First Lady Laura Bush advocates for Afghan women
First Lady Laura Bush advocates for Afghan women
NBC “Meet the Press”
Host: Tom Brokaw
Guests: First Lady Laura Bush and Said Jawad, the Ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States
November 30, 2008
MR. BROKAW: Our issues this Thanksgiving Sunday -- she has been a passionate advocate for women's issues in Afghanistan throughout her husband's presidency. She has made three trips to the region. How will she continue her work after her husband leaves office? Our exclusive guest, First Lady Laura Bush.
And what is the future of that war-torn nation? Also joining us, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, Said Jawad.
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MR. BROKAW: But, first, on this Thanksgiving weekend, we take a step away from the rough-and-tumble of politics of Washington to focus on global humanitarian concerns; notably, life for women in Afghanistan. And with us is the first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, who has made this issue a cornerstone of her work since September 11th, and she is joined here this morning by the Afghanistan ambassador to the United States, Said Jawad. Welcome to both of you, it's very nice to have you.
MRS. BUSH: Thank you very much.
MR. BROKAW: Thank you. Mrs. Bush, I thought we would share with our audience, a radio address that you made, the first radio address by a first lady, shortly after September 11th, and you chose Afghanistan to talk about. So let's listen to that, and then we'll begin there.
MRS. LAURA BUSH: (From videotape.) Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed. Children aren't allowed to fly kites. Their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot work outside the home or even leave their homes by themselves. Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control.
In America, next week brings Thanksgiving. After the events of the last few months, we'll be holding our families even closer, and we will be especially thankful for all the blessings of American life. I hope Americans will join our family in working to ensure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan.
MR. BROKAW: Not too long after that, great progress was made in Afghanistan.
MRS. BUSH: That's right.
MR. BROKAW: Women became involved in politics, they're members of the parliament, they've taken a much more active role in that country. But, as we all know, the Taliban have come back into Afghanistan in larger numbers, and now there were 15 schoolgirls that were attacked --
MRS. BUSH: That's right.
MR. BROKAW: -- with acid in Kandahar just recently. Some arrests have been made, but that's pretty discouraging, isn't it?
MRS. BUSH: It is discouraging, but, on the other hand, there has been lots of progress. Are there steps back? Yes. And there are terrible, brutal happenings like the girls who were just walking to school and were targeted just because they were going to school, and disfigured with acid.
The really good news is these, the people who did it, have been arrested. There is an Afghan police force now, and an Afghan army that are building up to be able to protect the people of Afghanistan internally like we want them to, we all want them to, and there are many, many signs of progress.
When I was in Bamiyan this year I met with the governor, female governor; I met with female police officers. Are women afraid to step out and have some of these roles, sure, to some extent, they are. But these sort of happenings are more isolated than they sound when we read about them in the newspaper because they are so horrific when we read about them.
MR. BROKAW: And it's much worse in the South and in the rural areas than it is in the North.
MRS. BUSH: That's right. And Kabul is in much better shape, I think, than it has been. Violence is down there in the city, but in certain parts of Afghanistan, because there are still so many very conservative people, women, themselves, are afraid.
I met with a group of women parliamentarians, members of parliament, who were in the United States recently, and they said, "This is our chance, and if we don't take this chance, if we don't succeed now, then when will we ever be able to?" And I think the main thing that says to me is that we need to stay with them. We have to continue to support them.
Recently, when there was a terrorist bombing in Afghanistan, a group of people, 1,000 protestors, actually, came out to protest. Most people in Afghanistan want to be able to build their country, live a decent life, not be afraid of the terrorist attacks and, the fact is, we just need to keep working with them so they can do it.
MR. BROKAW: Mr. Ambassador, part of the problem as the Taliban come back into the country, people of goodwill, even, in the rural villages may want to do the right thing, but they worry about reprisals from the Taliban.
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: This is true. The way Taliban operates is by forcing people into submission. They don't provide an alternative to what the United States or the Afghan government is doing as far as providing educational opportunities, and the way they operate is by terrorizing people. And there is no future for such a vision. They might be able to undermine a few of our efforts as far as building more schools, but the people are truly determined, and the people are also very fortunate to have the support and the friendship of the United States and also the first lady of the United States. Can you imagine how the situation would be for the woman of Bamiyan, an isolated, poor province of Afghanistan that have witnessed with their tears on their eye, the slaughter of their children, the destruction of the magnificent Buddha, to be standing on the line to shake hands with the first lady of the United States?
