Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

discriminated against, denied education and medical care and victimized by culturally sanctioned violence.

Law enforcement often turns a blind eye to the crimes of wife beating, bride burning and female infanticide, and in certain communities, women who are raped can be jailed for adultery. Despite such traditions of prejudice, there were signs of change across the Indian subcontinent, in schools that educate girls and in micro-lending programs that give women access to credit, enabling them to earn their own incomes.

The U.S. government had supported many successful projects, but the new Republican majorities in the Senate and House were targeting foreign aid, which amounted to less than 1 percent of the federal budget, for large cuts. I had long supported the U.S.

Agency for International Development – USAID―and hoped to use the media spotlight that follows a First Lady to demonstrate the tangible impact of U.S.-funded programs in the developing world. Cutting off this aid would both harm individual women in dire straits and contradict strategies that have been shown to benefit poor countries as well as the U.S. When women suffer, their children suffer and their economies stagnate, ultimately weakening potential markets for U.S. products. And when women are victimized, the stability of families, communities and nations is eroded, jeopardizing the prospects for democracy and prosperity globally.

Violence and instability plagued every country I was scheduled to visit. Just three weeks before our arrival in Pakistan, Muslim extremists had ambushed a van carrying U.S. consulate workers in Karachi. Two of them were killed. And Ramzi Yousef, one of the main plotters in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had recently been arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the United States for trial.

The Secret Service was nervous about the trip and would have preferred that I restrict my travels to government compounds and isolated resorts. They were amusingly at odds with the State Department, which wanted to send me to hot spots around the world―places where ongoing conflict made security too difficult for visits by the President or Vice President. The point of my mission was to meet rural as well as urban women, to jettison the predictable itineraries and get into the villages where most people lived. Advance teams and security experts planned each stop carefully, and I was painfully aware of how difficult and disruptive it was for our host countries and our embassies to accommodate such an unorthodox trip. Their extra efforts on my behalf made me feel even more obligated to make my presence as productive as possible.

When the sun rose over the Margalla Hills, I saw Islamabad for the first time. A planned city of wide avenues rimmed by low green mountains, it is a showcase of midcentury modern architecture and reforestation projects, typical of many of the capital cities that sprang up after national independence, built on neutral soil with good intentions and foreign aid. At first I didn’t feel I was in South Asia at all. But that notion evaporated as soon as I made a courtesy call on Begum Nasreen Leghari, the wife of Pakistan’s President, Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari.

An elegantly dressed woman, Mrs. Leghari spoke excellent English with a lilting British accent. She lived in conditions of strict isolation, known as “purdah,” never seen by men outside her immediate family. She had to be fully veiled on the rare occasions she left her house: She did not attend her husband’s inauguration but watched the ceremony on television. When she invited me to her living quarters on the second floor of the presidential residence, I could be accompanied only by female aides and Secret Service agents.

Mrs. Leghari peppered me with questions about America. I was equally curious about her life and asked whether she wanted change for the next generation of women in her family. I learned that her recently married daughter was on the guest list of a large dinner I was attending the next night in Lahore, and I asked Mrs. Leghari about the contradiction.

“That is her husband’s choice,” she said. “She’s no longer of our home. So she does whatever he chooses.” She accepted her daughter’s status and mobility because her sonin-law had chosen them on her behalf. The wife of Mrs. Leghari’s son, however, lived with her in purdah, because her son chose the traditional path of his father.

The contradictions within Pakistan became still more apparent at my next event, a luncheon hosted in my honor by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and attended by several dozen accomplished women in Pakistan. It was like being rocketed forward several centuries in time. Among these women were academics and activists, as well as a pilot, a singer, a banker and a police deputy superintendent. They had their own ambitions and careers, and, of course, we were all guests of Pakistan’s elected female leader.

Benazir Bhutto, a brilliant and striking woman then in her midforties, was born into a prominent family and educated at Harvard and Oxford. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Populist Prime Minister during the 1970s, was deposed in a military coup and later hanged. After his death, Benazir spent years under house arrest. In the late 1980s, she emerged as head of his old political party. Bhutto was the only celebrity I had ever stood behind a rope line to see. Chelsea and I were strolling around London during a holiday trip in the summer of 1989. We noticed a large crowd gathered outside the Ritz Hotel, and I asked people what they were waiting for. They said Benazir Bhutto was staying at the hotel and was soon expected to arrive. Chelsea and I waited until the motorcade drove up. We watched Bhutto, swathed in yellow chiffon, emerge from her limousine and glide into the lobby. She seemed graceful, composed and intent.

In 1990, her government was dissolved over charges of corruption, but her party won again in new elections in 1993. Pakistan was increasingly troubled by rising violence and general lawlessness, particularly in Karachi. Law and order had deteriorated as the rate of