Hundreds of Afghan women who escaped Kabul after the Taliban's return in 2021 are encountering a new struggle in the United States: rebuilding their lives and careers. These women, many of whom were judges and professionals, lost the public roles and careers they had meticulously built over two decades. Karen Bartlett's book, "The Escape from Kabul," which recently won the 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, chronicles the rescue of nearly 200 women judges and their families, shedding light on their plight.
The book emphasizes that while their physical escape was successful, the lives they left behind in Afghanistan did not follow. Many of these women had shaped Afghanistan's legal system, earning law degrees and working on critical issues like corruption and violence against women and children, only to see it all change rapidly with the Taliban's return. Under Taliban rule, Afghan women remain excluded from most formal education and public life.
For many, such as 148 students from the Asian University for Women who were evacuated, the challenge continues in the US. Several, including 10 women at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, face the high cost of college. A miscommunication led them to believe they had full scholarships, when the initial offer from a local church only covered the Intensive English Program. Despite $6.5 billion in federal funds allocated for Afghan evacuee resettlement, none is specifically for higher education. Some universities, like UW-Milwaukee, along with West Virginia, North Texas, Georgia State, Delaware, Suffolk, DePaul, Arizona State, Cornell, and Brown, have committed an estimated $32 million to educate these 148 women. These women, ranging from 18 to 25, are pursuing dreams of degrees in fields like public health and medicine, while working summer jobs to support themselves and hoping for federal student aid, for which some Afghan evacuees became eligible in June.
