws governing contracts, property rights, and business were absent in Afghanistan.
We had large scarves to cover our heads if needed, and while we flew, Anita and I pulled up our scarves as a fine, choking dust swirled through the open doors of the helicopter. The layers of dust that settled over us were far worse than the red sand that engulfed Midland. Here, there was nothing, not even scrubby mesquite, to hold the soil to the ground. The helicopter ride was like traveling in a wind tunnel, with the enormous thump-thump of the blades above us and bracing, cold air racing past. Soldiers leaned out of the doors and rear of the helicopter with their machine guns raised. These are the conditions our troops travel in every day, risking their lives. There is no special dispensation from either the elements or the insurgents; both are dangerous. The pilot who so gently set down my enormous helicopter was killed two months later in a crash in Iraq. Two of the crew chiefs were killed in a separate crash just a week later; their helicopter was brought down by bad weather in Afghanistan's Ghazni Province. I wrote to all three families. To Captain Derek Argel's widow, I penned, "Our nation has lost a hero, but you and your son have lost your precious husband and father. My heart aches for you."
Our destination was Kabul University, an austere, Soviet-style concrete building that had been partly bombed out during the years of conflict. The United States had renovated it to include dorm rooms and classrooms. In the yard outside, widows were planting trees as part of a nationwide reforestation project funded by Caroline Firestone, an American philanthropist and a member of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council.
My first stop was the Women's Teacher Training Institute, which I had helped found in 2002. The program, overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, is designed to train teachers from the rural provinces. After completing th
e program, they return to their provinces to train other teachers. The idea was to create a cascading effect, so that as many teachers as possible could be trained as quickly as possible and more small villages could open their own schools. That spring the institute's first class would be graduating. The institute trained both men and women, but they were kept segregated, taught in separate classrooms.
When I entered the women's classroom, the women were sitting on the floor on cushions, their backs propped against the wall and their papers spread across their laps. The institute had few chairs or desks. Many of the women were completely covered in blue burkas, and I was immediately struck by the sheer weight of the material. These were small women, drowning in cloth, each forming a kind of triangle on the floor, as if they were pinned to the ground. And they seemed afraid even to lift their mesh-covered eyes and peer up at me. Perhaps they were wary of looking at me in my Western pantsuit, with my uncovered face and hair. But these women were brave enough to leave their homes and come to Kabul, to live in a dorm, go to school, study, and be trained. Two Kabul University students showed me the dorm rooms where the female teachers slept on bunk beds. Without these rooms, without this program, these women would have no chance for any kind of education, no chance at all to come to Kabul.
In the men's classroom, there were only cushions around the wall, not even a rug. The men had short beards, and most wore shirts that hung below their knees. Two had donned Western-style blazers over top. A lone man in the corner stood and struggled to say his name in English and to welcome me to Afghanistan.
I gave a speech in the university's cafeteria and announced the establishment of two new schools, the American University of Afghanistan and the International School of Kabul, a high school. "These are more than just development projects," I said, "they also signify the bond between the American and Afghan people. They are symbols of our shared hopes and dreams for the future. That dream is of a prosperous, peaceful, and above all, a free Afghanistan, where both men and women stand upright in equality. "
A nearby room had been set up like a grand Afghan bazaar, with piles of hand-woven rugs and rows of dresses on display. There were twenty booths, each showcasing goods made by women entrepreneurs, rug makers, weavers, embroiderers, and clothing makers, all microenterprise projects. The driving force behind many of these programs was a woman named Mina Sherzoy, who had escaped to California in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She had returned in 2002 following the fall of the Taliban to help her fellow countrywomen. But there were also women with no prior connection to Afghanistan. Connie Duckworth, the first female sales and trading partner at Goldman Sachs, had helped to found the Arzu rug company. "Arzu" means hope in the Dari language of Afghanistan. As an enterprise, Arzu works to preserve the traditional Afghan craft of rug weaving and pays women bonuses for high-quality workmanship. In return, Arzu weavers must agree to send their sons and daughters to school, to take literacy classes themselves, and to receive pre- and postnatal medical care for themselves and their babies. After I had returned home, I ordered two Arzu rugs for the White House collection to place in the hallways of the residence. I purchased a third rug for the small library at our ranch, so that we might always have something created by these Afghan women.
On the grounds of Kabul University, I helped plant a tree in a new grove on what had been barren land. That cluster of trees is still green and growing.
Behind the scenes, Anita had been in negotiations with the Secret Service to see if I could leave the grounds of the university and go into Kabul itself. The agent in charge, Joe Clancy, finally said yes, but the outing could not last more than twenty minutes. We had to be onboard our airplane and in the sky by nightfall. We drove into the city in a convoy, along one of Kabul's major streets, and stopped in front of three little stores, clustered together, sharing walls. One was a bakery, with a picture of a white frosted cake and a smattering of English words on its wooden sign. Through the window I could see shelves of fluffy breads and pastries. The sidewalk in front of the shops was concrete, but just beyond, the concrete gave way to packed dust. Trash, empty bottles, and papers, carried by the wind, came to rest where the fresh concrete lip rose. Three children in a nearby house peeked out from their windows, and Therese Burch, one of my advance staff, walked over and invited them to come outside. The older boy knew a few words of English, but his younger brother and sister looked at me in silence. They wore only thin jackets, and in the chill of March, the younger children had no shoes for their feet.
