00:01:28.580I do. We're the best. Five years ago this month, Kabul fell to the Taliban in just about half a
00:01:35.760day. I remember watching the footage from the airport and thinking that the whole world was
00:01:41.380going to be talking about this story for years and years and years. And then we stopped talking
00:01:46.320about it. It just disappeared. It incinerated in the dumpster fire of our news cycle. But my guests
00:01:52.020today did not stop talking about it. They did not stop reporting on it. And they have committed
00:01:56.780so much of their careers to making sure that this story stays in the news. Rebecca Blumenstein was
00:02:04.800an editor at the New York Times when the city fell, and she helped assemble the actual manifest
00:02:09.180that got 124 people out of there, mostly staff of the paper's Kabul bureau and their families.
00:02:16.420Diana Kapp had been reporting on Afghan girls in their schools since 2012, and together they wrote
00:02:22.360this book that I can't stop thinking about, The Last Free Women. The Last Free Women follows four
00:02:28.880of those young women through five years of starting over completely in America. They learned English,
00:02:35.720they went back to undergraduate school, they worked night shifts, and they built lives. It's also a
00:02:41.320book about the women who did not get out of Afghanistan and what's currently happening to
00:02:45.820them right now. These stories are truly so incredibly inspiring. I'm on a mission to get
00:02:53.500book clubs reading things that they would not normally pick up this year, and this is truly
00:02:57.420one of those books. This is a book that you can't really summarize because it has so much in it,
00:03:07.500but can you give us the best elevator pitch that you possibly can? I would say this book
00:03:13.220is about four of the young Afghan women who are part of a group of 124 who we miraculously got
00:03:22.660into the United States five years ago when Kabul fell and how they have attempted to rebuild their
00:03:28.640lives here, taking advantage of a freedom that does not exist now in Afghanistan, especially
00:03:34.320for women. Right, right, exactly. And we just came up on the anniversary of this, which honestly,0.99
00:03:42.760I think, got lost in the news cycle. And I wish that more people were paying attention to this
00:03:49.860story. What do you guys think about that? I totally agree. I thought that the fifth
00:03:54.020anniversary would be huge news. And in many respects, while there was some coverage,
00:04:01.340it's just continued a bit of a pattern of Americans not really even talking much about
00:04:07.060the longest war that America ever waged and a lot of the people who were caught up in it.
00:04:12.760Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it does feel, and again, like our world has been in such a dumpster fire for the past five years, right? And there's like so much else happening, but it does feel like this story has been largely forgotten. One of the things that I'm hoping is that your book brings this back to the forefront and that we start talking about this again.
00:04:34.160And particularly the piece of this that is about what is going on for women right now in Afghanistan and the extent to which it really is an erasure of an entire gender.0.63
00:04:48.220And this is something we just can't forget about.
00:04:51.800The world needs to pay attention to this issue and do something about it.
00:04:58.820And I think it's also really important to say that this is a story of hope, that for those who made it to the U.S., there were countless people along the way who helped them. And in many respects, it's an example of how that while there's a lot to feel in terms of, you know, we're a divided country, we can't seem to agree on anything.
00:05:20.440There are so many kind of acts of human kindness that that people do all the time that almost restore one's faith in one another.
00:05:28.980Right. Right. Exactly. No, I want I want you to because I do want us talking about this again.
00:05:33.820Take me back to five years ago. And for our listeners who may not be as familiar with what happened, tell me a little bit about how these young women got out of Afghanistan.
00:05:46.620I was an editor at the New York Times when Kabul fell, and there was increasing alarm across news organizations and among vets and those who had people in Afghanistan who had worked with them on the ground because we all knew that the Taliban would probably exact revenge upon them.
00:06:07.640No one imagined that Kabul would fall so quickly. It really fell in half a day. And we were all scrambling to do whatever we could to get those people out. The women that we profile were employees of the Kabul Bureau of the New York Times, or they were directly related to someone who was.
