'The Last Free Women' follows 4 Afghans rebuilding their lives after escaping the Taliban

Geoff Bennett:

When the Taliban swept back into Kabul in August of 2021, thousands of Afghans who had worked alongside Americans and their families suddenly faced an uncertain and dangerous future.

Among them were four young women who had grown up in a rapidly changing Afghanistan with ambitions for college, careers and lives of their own. Their extraordinary escape from Afghanistan and the lives they built afterward in the U.S. are at the heart of a new book, "The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America."

It's written by Rebecca Blumenstein, now president of editorial at NBC News, who was then a deputy managing editor at The New York Times. Her co-author is journalist and author Diana Kapp.

I spoke with them earlier today.

Rebecca Blumenstein, Diana Kapp, welcome to the "News Hour."

Diana Kapp, Co-Author, "The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America": Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Blumenstein, Co-Author, "The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America": Great to be here.

Geoff Bennett:

Take us back to August 15, 2021. Kabul is falling. At the same time, you were driving your son across country to college. How quickly did you realize that what was unfolding in Afghanistan would turn out to be a life-and-death situation for your then-Afghan colleagues?

Rebecca Blumenstein:

When Kabul and Afghanistan started falling, it just happened far faster than anybody thought it would. Of course, the U.S. had signaled that we were pulling out.

But people thought the Afghan forces that the U.S. trained, they would hang in at least for a while. And province after province started falling. They started getting closer and closer to Kabul. We were scrambling, like many news organizations, like many vets, to do whatever we could to get our people out of Afghanistan.

It was clear at that moment that the U.S. was going to be of no help. And so the task to the top editors at The Times was like find them a way out of there and find a country where they can go. And I was literally calling anyone in the world I could think of.

Geoff Bennett:

And The New York Times ultimately evacuated 124 Afghan employees and their family members. What did The Times have to do that the U.S. government at the time could not or did not do?

Rebecca Blumenstein:

We were able to get a request into the deputy foreign minister of Qatar and a manifest with a list, which is a list of all of the names of the employees we wanted to evacuate, their family members, their birth dates, and their documents.

And we had been pressing the U.S. to issue visas, and they just -- it was so chaotic, it was clear that it was not going to happen for the U.S. So we had to get foreign governments to help us. Qatar would only take us if we found another country. They did not want people to stay in Qatar, importantly.

And so we were able through our reporter in Mexico -- he convinced Mexico's foreign minister to take them. And you remember the images of the thousands of people who descended on the airport in Kabul, many of them so desperate to leave, with no way out, some of them so desperate to leave that they climbed literally into the wheel holes of planes and fell to their deaths.

We had a plan. We finally got Qatar to say they would take them out on a plane. They couldn't land the plane. Our group was there for two days. They fell under attack from the Taliban and they had to try again three days later. And, by that point, the Taliban controlled the entire city.

So we had to appeal for help, and thankfully found it in the right places through some luck.

Geoff Bennett:

And, Diana, when you heard this story, when did you realize that this was more than just an extraordinary evacuation story, that there was a larger, deeper narrative here?

Diana Kapp:

As I write in the book, it's a hell of a story. So, I had been talking to Rebecca, who's a close college friend, and I had been interested in Afghanistan because I went to Afghanistan in 2012, and I had the opportunity to visit a woman building schools in the far north in the Takhar province.

And it was the height of girls' education. It was, the Americans landed in 2001. The school doors flung open. Girls rushed in. There was classrooms with as many as 70 girls in them. And we walked into a few classrooms and we asked the little girls, how many of your mothers can read or write? And not a single hand would go up.

And then we would ask them, how many of you imagine going to university? And they would all shoot their hand up. So we understood, I understood that this was a generation of women that had huge aspirations for themselves, and it was washed away in an instant in a morning.

And so as soon as I heard this story and the great work The New York Times was doing, I knew it was a tale we should start to follow.

Geoff Bennett:

And you center this book on four women, Marwa, Mursal, Maryam, and Samira. Why these four? What did their different lives allow you to show about a generation of Afghan women?

Diana Kapp:

They were between the ages of 17 and 24, and they were all poised, right at the cusp of launching into their adult lives, into careers that they were passionate about.

