Where the burqas are

WASHINGTON – Afghan watchers were taken aback Tuesday night when Laura Bush, appearing on the “Tonight” show, chatted with Jay Leno about her recent trip to Kabul, where she found things “very encouraging.”

She spoke with women at Kabul University and “I didn’t see any women in burqas,” she told Leno. “I mean, a lot of – all women, of course, wore scarves, and some covered part of their face. But they (were not) really covered up with that – with the burqa that’s so difficult to be able to see out of.”

Of course she didn’t see women in burqas, Afghan experts said Thursday. “If you go the same way she did, you wouldn’t see any either,” said Abdul Raheem Yaseer, assistant director of the University of Nebraska Center for Afghanistan Studies. But if she went to “the old city or to the bazaar for a shopping tour, she would see hundreds of them.”

In places where women work, said Barnett Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, they would have a lot of trouble wearing burqas. “There are no women wearing burqas at offices,” he said. But in the other areas, in the villages especially, burqas are much more common, he added.