So there are challenges in Afghanistan, definitely, but there is also a lot of signs of progress. We are optimistic for our future, we have made a big progress.
MR. BROKAW: I want to share with our audience what the Wall Street Journal had to say about the situation there in which you were quoted widely in the article, if we can, to give them a sense of the political reality that we are dealing with: "The Taliban are setting up courts in other local government institutions across Southern Afghanistan, challenging U.S. efforts to pacify the country and bolster the authority of the central government in Kabul. Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, Said Jawad, said that the Taliban is expanding its reach into Afghans' daily lives. 'It is a disgrace that seven years after the beginning of the military operations in Afghanistan, we are seeing a U-turn back to how the situation was before September 11th,' he said." That's the Wall Street Journal.
What can the central government -- what should the central government, your government, be doing more of to counteract what is going on in this rural areas where the Taliban have come back in, even in a non-military way?
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: The people of Afghanistan have done their job as far as electing a president, a parliament in a democratic government. What my government needs is more resources to deliver services, to provide protection to our people. So in many areas where there is lack of delivery of the services because of the lack of human capital on the part of the Afghan people, or the shortage of resources, the Taliban are making a comeback. They do not provide a vision for the future of the country, therefore, more investment in building an education in Afghanistan is very important to the future of Afghanistan, of the new generation of Afghan people, of Afghan women, will depend on further investing in education to train a new generation of Afghan leaders and also to provide for true gender equality.
MR. BROKAW: And Mrs. Bush had a recent meeting that President Karzai addressed -- a lot of women stood up and challenged him about law and order in Afghanistan. They wanted, really, to crack down on these terrible, terrible crimes against women in that country. Do you think that we have to find a whole new model for dealing with women's rights there that we've really reduced it to a military equation on the one hand and relying on Kabul on the other? Are we going to have to find a new model in the rural areas?
MRS. BUSH: We have a model that you didn't mention, and that's the building of civil society, and many, many people from around the world are working on building civil societies -- building schools, making sure girls are educated.
When you look at the whole situation, Afghanistan is a country that was totally decimated. Many, many people lost all the years that they would have been in school. They were never educated. The population is generally not skilled or educated. There are jobs, there are jobs that people could do if they had the skills for them, but people are not educated.
So what we have to do, what the ambassador just said, is do whatever we can to educate people as quickly as we can, and the U.S. government, working with the Afghan government, working with a lot of people in civil society, the Afghan American Women's Council, for instance, who just returned home this week from a trip to Afghanistan, are doing -- is trying to do teacher training as fast as possible.
We built, early on, a teacher training institute so that women would have a safe dorm to stay in when they came into Kabul to be educated to teach so their family members would let them leave their provinces and come into be educated, and then they were educated and went back to their own provinces to try to train teachers -- in a cascading effect, train as many teachers as possible.
But it is true that with security issues like they are, NGOs and a lot of civil society that are very, very active in other parts of the world and would love to be active in Afghanistan, are afraid to send workers there to work on all these ways that we can help both with micro finance for enterprise for women, literacy -- literacy training already that's set up in Afghanistan is set up to teach life skills.
As you learn to read, your text that you're reading is based on life skills, health information, all the things that mothers would need to know to either be able to get a job and, of course, there are many, many widows with children in Afghanistan; or to be able to start some sort of little enterprise so that they can support their family. And all those life skills are what they missed while they missed learning to read and do math and all the other things that are part of a primary education.
MR. BROKAW: You mentioned NGOs, non-governmental organizations. I had the privilege of being in a meeting of the International Rescue Committee when you addressed it a few years ago here in Washington. The IRC just had a terrible, terrible attack in Afghanistan --
MRS. BUSH: That's right.
MR. BROKAW: -- four of our aid workers were killed there, including three women who were plainly targeted because of the work that they were doing with women. The IRC had no choice but to suspend its operation --
MRS. BUSH: That's right, I mean, that's --
MR. BROKAW: -- for security reasons.
MRS. BUSH: -- that's what a lot of NGOs have done, and it's a very, very difficult issue because these are isolated. It's not everyone that that happens to but, just like you said, a lot of international aid organizations are targeted, and so they don't go there, even though that's really what -- the kind of help that the people of Afghanistan need the most.