00:06:27.380We followed two sisters. Their brother, Najim, was a longtime reporter for The New York Times. So their entire family really was seen as at risk. And we formed a manifest of those who had worked in the bureau. We had had a bureau in Kabul over the 20 years of the U.S. occupation. The list grew and grew. There were debates about who could be included, who could it be. If you were married, your immediate family could be included, but not your parents, for example.
00:06:54.620And Najim wasn't married, so his parents came. And this list grew to 124. And we told people to get to the airport as soon as possible for what became really two weeks of constant crisis. At some point, they came under fire at the airport. They fled for their lives. They tried again three days later and somehow through a very narrow opening, made it on a military plane to Doha and to Mexico City and then landed in Houston.
00:07:21.640And the book opens with a scene of one of our young women, Marwa, and she is entering her fourth year of medical school. It's midnight. She's set her alarm so she can use the most reliable electricity, which is at night, so she can iron a pink dress that she's planning to wear to return to classes in person after a hiatus for COVID.
00:07:49.440And so it's just such a scene of, you know, the hope that she has about her ambitions and pursuing medicine, which has been a dream since she's a child. And instead, she wakes up and she's getting all these texts on her phone that say they are coming, they are coming.
00:08:06.020And that is the Taliban. And she learns by lunchtime that she has 30 minutes to pack all of her things in a single backpack and run to the airport. And, you know, putting ourselves in her shoes is sort of the purpose of this book. You know, what would that feel like if that was you or your family? And then the story that unfolds from there.0.72
00:08:28.060Exactly. And I think that's why the book is so important because of the level of empathy that you bring to this story. Again, it does feel like we've very much forgotten what's happened in Afghanistan and talking about this and these young, but, and also these young people, like they could be your daughters. They could be your best friends, right?
00:08:54.000Like they are, I hate to use the Us Weekly metaphor of they're just like us, but they're just like us, right? And I think that you bring that level of kind of normalcy, of banality to this so that we can imagine, oh my gosh, this actually could be us, right?
00:09:10.200Well, Rebecca and I both have children that are pretty much the same age as the three women, as the four women that we profile.
00:09:20.940And it's definitely added a lot of thinking on our part and insight, just, you know, wondering how would our kids or how would we fare in a similar situation?
00:09:32.200Exactly. And much of the book is set as I'm driving my middle son back to college.
00:09:38.480It's a bit of a contrast because, of course, compared to what's unfolding on the ground in Afghanistan, my concerns pale in comparison.
00:09:46.460We were taking a road trip to go to a family wedding.
00:09:50.340It was our first road trip post-COVID.
00:09:53.520And the plan was for me to drive with my son Eli back to Boulder to reassemble his college room.
00:09:58.460And my concerns and nervousness about this just felt so small compared to the situation that I was getting increasingly involved with on the ground in Afghanistan.
00:10:07.420Once we finally got these people here and I got to know them, especially the women, Marcel said the first time I met her, you know, why is it always about the women? Why hijab, no hijab, education, no education, all of these issues.
00:10:24.360And I guess at that moment, it just felt that we just had such a duty to help them, because these women in Afghanistan, they were on the verge of becoming doctors and lawyers. They had benefited from the 20 years of U.S. occupation. The doors at that time of this is post 9-11, they were thrown open. They had been closed and and they had worked so hard to just see it vanish in a moment.
00:10:48.400And it just felt intuitively to me that even though refugee experts said, well, they'll be they're safe, they're free.
00:10:56.220They may have a life of poverty, but they're going to be OK.
00:10:59.480It felt that we owed them the chance to rebuild their lives, to get at least back to close to what they had what they had lost.
00:11:07.640And I think a lot of our listeners might not remember exactly where we were at in Afghanistan five years ago.
00:11:15.360Things were looking up for women. Right.1.00
00:11:17.720Can you can you just can you give us a little bit of a primer on that?
00:11:22.820In 2012, I traveled to Afghanistan to do a feature story for More magazine, and that was 12, 11 years after the Americans landed in 2001 and the Taliban fled.
