Spoken from the Heart (40 page)

If we set aside one day to honor each victim of 9-11, it would take us nearly a decade to complete our tribute. There were, at final count, 2,973 innocent dead from that morning. I closed by saying, "Americans are willing to fight and die for our freedoms, but more importantly, we are willing to live for them." And when I look back now at that fall, for all the worry and the darkness, I do still see, as the Psalmist said, so much goodness in the land of the living.

In sixth grade, our big class project was to write a country report. I painstakingly copied mine into a green notebook, with a green and gold compass that my mother helped me design to decorate the cover. My research came from the encyclopedia, what all elementary school students in Midland used back then. At home, we didn't have a set of leather-bound Britannicas or World Books; Mother and Daddy hadn't wanted to spend the money on them. Instead, our encyclopedia set came from the grocery store. Mother "earned" it one volume at a time as part of a special promotion; whenever she spent a certain amount of money at the store, she received a coupon good for one or two volumes.

The moment I got the assignment, I decided to pick a country that sounded completely exotic and remote compared to anything I knew in Midland, Texas. Our teacher, Mr. Bain, told us to look at a map of the world, and I ran my finger around and picked the crossing point for the ancient Silk Road. And so my sixth-grade country report was on Afghanistan, a nation I never thought that I would encounter again.

The Afghanistan I wrote about in 1957 was very different from the one the United States was confronting in 2001. For thousands of years, it has been a land of high mountain ranges, sweeping desert, and remote green valleys, where goats and sheep grazed and orchards were planted. Landlocked, it was never totally isolated. Trade routes between West and East snaked across its harsh terrain. Nomadic peoples from the Mongolian steppes used its corridors to push east toward Persia or south to India, and it was invaded from the west as well. Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan in 329 b.c. on his way to India; Arab armies came in the 600s; and Genghis Khan left a trail of carnage in 1219. In the 1300s, Tamerlane made Afghanistan part of his Central Asian empire. Afghanistan became its own confluence of cultures--Persian, Turkic Central Asian, and Indo-Persian--along what would become the Pakistani border. It was tribal and diverse, and repeatedly caught between other empires. In the nineteenth century, the British and the Russians used Afghanistan as a wedge between their two dominions. In the mid-twentieth century, as I was writing my sixth-grade report, Afghanistan was a pawn between the Soviet Union and the Americans in the Cold War. It was technically a nonaligned nation, and its king and prime minister were hoping to benefit from playing one side against the other. From 1955 to 1957, the United States gave Afghanistan more than $30 million in economic aid. The following year, the Afghan prime minister came to Washington, D.C., and addressed both the House of Representatives and the Senate. But by 1960, the Russians had given $300 million in economic aid to Afghanistan, and its prime minister was meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. After that, the United States largely ceded Afghanistan to Russia's sphere of influence and began looking to other nations arrayed across the vast, global Cold War chessboard.

But this period was notable in other ways, particularly for women. In 1959 Afghanistan formally abolished the requirement that women wear a veil and a chadri, a shroudlike head-to-toe covering. By 1965 women were allowed to vote in national assembly elections, and soon after a woman was made the minister of public health. Women became teachers and doctors and ran businesses; eventually 40 percent worked in paying jobs. They played sports, watched movies, wore skirts and heels, and the few well-to-do copied the fashions in Tehran.

Then in the early 1970s, a severe drought hit. Crops failed, and much of the country's sheep population, a key source of meat, perished. Hunger was rampant, and as many as eighty thousand people died of starvation before international food aid could reach them. From there came coups and then the overthrow of the government. A communist faction took control, but the Soviet Union was still not pleased, and in December of 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics in protest, and no American athletes participated.

United States- and Middle Eastern-backed Afghan mujahideen fighters drove the Soviets out ten years later, after the country had been largely left in ruins and 1.5 million Afghans had been killed. Five years later, in 1994, as George was running against Ann Richards for Texas governor, some of those mujahideen regrouped, found fresh recruits, and became the Taliban.

Like most of America, I didn't pay much attention to the Taliban and Afghanistan in the 1990s, although some women did, among them Mavis Leno, wife of the comedian Jay Leno, who made the repression of women in Afghanistan her personal cause. But in the weeks after September 11, what I learned horrified me. Starting in 1994, when they came to power over swaths of Afghanistan, the Taliban imposed a brand of sharia law never before seen in the modern Muslim world. They shut down girls' schools and banned women from working outside their homes. They destroyed television sets, banned dancing and music because it "creates a strain in the mind and hampers the study of Islam." They required men to grow long beards and women to cover themselves in the heaviest and most restrictive style of burka. Women, they decreed, should be neither seen nor heard; otherwise they would tempt men and lead them away from the path of Islam.

When the Taliban seized Kabul, they closed the university. Ten thousand students, including four thousand women, could no longer study. Schools for boys suffered too, because the majority of teachers were women. By December of 1998, UNICEF reported that in Afghanistan nine out of every ten girls and two out of every three boys could no longer attend school. Then the religious police began to patrol the streets, beating women who might venture out alone, beating women who were not dressed properly, beating women who so much as laughed out loud. Women were ordered not to wear shoes that made noise. The Taliban closed female bathhouses and hair salons.

The repercussions for an already impoverished country were staggering. After half a decade of Taliban rule, 70 percent of the Afghan people were malnourished, one in four children would not live past the age of five, and mothers routinely died in childbirth. Old was age forty-five.

The more I read, in books and briefing papers, and the more I listened to Condi Rice, to George, and to others, the more heartbroken I became. It was late, very late, but after years of repression, the United States needed to speak out on behalf of these women. And we needed to do more than talk; we needed to reach out and help them.

