Rice: Kazakh democracy before oil (Condi 08-yes)

ASTANA, Kazakhstan (CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has refuted claims by the opposition in Kazakhstan that Washington's primary concern is oil.

Rice, visiting the oil-rich central Asian country on Thursday, made the comments in response to a question from CNN State Department Correspondent Andrea Koppel, who noted that members of the Kazakh opposition said Rice's "soft words have no impact."

"I think if we were interested only in oil and the war on terrorism, we would not be speaking in the way that we are about democracy here, or in Saudi Arabia, or throughout the Middle East," Rice said.

"We will press for free and fair elections here, just like we've pressed for free and fair elections everywhere else in the world," she said. . "While we try to be responsive now, we know there is more to be done," Rice told Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Before leaving Islamabad, Rice personally thanked U.S. and Afghan troops -- lined up on the tarmac at the Islamabad airport.

"I was just with President Karzai, he is very proud of what you are doing," she told one Afghan soldier.

After her meeting with Karzai, Rice reiterated the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan and the war on terrorism, saying U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan "as long as they are needed and in whatever numbers they are needed."

On Tuesday, Rice visited Kyrgyzstan and won fresh assurances from its new president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, that the United States can continue to use its air base in Manas on the outskirts of the capital, Bishkek

[FROM ANOTHER SOURCE].............................. After Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made stops in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and later to Tajikistan, she was not about to put up with any silliness from the Ex-Soviet Autocratic President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, on Thursday!

After their opening remarks, the Kazakh Leader left his podium. That is when Condi chased him down and brought him back to the podium to answer reporter's questions! ....................................... QUESTION: Andrea Koppel with CNN. I have a question for both of you. Mr. President, one of your daughters controls the media. The other controls the main bank here. The opposition, the political opposition, is routinely harassed, arrested. What evidence is there that you are anything more than a dictator? ....................................... PRESIDENT NAZARBAYEV: (Via interpreter.) What I said about the freedom of speech, I said I underlined that it should not be a freedom of misinformation. So I think that our opposition has provided you with some...(blah, blah,...)

SECRETARY RICE: Andrea, I think if we were interested only in oil and the war on terrorism we would not be speaking in the way that we are about democracy here or in Saudi Arabia or throughout the Middle East.

And so quite clearly, while we do have interests in terms of resources and in terms of the struggle for terrorism, we have in no way allowed those interests to get in the way of our open and clear defense of freedom.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice became the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor, on January 22, 2001.

In June 1999, she completed a six year tenure as Stanford University 's Provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.

As professor of political science, Dr. Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

At Stanford, she has been a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She also has written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy, and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.

From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.

She was a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors. She was a Founding Board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California and was Vice President of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula . In addition, her past board service has encompassed such organizations as Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Rand Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.

Born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the National Defense University in 2002, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004. She resides in Washington, D.C.

FROM CNN:
Indeed, her bipartisan tone leads one former Bush official to note that Rice could have ended up working for a Democratic administration. But Rice would rather see her beloved Stanford football team lose than work for a Democrat. By both upbringing and philosophy, she is a committed Republican realist in the tradition of Kissinger, Scowcroft and Colin Powell. Rice's father, a university administrator, joined the G.O.P. in 1952, at a time when Dixiecrats still ruled the South. In 1960 the six-year-old Rice went into a voting booth and instructed her mother to "pull the elephant." Her mother listened.

Growing up in segregated Birmingham, she recalls hardly knowing that white people existed. Then, in 1963, her friend Denise McNair was killed in the church bombing that helped ignite the civil rights movement. The family moved out of Alabama, eventually relocating to Denver. But living under Jim Crow instilled in Rice an astonishing resilience. "I came out of that not bitter but with a sense of entitlement," she says, "to do whatever I wanted to do, to be whoever I wanted to be."

For most of her youth, she wanted to be a concert pianist; she still practices for an hour a day and gives recitals on the Stanford campus. But after entering the University of Denver at age 15 (she skipped two grades in school), her professional music prospects dimmed, and she began to feel "an inexplicable pull toward the study of Russia and communism and Eastern Europe."

Her mentor at Denver was the Czech refugee Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright's father. This coincidence serves to highlight her differences with Albright, who has become the foremost proponent of an ideal-driven foreign policy. While Rice says that in foreign policy "America's values are extremely important," she hews closer to the tradition of Korbel and other realists, such as Hans Morgenthau, who place greater weight on defending strategic interests and tending to the balance of power.

In 1981, before she had even completed her Ph.D., she was offered a professorship at Stanford. Scowcroft met her in 1986, at a dreary dinner with various foreign policy graybeards. "Here was this young slip of a girl who would speak up unabashedly," he told TIME. "I determined to get to know her." After he was named Bush's NSC adviser, he placed one of his first recruiting calls to Rice.

She mesmerizes colleagues with a mixture of soft-spoken gentility and effusive warmth. But beneath that lies a steely determination. "The roadside is littered with the bodies of those who have underestimated Condi," says Stanford political scientist Coit Blacker, a close friend. Former CIA chief Robert Gates recalls Rice's accosting a Treasury Department official who tried to undermine her authority. "With a smile on her face she sliced and diced him," Gates says. "He was a walking dead man after that." During her bravura six-year tenure as Stanford provost, her aversion to identity politics at times unsettled some faculty and students. Once, when an African-American student complained that Rice was inattentive to campus minorities, she shot back. "You don't have the standing to question my commitment," she said. "I've been black all my life."

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