Bush guest grateful for U.S. commitment

Fawzia Koofi, the veiled woman shown repeatedly at first lady Laura Bush’s right elbow during the State of the Union, does not care about her newfound celebrity or that President Bush did not recognize her by name in his address Tuesday.

It is enough, she said, that the president and the U.S. government remain focused on her native Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy four years after the fundamentalist Taliban regime was ousted.

“We know there are new priorities in Iraq and Iran, but it is very important for us to hear that the president and the U.S. government are still with us,” Mrs. Koofi said in an interview yesterday.

A widowed mother of two small children, Mrs. Koofi, 30, represents a near-perfect symbol of U.S. and Western hopes for post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Her father, a member of Afghanistan’s last democratic government more than three decades ago, was killed when she was a girl. She became a well-known advocate for women’s and children’s rights, living in a northeastern part of her country not controlled by the Islamist Taliban regime.

In September, she won a seat in the lower house of the new Afghan National Assembly and was elected second deputy speaker. She arrived in Washington this week with Sayed Hamed Gailani, a member of the assembly’s upper house, to hear the president’s speech and meet with U.S. officials and lawmakers.

Mr. Bush twice referred to Afghanistan early in his speech, hailing the right of women to vote and praising President Hamid Karzai and the new parliament for “fighting terror while building the institutions of democracy.”

Mr. Gailani, 51, said the president’s message, the invitation to sit with the first lady and the successful international donors conference this week in London were crucial symbols for Afghans who felt ignored and abandoned by the West in the decade before the September 11 attacks.

“Our message is that this neglect cannot be allowed to happen again,” he said. “If you are treating a bacteria with an antibiotic, and you leave the bacteria only half-killed, it only becomes more resistant and dangerous. You need to complete the treatment.”

Mrs. Koofi said she learned as she was leaving Kabul on Sunday that she and Mr. Gailani would be in Mrs. Bush’s gallery section, but did not realize she would be beside the first lady until she saw her name card on the gallery seat. She was told Mr. Bush might recognize her and Mr. Gailani in his speech — he did not — and spent much of the address listening intently for her name.

Afghan Embassy officials took her shopping for clothes before the speech, but she decided in the end to go with the veil and dress she typically wears in her professional duties.

“I am representing Afghan women. Let me be the way I am,” she said.

The Afghan lawmakers met with Mr. Bush briefly after the speech in a Capitol reception room. Mrs. Koofi said she told the president that her country, with U.S. help, had given birth to a “small baby” named democracy.

“I told him we cannot let this baby just die now that it has been born.”