A cold winter is coming on. Afghanistan can have very, very brutal winters. A lot of parts of Afghanistan are totally isolated once the snow has closed the roads that are there, and we are working, along with the government of Afghanistan and international organizations -- the UN, for instance, to make sure there is plenty of wheat in Afghanistan before the cold winter comes on.
But there are a lot of problems, but we need to look for a lot of different situations and, certainly, one of them is the training of the police of Afghanistan, the training of a national army, so that they can do those sort of jobs themselves.
And then, really, I think, another thing that is very important is for the people of Afghanistan to stand up, just like the protestors protested terrorist attacks to say we don't want to live like this. We want to be able to build our country, we don't want to be afraid, we want our girls to be educated, and we want a decent life.
MR. BROKAW: It's very hard, though, isn't it, in a rural village --
MRS. BUSH: Very hard.
MR. BROKAW: -- Mr. Ambassador and Mrs. Bush -- I mean, if you're a male in a rural village, and I've been in those villages, and the U.S. Army comes in during the day and says, "We want to help you. We'll set up a clinic. We'll do whatever we need to do." Night falls, the Americans go back to their base, guess who arrives next? MRS. BUSH: Yeah, sure, and they target the people who said, "Okay, good, let's build a health center."
MR. BROKAW: Right, right. So how do we get around that? I mean, that seems to me to be a conundrum that needs either a lot of new resources that is poured into it, or you need a new model for dealing with it somehow.
MRS. BUSH: Well, of course, we need resources, and the United States has supplied a lot of resources, financial resources, to Afghanistan.
And I urged the United States and the international community to not quit. You know, we need to continue to do that, but it will take time, it will take reconciliation, maybe there are ways to be able to reconcile some of these groups. A lot of them are across the border from Pakistan. They think that these young people who were -- or people -- who were arrested that had thrown the acid on the girls' faces were Afghans, but they came across the border from Pakistan.
MR. BROKAW: And, apparently, they were paid a reward for doing it.
MRS. BUSH: You know, and people need jobs, I mean, they're desperate.
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: And also we should add that is issue of the terrorist sanctuaries. We have to really make sure that the ideological, financial, and logistical support that's available to the terrorist groups still in the region will dry up. In many instances, they are capitalizing on poverty and ignorance. And if you give the people a hope, there is nothing else that will drive them to these criminal groups.
MR. BROKAW: Some of this is rooted in the Islamic religion, as well. If you go into the rural areas and into the villages, you find a lot of fathers and husbands who believe strongly in the traditional interpretation of the Koran and the place of the women in their society. And so they are not much encouraged about doing a lot for the women and their family, isn't that a big part of the problem?
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: No, no, this is separate from terrorism, of course, where there is extremism is a wrong interpretation of religion but here what needs to be done is to change gradually the culture and the tradition. And the culture and tradition could be changed only through education not through a decree by the government. Really, we have to invest for -- to educate both men and women about the rights of women. And this will be a gradual process with heavy investment on education and, more importantly, opportunities for women to have a job.
If women bring some sort of income to home, her status will change automatically. And these are the kind of programs that we are implementing with the assistance of the first lady in Afghanistan.
MR. BROKAW: General David McKiernan, who is running American military operations there, I heard him in a briefing the other night saying we have an absence of human capital -- all the lawyers, the accountants, the teachers, have left the country --
MRS. BUSH: That's right.
MR. BROKAW: We have to pull them --
MRS. BUSH: And they left a long time ago. They -- it's not -- you know, and lot of people have come back, of course. There are Afghans who have come back from -- who left before the Taliban really even -- but, of course, there are a lot who haven't come back and can you blame them? I mean, it's a very, very difficult life, and people who have built their lives in another country, in the United States or in Europe, you know, it's a sacrifice for them to come back.
MR. BROKAW: But do we have to have a new international model? Most of the emphasis, understandably, has been on the military equation, trying to shut off the Taliban in Pakistan and place them on the ground in Afghanistan itself. Should we be going to our allies and saying, "Look, we have to step up here on building roads and on building markets and on building schools?"
MRS. BUSH: Sure, and on the electricity and infrastructure. I mean, all of those things, Afghanistan needs everything. There is no infrastructure. There is not just not extensive infrastructure like sewage and water treatment and electricity, but there is no infrastructure of laws and, you know, all of those things take time, and we need to help however we can.