00:11:37.540And just within weeks of our arrival, the schools reopened.
00:11:42.580They had been closed between 1996 and 2001.
00:11:46.640And our protagonist, Mursal, she went to school for the first time. She was five years old and she talked about going to a classroom that had girls as old as 16 who were going to school for the very first time.
00:12:02.020And another young woman in the Times group described a classroom with, you know, teeming full of 70 girls so anxious to begin an education. So this really was the beginning of a rising Afghanistan.0.91
00:12:17.800And these young women were in the vanguard. They were they completely imagined lives with careers and, you know, ambitious, ambitious desires for for what they would do with their lives.
00:12:33.080And I would say also on the ground in Kabul, it was a pretty cosmopolitan city. We all know that the Taliban was there and there were attacks. This is a war that people were covering. But women had seen a great opening of freedoms, particularly young women.
00:12:51.500There were cafes, there were shops, there were, you know, women on motorcycles, there were gyms. And there was a sense that women could do things and a liberation that was really encouraged by the U.S. occupation and I think was one of the biggest accomplishments of the U.S. occupation.
00:13:10.620I want to take a really quick break. And then when we get back, I want to talk a little bit about what the reality is in Afghanistan on the ground today.
00:14:48.720Okay, we are back. We just talked a little bit about what it looked like in Kabul five years ago. What does it look like now? Again, because I don't think that we're seeing major media organizations cover this at all right now.
00:15:03.940On the ground in Kabul now, women are not allowed to go outside on their own.
00:15:09.320If they go outside, they need to be accompanied, and this is throughout Afghanistan, of course, by a man.1.00
00:15:15.020In most cases, they have to wear a full-body burqa.0.99
00:15:18.360On many cases, you can't even see their eyes.1.00
00:15:28.560the Taliban has banned, one of the first things they did is they banned education of girls past
00:15:34.020the sixth grade. One of the women in our group, one of the few female Afghan reporters, told me
00:15:40.520that recently she spoke to a cousin. And of course, technology is something that has provided
00:15:45.660a vital connection, but it also reminds many of the people who made it out just how terrible the
00:15:52.320situation is. She was talking to a cousin and he proudly showed her his daughter, who had just
00:15:57.840completed the third grade and is number one in her class. And Fatima, who is now a student at
00:16:04.500Columbia University, said she thought to herself, she has two years left. And that's it. And another
00:16:11.920one of our young women had a family friend who, and she wrote about this in an op-ed for the New
00:16:18.640York Times, a family friend, a young girl who they used to commonly give books to. And she heard
00:16:24.540recently that she's being married off at age 16. So child marriage has become increasingly common.
00:16:31.820There are some people who are trying to continue to educate women because many want to continue
00:16:36.920to be educated. The American University of Afghanistan is still trying to do it remotely.
00:16:42.620There's been some stories about women starting small businesses from their homes.
00:16:46.880They have not given up, but it's just incredibly brutal for women in Afghanistan.
00:16:52.520The young women in our in our book are really struggling with sort of the level of guilt that they feel about the women that have been left behind.
00:17:02.880And it's a huge motivation for them in terms of feeling like they need to make the most of all the opportunity they're finding in America. But it also really pains them and is a form of survivor's guilt, watching their friends that were their classmates in medical school or their law school classmates who are now literally stuck at home.
00:17:26.800You know, Marwa describes her friend, her best friend from growing up who was in medical school with her, you know, staring at the walls and she's developed some kind of tick. And it's just such a difficult, such a difficult situation for these women who knew something so different.
00:17:46.000I want to talk a little bit about these women. I mean, I want everyone to be reading this book. I think it's an amazing book club book. And again, because I do think this is a story that we're not covering nearly enough. But tell me a little bit about how these women have fared since coming to the United States five years ago.
