In My Time - Dick Cheney [225]
Like the president I had believed that Colin Powell would be an effective secretary of state. I had long admired his talents and had personally selected him for appointment by George H. W. Bush to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was superb in that job. But it was not the same when he was at the State Department. I was particularly disappointed in the way he handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. Indeed, I continue to hear it today. But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection. It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government. I’d been sorry in 1992 when Bill Clinton’s election brought an end to my working relationship with Powell at the Pentagon, but when President Bush, after his reelection in 2004, accepted Powell’s resignation, I thought it was for the best.
IN DECEMBER 2004 LYNNE and I traveled to Afghanistan for the inauguration of Hamid Karzai, the nation’s first democratically elected president.
With Hamid Karzai in Kabul, Afghanistan for his inauguration as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
Before the ceremony, we had breakfast with U.S. troops stationed at Bagram Air Base, outside Kabul. When I spoke to the men and women who were gathered, I reflected on the fact that we were meeting that morning in a nation that had just held the first free elections in its five-thousand-year history:
Just eight months earlier the United Nations hoped that six and a half million Afghans would register to vote. The number turned out to be more than 10 million, and on election day, they showed up at twenty-two thousand polling stations across the country. Near one of these stations, a coalition officer told of seeing a line of people two miles long, all walking down a road on their way to the polls. He spoke of old people walking and being ferried in goat carts, amputees on crutches, droves of people moving toward the polling booths, and then, late in the evening, aged adults running to beat the deadline to get in line in order to vote.
It was a time of great promise and hopefulness in Afghanistan, and I thanked the American soldiers and airmen at Bagram for the enormous part they had played in defending America and securing freedom for the Afghan people.
A few hours later, Lynne and I arrived at Afghanistan’s presidential palace, which still bore the marks of the years of fighting the Afghans had lived through. President Karzai and I met to discuss the ongoing military operations and his work to set up a new government. At our press conference immediately afterward, he made clear his gratitude to the American people:
Whatever we have achieved in Afghanistan—the peace, the election, the reconstruction, the life that the Afghans are living today in peace, the children going to school, the businesses, the fact that Afghanistan is a respected member of the international community—is from the help that the United States of America gave us. Without that help, Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists—destroyed, poverty-stricken, and without its children going to school or getting an education. We are very, very grateful, to put it in simple words that we know, to the people of the United States of America for bringing us this day.
After the press conference, Lynne and I headed to another building in the presidential compound for the inauguration itself. President Karzai arrived with Afghanistan’s last king, the elderly Mohammad Zahir Shah, who had been living in exile. The ceremony was both solemn and joyful. Prayers were followed by songs from schoolgirls wearing colorful embroidered