But I will say, there are military groups, the PRTs, the Provisional Reconstruction Teams that are there from many, many countries, I don't -- maybe 18, is it that many?
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: Forty countries have troops in Afghanistan.
MRS. BUSH: Yeah, but have these PRTs that are building schools, that are working to train policemen, for instance. There are a lot of civilians from the United States I've met when I went to this police training institute where I met the women police officers. The policemen that were there, some were from Texas, the trainers that were there helping train. So there are many people who are doing whatever they can.
But, you're right. How can we increase every one of those, every piece of it, including the civilian people that help, and then how -- what more can the PRTs, these Provisional Reconstruction Teams, do to help educate Afghanis so that they can do what they want to do for their country, and what we know they want to do. MR. BROKAW: Mr. Ambassador, a couple of tough questions about your government -- as you know, you've been reading the press. President Karzai said recently that he would like to explore the possibility of opening negotiation or talking to the Taliban, so if I'm a rural villager, and the Taliban are coming around, and I hear my president is going to be talking to them, I'm thinking maybe I should make my own kind of an accommodation here.
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: No, at the same time, what the Taliban are telling to the villager is that there is no future for you. The Afghan government is after you, the international community is after you, so we would like to give them an assurance, to the villagers, that if you are not actively involved in any kind of crime, there is a future for you to join the political process in Afghanistan.
The purpose of the talk is to bring over some of the more moderate elements of the Taliban to join the political process, because we cannot have another circle of revenge and violence in Afghanistan. It's going on for a long time. Alongside the pressure on the military front, you have to make sure that we bring into the fold those elements who have been -- joined the Taliban because of ignorance or money or other reasons.
MR. BROKAW: Do you honestly think you could ever make -- strike a deal with the Taliban to share power in Afghanistan?
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: No, we will not share power with them. We will not compromise on the values of the Afghan constitution, but if they realize that there is no future for them in Afghanistan through military operation, they will come to the table and talk to us.
MR. BROKAW: I think the other issue that troubles a lot of people who have been there including a lot of our very senior American military and diplomatic officials is that they see a very high level of corruption in Kabul, in the central government; that billions of dollars have been spent, and it's not getting out to all those parts of Afghanistan that are so desperately needed.
AMBASSADOR JAWAD: Well, most of the money has been spent outside the Afghan government budget, so there is serious effort in Afghanistan to address this issue. In fact, we have removed a number of the ministers, we have -- in fact, one of the ministers very recently for lack of proper performance. It is a partnership between the Afghan government and the international community and where we have worked together, we have even provided the resources, we have made tremendous progress in the area -- there has been less investment, we are still having challenges. But we are determined to overcome those.
MR. BROKAW: Let me just share with you, as we talk about this, the quote of David Petraeus, who is our most successful military commander in Iraq now in charge of the Southern Command, which includes Afghanistan. He said, "The effort in Afghanistan is going to be the longest campaign of the long war." Do you think the American people, especially given the economic difficulties that we have here at home now, Mrs. Bush, have the patience for that?
MRS. BUSH: I hope so. I hope they do. I mean, our tendency in the United States is to, you know, become isolationists, become protectionists, but our world is just this small now, and we are so aware of what the problems are in every corner of the world, and so I hope people in the United States will look outside of our life here in the United States and do what they can, both financially to be able to support the people of Afghanistan and then every other way.
I remember shortly after September 11th, when people would -- church groups or Girl Scout troops would collect school supplies to send to Afghanistan for the children there, because people were so shocked and amazed that a government would forbid their children from being educated, or their children even playing or flying a kite. And so I know that it's wearying -- I'm sure it's wearying for the people of Afghanistan.
But it's really important for us to continue to support the people of Afghanistan; to look outside ourselves, and I do know, and I know you know this from your children as well, that young people in the United States do have the energy and do want to help, and their world is small. They are well traveled, they've traveled to many places, and they want to keep continue helping them. So I urge the people of the United States to do that.
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MR. BROKAW: And what will be your role in Afghanistan?
MRS. BUSH: Well, I hope to continue to work on this. Afghan- American Women's Council has moved -- will move to Georgetown, it's moved to Georgetown University. I hope to continue my role with that. The president is going to build a Freedom Institute with his presidential library and museum at SMU in Dallas, and that will be a really good vehicle, I think, for me to continue to work with -- especially women and children in Afghanistan.
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