00:18:03.360They're actually faring incredibly well. They've overcome so many challenges. It's almost mind-boggling. They had to completely start over. They went back to undergrad for the most part. One went to get a master's degree. They had to learn English. They didn't know how to operate computers. They had to be talked through how to get on a portal so they could turn in their assignments.
00:18:29.720They were translating assignments from English into Dari and back again in order to keep up in school in the beginning. Everything's been new for them. Living on their own is not something that young women do in Afghanistan. They live with their families when they go to school.
00:18:47.220So it's just been one challenge after another. And somehow these young women have indomitable spirits. And it's something that we all can take from them, which is, you know, when they have to do it, they do it. They don't have any other choice.
00:19:03.320They are so excited about the opportunities that they're being given to resume their education and to get on a career path.
00:19:14.640Our young woman, Mursal, she sent in 30 applications to get an internship at the UN.
00:19:21.220She was told by professors at Cornell, you know, don't get your hopes up.
00:19:25.800These are highly competitive and almost discouraged.
00:19:29.280and she just went straight ahead and applied to every single one she had to write thousand word
00:19:35.600essays for those each one of those and she would edit them using chat gpt and she did get an
00:19:42.800internship and it was an incredible experience for her i would say we've been blown away by
00:19:47.860the the courage and the tenacity of of the people in our group and particularly the women
00:19:53.940When I first started talking to them initially, when I when I was helping to resettle them along with Catholic Charities in Houston, quite frankly, I only spoke to the men because they were the ones who tended to work for us and had the best English.
00:20:10.540And I was encouraged one day by a resettlement coordinator to go talk to the women.
00:20:15.160I'm a bit embarrassed that it took me so long to do so.
00:20:17.620It was almost like crossing an invisible line.
00:20:20.240And it was one of the most, it was just an instant kind of love affair. They appreciated me. I don't know how often they had seen women leaders in a sense. But by the time I left that day, we were taking pictures with our arms around one another. And then I would go back and visit them as much as I could.
00:20:38.860and to a person, I mean, obviously the women that we have focused on, we weren't sure how it was
00:20:44.820going to turn out and they've had their struggles and pitfalls, each of them, but they have pushed
00:20:49.640through them. But even for the older women in our group, even for women and mothers who, who were
00:20:55.820illiterate, when I would ask, what do you want to do here? Do you want to work? Do you want to study?0.81
00:21:01.360What, what, what, what do you, you know, what do you see with your, their, their lives, your lives?
00:21:05.340They all raised their hands. They were so proud to be here. I think they feel an obligation to make the most of their freedom because of what they left behind. And they've blown us away, really, with how well they've done.
00:21:17.780This was the largest influx of refugees since the Vietnam War. And our country accepted them quietly, but decisively. And there were multiple examples of them getting to know people, getting to know friends who aren't Afghan, and a sense of welcomeness that I think would be surprising to people.1.00
00:21:38.180The title of the book, The Last Free Women, it's heavy, right? How did you come up with this title? And did you think about other titles along the way?1.00
00:21:52.020Yes, I came up with a title because I would I became convinced pretty early on that we needed to try to get these women back to college and was pretty disappointed with the initial assessments of how likely that would be.1.00
00:22:08.660Place after college, place after place we called, college after college we called, basically said, their TOEFL scores, their English scores aren't high enough. And besides, we don't have the transcripts. And how would you pay for it? And it just seemed they should go to community college. And we would try community colleges and they were very hard to navigate. And that didn't seem likely.0.99
00:22:30.420And just it felt like the odds were so long to try to get these young people who were literally in college or graduated from college in Afghanistan back into college.
00:22:42.300And it just seemed so obvious to me because I went to the University of Michigan.
00:22:47.360Colleges should do that in these situations.
00:22:49.160They could help them with their English and then get them back to their studies.
00:22:52.440But I would kind of routinely rant about this to people in my life.0.84
00:22:56.180And I think I literally just said, these are some of the last free women of Afghanistan and they are just precious jewels. And I don't understand why there isn't more creative thinking about how we could make the most of them, of the people who did manage to get out, especially given what's happening in Afghanistan. And so, and to the women there.
