WASHINGTON - First Lady Laura Bush told NBC's Jay Lenno that the progress she saw during her secret and lightning trip to Afghanistan on March 30 was "very encouraging," especially regarding the advances women are making free of the repression of the Taliban.
"It's very, very encouraging when you saw the people of Afghanistan lined up to vote," she said in an appearance on The Tonight Show sporting a cream colored trouser-suit and an apparently new hair style Lenno called "short'n sassy."
Bush said Afghani President Hamid Karzai told her a story exemplifying the courage of a group of Afghani women who refused to leave a line outside a polling station even when they came under rocket fire.
"The men all ran and the women said 'we're not going to run, we want to vote,'" the First Lady said referring to the comments Karzai made. "So then the men, of course, came back and joined them and they voted," she added.
Laura Bush said she visited a dormitory for 800 women built with US help at Kabul University to provide women a safe place to live in away from home while they train to be teachers.
"They can stay in the dorm and then they go back after six months' training to their villages and try to train other teachers. It's actually a cascading effect: to try to educate the country as fast as they possibly can educate it," she added.
She said she was very pleased to see Afghan women living free of the repressive Taliban regime -- which was overthrown in a US-led military invasion of the country in late 2001. "I didn't see any women in burkas" -- the mandatory, black veil covering the entire face women wore under the Taliban regime.
Bush said American women "stand in solidarity with the women of Afghanistan."
"It's hard for us to even imagine a country where girls are denied an education or where women can't even leave their homes to go to work or to do anything else without a male escort," said the wife of US President George W. Bush.
"And so it was an honor to be able to bring the best wishes of American women to the women of Afghanistan," she added.
04/27/2005 06:28 GMT