Mursal had completed law school. Maryam was a senior in high school and headed to medical school. And Marwa was in her fourth year of medical school when she woke up that morning to learn that, instead of returning to classes after the pandemic, she would be running for the airport.

So we chose a cohort that was of similar age and was very much of that generation that had high aspirations for themselves.

Rebecca Blumenstein:

When you think about it, maybe one of the largest accomplishments of the longest war that we waged in Afghanistan was the education of the women of Afghanistan.

And we were finally fortunate enough to get this group of 124 into the U.S., and I was rather startled to hear that the typical expectations of refugees in this country are a lifetime of poverty.

And it just felt, especially for the women, especially those who were on the cusp of becoming doctors and lawyers and really wanted to build the future of Afghanistan, to lose it all in half an afternoon and to come here and to have to give it all up and have no hope of going back to school seemed wrong, and especially because of what happened, obviously, to the women of Afghanistan.

Geoff Bennett:

And there's a question embed in the successful evacuation of the 124 Afghans. What does it mean for the millions of Afghans who didn't have a powerful American institution advocating on their behalf?

Rebecca Blumenstein:

Exactly.

Many of the people in our group struggle with a bit of guilt that they were -- they were evacuated. And I think The Times did something very significant here. They didn't just take out the expat foreign reporters. They decided to take out the entire bureau, everybody who had had ties to the 20 years of the bureau in Kabul, the cooks, the gardeners, the translators, the drivers, and their immediate families.

But, obviously that's a limited number of people. And I think those who made it out do feel a duty. They can't do much to change the situation there, but the title of the book, "The Last Free Women," does convey the sense that, for those here, whether they're illiterate, whether they were on the cusp of becoming doctors and lawyers, they want to do whatever they can and work as hard as they can to take advantage of the freedom they have here.

Geoff Bennett:

How do the four women you profile, how do they make sense of that and how has that shaped their lives, the fact that they were evacuated and had the opportunity to start over again in the States?

Diana Kapp:

They have jumped into their lives here with just incredible force.

Of course, there was trauma and they had a lot of challenges. Some of them have been -- real difficulty, like how to learn to use a computer. They had to learn to speak English. They had cultural issues. They went on to college campuses.

In Afghanistan, girls don't leave home and live away from home in a dorm. It just doesn't exist. So there was -- on so many levels, they were confronting a lot. And yet they went after it with such, such tenacity. The young woman Mursal, she was desperate to work at the United Nations in her internship between her two years of Cornell, where she got a master's in public administration and graduated.

But she made 30 applications to every single department she could find. And she had each of them edited by ChatGPT. She did all of that herself, because, even though professors told her this is extremely competitive and you won't get it, she went right ahead and tried anyway.

And you -- we just have seen that over and over again, where they just -- they just keep stepping forward.

Geoff Bennett:

Yes.

Rebecca Blumenstein:

And our women are quite different.

Samira Rustami, she grew up in a household where her mother did not support education. Her mother actually burned her books. And she figured out a way to get an MBA in India, leave the country, come back. She had just been in Kabul for a couple of months. Her husband had worked for The New York Times just for a couple of -- a couple of months as well.

They get on the manifest. And she has come here. She had a daughter. They moved to Pittsburgh,. She is about to become a nurse, and her daughter has basically been adopted by a family in Pittsburgh and now goes to the Jewish community center for kindergarten.

And you think about Durrin and the life that she will have and how different it is than even her mother's, and it's really quite astounding.

Diana Kapp:

It's so striking watching these women. They don't just work hard and do the schoolwork. They also find the joy in life. So they want to learn how to do scuba diving. They have tried -- on her 30th birthday, Mursal bought an inflatable paddleboard and took it out on the Potomac River.

She's learned to swim. They take yoga. They're trying ceramics. They want to learn to play the piano. So they are embracing life in so many different ways.

Geoff Bennett:

Tremendous stories and a terrific new book, "The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America."

Rebecca Blumenstein, Diana Kapp, thank you so much for being here.

Rebecca Blumenstein:

Thanks for having us.

Diana Kapp:

Thank you. Thank you, Geoffrey.