00:23:18.580And so when it came time for Diane and I to think about a title, I mean, that just was like a bit of a mantra for me.
00:33:59.560And especially younger women is especially meaningful to me.
00:34:04.580I think a lot of these young women, I think the young women in the book are very relatable,
00:34:11.100way beyond their status as new refugees or immigrants. They are young women. They are
00:34:18.78020-somethings and teenagers when they arrive. And, you know, they care about clothes and
00:34:25.800they're reading Pride and Prejudice and falling in love with a story by John Green and, you know,
00:34:33.180having concerns about what kind of pajamas to wear to an overnight pajama party they get invited to.
00:34:40.180And I feel like that's that's something that makes this book really charming is that these are these are just girls.
00:34:47.380They're young women and there's so much about them that young women will find extremely relatable.
00:34:53.220They seem almost like any American college student in certain ways and then in other ways so very different.
00:35:00.400Exactly, exactly. I mean, I would love this to be on required reading lists for high school women, for women entering into their freshman year of college as well. The young women in the book are joining you on book tour. Are they excited to be coming with you?
00:35:17.560They're really excited. Marwa and Mircelle, the two sisters, will be with us at the launch in New York. Mircelle, she's now worked in New York at the UN and came as a representative of the group in the early months here.
00:35:33.000But her sister Marwa has never been to New York. And they they're very courageous to use their voices. They feel it's an oblique and their names and they they have been granted asylum. But, you know, there they could have decided that they that they really didn't want to come forward.
00:35:52.460And yet they they feel both compelled to excited to.
00:35:56.920They want to share their story and they're savvy on social media.
00:36:00.820As Diana said, they're really into clothes.
00:36:13.100Will you tell everyone where they can find the book and you and possibly see you all on tour?
00:36:18.520At www.thelastfreewomen.com, that's our landing page. You can see our schedule of public events and links to particular events. You can find us at Diana Kapp on Instagram and at Rebecca Blumenstein.
00:36:36.900The book is available in independent bookstores, on Amazon, Green Apple Book, Barnes & Noble,
00:36:44.220all the places you'd expect to find it.
00:36:46.340And what we would say to listeners is we really hope you'll order the book and pre-order
00:36:51.840the book if you can, because it's a great help to authors to kind of get momentum going.
00:36:58.240And I loved what you said about book clubs.
00:37:00.760I think this really would be an incredible book to have at your book club.
00:37:05.440And we will be happy to come and talk to your book club over Zoom or, if possible, in person, particularly if you can get a big group together.
00:37:14.920I love that. I love that. Yeah, no, I do.
00:37:17.340One of my goals for this year is to get book clubs reading books that they might not normally read, right?
00:37:22.900Because I do think that certain kinds of nonfiction can really inspire important conversations.
00:37:28.900And I genuinely believe that this story needs to cut through all of the noise in our insanely, insanely saturated attention economy right now.
00:37:40.100Well, thank you so much for your interest.
00:37:44.740We just honestly, we couldn't shake it.
00:37:46.980We thought that these young women coming into America and the chance to watch what happened, we didn't know how it would unfold, but it has been, you know, a remarkable journey for them and for us.
00:37:59.940And we do think their story is so important, not only for women, not only for young women, but really for the world.
00:38:06.680And we so deeply appreciate your interest.
00:38:08.860And we so much we so much believe that this will renew your faith in in Americans and in humankind generally, because this is a book about people who did the right thing, whether it's the New York Times feeling a duty towards their local people and all the people along the way.
00:38:28.420it's almost like a hands across America moment where people leaned in out of the goodness of
00:38:34.040their hearts to help these people. And it's it's so positive and hopeful in that sense. And for me,
00:38:40.660it just fills me up with optimism about the future. And I think that's what we all need right
00:38:45.080now. Thank you so much for having us on, Joe. This has been fun. Thank you, guys. It's been great.