I said hello and offered them one of the small gifts that we had brought, a kaleidoscope. I held it up to my eye and turned the tube to show them how it worked. Their faces broke into smiles. Inside the bakery I looked at the display, and the employees insisted upon pressing a bag filled with sweet Afghan cookies into my hands. I paid for the bag and thanked them. The pastries looked delicious, but of course, the Secret Service agents wouldn't let us eat them.
In those few minutes, I had exhausted my unscheduled off-site visit time. We piled back into the convoy and returned to the helicopters that ferried us to the Presidential Palace, where Hamid Karzai was waiting.
The palace is old and, after years of neglect, was in terrible shape. Crumbling blocks had been repainted and fresh plaster patches hid aging bullet holes in the walls. It was a stark place, several years away from even a modest garden or grounds. The inside was furnished in heavy, carved wooden pieces and old, slightly worn tapestries. Only the official meeting area, where we sat on gold-trimmed claw-foot chairs, beneath a crystal chandelier, had any look of opulence. As we talked, President Karzai's staff served us bright glasses of pomegranate juice. The Secret Service blanched as I raised my glass. Lindsey, my assistant, rushed over to whisper that they didn't want me to drink it, so I left the beautiful glass of deep red liquid untouched; I was dying to drink that pomegranate juice.
After our meeting President Karzai walked me out of his offices and across a long, enclosed courtyard to a smaller, modern, rectangular building, made of concrete and blocks of stone. The woman who appeared in the doorway was his wife, who is so private that she is rarely seen in public. Zeenat Karzai wore a long, gray coat, and her head was tightly swathed in a full white scarf. Unlike some Muslim women, who push their scarves back above their hairlines to reveal a tantalizing bit of their dark tresses, she concealed every strand of hair. In a nod to Western ways, she clutched a gray purse in her hand as we were introduced.
Sitting beneath a painting of her husband in her living room, Dr. Karzai offered me tea. She is a trained obstetrician-gynecologist in a nation with the world's second highest mortality rate for women in childbirth. In 2005 an Afghan mother would die every half hour trying to bring a child into the world. Dr. Karzai told me of the desperate need for a maternity hospital in Kabul. The French hospital that Bernadette Chirac had discussed at the previous year's G8 Summit had yet to materialize, and Dr. Karzai pleaded for help, hoping that the United States could do more. Clasping her purse in her hand, she walked me to the door and took a few brief steps into the sunshine before retreating inside. I turned around to wave as we hurried to the helos for the thirty-minute flight back to Bagram.
At the base, in a bare prefab room with Afghan throw rugs to warm the cold floor, I listened to a briefing by Lieutenant General David Barno and Major General Jason Kamiya on provisional reconstruction and military projects. As they pointed at provincial maps, my eyes were drawn to the vast, mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reputed hiding place for Osama bin Laden and the refuge for the Taliban. Even on paper, it looked formidable. By 4:55 that afternoon, I was standing in the chow line to eat dinner with the troops in the Dragon Chow Dining Hall. We ate chicken tenders, ketchup, and broccoli under a large American flag. Sitting on one side of me was a female soldier, wearing camouflage fatigues, her sandy hair pulled back into a ponytail. These were the two worlds, burka-clad women and women in combat fatigues, now inhabiting the same dusty Afghan gr
ound.
At 5:45 p.m., we were on board the plane, chasing the setting sun. Touchdown was at 1:45 a.m. at Andrews Air Force Base.
I had told the Afghan students that it was "an extraordinary privilege" to be with them that day. It was. It was a privilege to see Kabul and to be able to thank our troops in Bagram. But it was powerful to see with my own eyes the complete devastation in Afghanistan. As years of Soviet war and then Taliban rule had shown, it is easy and quick to destroy, and slow and hard to rebuild. I can understand the impatience of many with the halting progress made by new democracies around the world. From our vantage point, our own democracy and government may appear to have come easily. But they did not. Thirteen years after America declared its independence, we had to completely revamp our government. And though in 1789 we started with a near perfect document, the Constitution, it took decades, even centuries, for us to build a more perfect country. It took over seventy-five more years to achieve the abolition of slavery. It was fifty-five years after the surrender at Appomattox before women earned the right to vote and another forty-five years beyond that before real civil rights came to our own nation. Only in hindsight do we feel the onward rush of progress and think of it as inevitable and unstoppable. In the moment, it looks like something else indeed.
Two days after I returned from Kabul, Pope John Paul II died in Vatican City. George and I, accompanied by Gampy, Bill Clinton, and Condi Rice, flew to Rome for the largest gathering of heads of state in history. In total, seventy presidents and prime ministers, four kings, and five queens gathered to mourn his passing. Four million other mourners packed the streets around the basilica, and millions had walked past his body as it lay in state. We too went to pay our respects, kneeling at the communion rail. Before us lay the once vibrant man who had helped rally millions in Eastern Europe to the cause of freedom and the end of communist oppression, and who had worked so tirelessly on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden. No effort had been made to cover his skin, which had grown mottled with age and illness. But his was a life of devotion, a life of blessings, a life well-lived.