I became passionate about the women of Afghanistan and their children, children who had been scarred not just by sharia law but by the near constant violence of Taliban attacks and civil war. According to reports from UNICEF, almost three-quarters of the children in Kabul had lost a family member during the years of conflict. Half of the children in the capital had watched someone be killed by a rocket or artillery, and many more had witnessed corpses and dismembered body parts scattered along city streets. Most no longer trusted adults, and most did not expect to survive themselves. On November 17, George was slated to give his weekly presidential radio address on conditions in Afghanistan, and his longtime advisor and now Counselor to the President Karen Hughes raised the idea that I speak for part of it. Karen had been with us since George's early days as governor. We valued her counsel, her creative thought, and her years of unselfish service. Her bright spirits made her a dear friend as well.

George responded, "Why not have Laura give all of it?" And so I was slated to be the first first lady to give a full presidential radio address, and I was to tape it on November 15, the same day that Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina would be leaving our Crawford ranch after their upcoming visit.

The Putins were arriving in Washington, D.C., on the morning of November 13, the day that the U.S. ally, the Afghan Northern Alliance, captured Kabul as Taliban fighters fled in pickup trucks. George and President Putin were scheduled to have a working lunch in the White House's old Family Dining Room, on the first floor. I was hosting Lyudmila for a smaller lunch in the second-floor dining room. After lunch, we left for Andrews Air Force Base and Texas. The Putins would join us at the ranch the following afternoon after a stop in Houston.

My staff, Cathy Fenton, our social secretary, and I had arranged the decorations. Outside, we had strung lights through the branches of the old live oaks, and in the dogtrot, we'd arranged round tables with orange cloths and pumpkin and hydrangea centerpieces. Tom Perini and his team would be barbecuing out of the backs of old-time covered chuckwagons. Everything was ready by noon. The Putins were scheduled to land at the ranch at 3:05 p.m. By one o'clock, it was raining; two hours later, the Putins got off Marine One in the middle of a thunderstorm. Our ranch is in one of the most arid parts of the country, and it rained almost the entire visit. George spent forty-five minutes driving President Putin around the ranch in our pickup truck, and fortunately they never got stuck in the mud. Rain blew through the screens to our porch, where we were to have cocktails before dinner. The staff was frantically moving tables and hunting for umbrellas minutes before we had to start greeting the guests. The cowboys cooked in the rain, and the cowboy band the Ranchhands played on the covered porch. The Putins walked from the guesthouse in the downpour.

We started the meal with fried catfish and corn bread and then mesquite-grilled beef tenderloin, plus a birthday cake for Condi Rice. I had invited twenty people, all of whom we thought a Russian head of state might be interested in meeting, including ranch owners, athletes, and our friend the pianist Van Cliburn, who was the first person to win the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, at the height of the Cold War. He gave a toast to Putin in Russian. I seated the Russian president next to Alice Carrington, one of the heirs to the famous King Ranch in Texas. The Putins thought we had a large ranch at 1,600 acres. Then President Putin asked Alice how big the King Ranch is, and she told him 825,000 acres. The funniest part for me, after all my protocol briefings and binders, was that in Texas it's considered a real faux pas to ask someone how big their ranch is. But it was a perfectly natural question for the head of state of the largest nation in the world.

Jenna came up from Austin. She speaks Spanish, and I sat her next to Lyudmila Putina, who does not speak English but does speak Spanish.

The rain finally abated during dinner, and afterward, we walked outside to have coffee around a crackling bonfire. Vladimir Putin struck up a conversation with Don Evans, the commerce secretary, over the fire pit. Putin said, "You have such a short history. You only have two hundred years of history and look how far you have come. How have you done it?" We forget that Russian history dates back well over a thousand years, with centuries of czars and dynasties. Donnie looked at him and said the answer is simple, freedom, democracy. "Here in the U.S.," he added, "people are free to run their own lives."

To us, it was a very simple statement of the fundamentals of American life, but George and I and the rest of the administration were never under any illusions about how hard a concept that is for the most powerful in Russia to grasp.

For the remaining seven years, whenever George was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Putin, leaders from around the world would start calling the White House weeks in advance. First it would be the Baltic countries, then the Balkan ones. Nation after nation wanted George to deliver messages for them. Even Tony Blair would call and say, "You've got to tell this to Vladimir." George would go to the meeting with a string of messages from others. And he would have a few of his own as well.

Both here and in Russia, he repeatedly chided Putin for cracking down on the press, telling the Russian president that his country had to have a free press, that a free press is essential for a democracy. "You need to have an independent press," George would tell him. And Putin would invariably reply, "Well, you control your press." George would shake his head and say, "No, Vladimir, I don't. I wish sometimes that I could control them, but I can't. They are free to say whatever they want. In our country, the press is free to write terrible things about me, and I can't do anything about it."

But Russia is a country without those traditions, and with no memory of them, and many in Russia believed that the U.S. government did control our press. In fact, following a summit meeting, one of the first questions George got from a Russian newsman essentially was, How can you complain to President Putin about the Russian press when you fired Dan Rather?

George worked hard to reach out to Putin in spite of the philosophical divide between them. The next morning at the ranch, the four of us had breakfast and then headed into Crawford, so the two presidents could make remarks to the press at the local high school. First-grade students had hung a banner that read "Howdy, Russian President Putin." Having world leaders visit our private home forged relationships; it helped to make it possible for George to deliver all those messages to Putin for so many years. And we quickly discovered that leaders from all over the world wanted to come to Crawford. When George invited Chinese president Jiang Zemin to "come and visit America," President Jiang indicated that George had invited him to be a guest at our ranch. A few months later, he arrived at our door. We entertained fifteen foreign leaders among the live oaks and wild grasses of Crawford.