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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview with Susan Rice; The Seventh Sense; Surviving A World Dangerous for Girls. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired May 15, 2016 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

[10:00:02] SUSAN RICE, PRESIDENT OBAMA'S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: In the halls of power, in the faces of our national security leaders, America is still not fully represented.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: And there is a way to have predicted the rise of both ISIS and Donald Trump.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: President Obama, you're fired.

ZAKARIA: Joshua Cooper Ramo explains how some people can see through the flood of data that we all get hit with every day and see the patterns. How we can all learn how to have a seventh sense.

And Waziristan. It's been called the most dangerous place in the world, and it is especially inhospitable to women. So one girl there disguised herself as a boy in order to be educated and compete in sports. And she went all the way to the top. The amazing story of Maria Toorpakai.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first here is my take. While Americans have been obsessing about the presidential election, half way around the world, Iraq is collapsing as a country.

This week's bombings in Baghdad killing scores of people were just one more reminder that the place remains deeply unstable and violent. And as Iraq has spiraled downward, policymakers in Washington have offered all kinds of advice on how to salvage it. But perhaps it's worth stepping back from Iraq and looking at another country where America has been involved. Afghanistan.

The United States has been engaged in Afghanistan militarily, politically and economically for 15 years. It has had many surges of troops. It has spent more than $1 trillion on the war and counterinsurgency there by some estimates and it still pays a large portion of Afghanistan's Defense budget. And yet last October the United Nations concluded that the insurgency had spread to more places in the country than at any point since 2001. Some argue in Washington that 15 years is not enough. They point to

South Korea and Germany and say the United States should simply stay in Afghanistan unendingly.

Now I'm not opposed to a longer term U.S. presence in Afghanistan, especially since the country's elected government seems to want it, but the analogy is misplaced. In Germany and South Korea, American forces remained to deter a foreign threat. They were not engaged in a never-ending battle within the country to help the government gain control over its own people.

The more appropriate analogy is Vietnam. Much has been made recently of a pair of interviews on American foreign policy. One by President Obama and the other with one of his closest aides, Ben Rhodes. Both men have been described as arrogant, self-serving, and brimming with contempt for the foreign policy establishment.

Certainly as most administrations would, Obama and Rhodes sought to present their actions in a positive light so Obama congratulates himself for stepping back from the edge of military invention in Syria. He never grapples with the fact that it was his own careless rhetoric about Assad's fate and red lines that produced the crisis in the first place.

But on the most important issue of substance, Obama is right and his critics are wrong. The chief lesson for American foreign policy over the last 15 years is that it is much easier to defeat a military opponent in the greater Middle East than to establish political order in these troubled lands. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it took just weeks to defeat the old regime. But years later, despite varying approaches, all these countries remain in chaos.

Can anyone seriously argue that a few more troops here or a slightly different strategy there would have created stability and peace when you have instability in all three?

Most of Obama's critics want a quick plan to defeat ISIS or more troops or greater U.S. intervention. They are blind to this dominant lesson of almost two decades, the failure of nation-building in the Middle East.

In Syria, Washington's real dilemma would be if it's strategy actually worked and ISIS were defeated, this would result in a collapse of authority in large swaths of Iraq and Syria that are teaming with radicalized Sunnis who refuse to accept the authority of Baghdad or Damascus. Having led the fight of course Washington would then be forced to assert control over these territories, set up prisons to house thousands of ISIS fighters, provide security and economic assistance for the population. All the while fighting the inevitable insurgency.

You know you are in trouble when your strategy's success produces more problems than its failure.

For more go to CNN.com/fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started. [10:05:17] On Friday I sat down with Susan Rice at the Eisenhower

Executive Office building on the White House grounds. It was an important time to talk to the national security adviser as President Obama is about to head out to Japan and Vietnam as ISIS continues to wreak havoc in the world, especially the Arab world, and just days after Ambassador Rice made controversial remarks about the lack of diversity in her own cohort. The U.S. foreign policy community.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Ambassador Rice, pleasure to have you on.

RICE: It's great to be back.

ZAKARIA: The news reports suggest that the battle against ISIS is not going as well as it was initially thought because it is proven more difficult to get the Turks and the Kurds and the Iraqi army to work together, and most importantly that the Iraqi army, when it goes into places, is viewed by a lot of the Sunnis on the ground there, the locals, as an army of occupation.

Are these political, regional problems slowing down the fight against ISIS?

RICE: Well, actually, Fareed, I would argue that in the last several months the ISIS campaign has made great progress. Now we've always taken the view and had the expectation that this was going to be a long-term challenge. That this was a fight to be measured in years, not months. And that it was not going to be a linear progression. We'd have progress and setbacks, progress and setbacks, but over the last several months by any number of metrics l would say that things have progressed quite well.

For example, we have now taken back, with the Iraqi Forces, 45 percent of the territory that ISIL originally controlled in populated areas in Iraq. And about 20 percent of the populated territory that they controlled in Syria is now out of ISIL hands. That is one metric.

And we've taken out a number of ISIL leaders in both Iraq and Syria. We've substantially degraded their economic resources by hitting cash storage sites as well as oil infrastructure that they've been using to raise revenue and we've seen evidence of their ability to pay their personnel at the same rates they had in previous years is diminished. So I think on a number of dimensions, in fact, the campaign has made real progress. Now --

ZAKARIA: But a lot of people say that particularly the effort to take Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.

RICE: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Has slowed down because of this problem, the Iraqi army not being viewed favorably by a lot of people.

RICE: Well, I think that is -- I think, in fact, we have two significant remaining objectives. Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria. Both of which are going to take time to -- to take back from ISIL. These are heavily and densely populated areas and major cities. In each context what is going to require is a ground force in Iraq led by the Iraqi army, joined by the Kurds and others, to first encircle and then ultimately seize Mosul.

In Syria, obviously we need to continue to build with our partners on the ground in Syria. An Arab force with the size and the capacity to take Raqqa. That's going to be in focus since it's something that's going to take time to build.

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you about an interview that your deputy, your principal deputy gave, Ben Rhodes, in a "New York Times" magazine profile. He described it -- turned out to be a very controversial interview, much commentary on it. In that article, the way in which Rhodes and the National Security staff is portrayed on one crucial issue, the selling of the Iran deal, raised a lot of criticism and people felt there was a kind of political campaign that might even have misrepresented the truth in order to sell the Iran deal to Congress and the American public. Do you think that is fair?

RICE: No. I think it's absolutely unfair. And let me be very clear as to why. First of all, there is nothing that Ben or the president or I or anybody who is involved in explaining the Iran deal to the American public said that wasn't factually correct. If you look at -- how that whole debate went down last year, there was perfect public attention, scrutiny, the documents were there for everybody to read, for members of Congress to consider and debate. There was nothing that was hidden or could be hidden.

It was in the public's sphere and never in my recent recollection has there been a more robust and substantive debate over an important foreign policy issue.

[10:10:11] So there was nothing hidden. There was nothing -- there was no effort to or reality of misleading. And I think that's one the unfortunate things about that article. There was never anything other than a straightforward attempt to explain the merits of the Iran deal to the American people and to Congress. And in fact, those merits have been borne out by the fact that we have now successfully cut off all of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon.

Iran is far more subject to international inspection and verification. The whole world now is able to determine through the inspection capacity of the International Atomic Energy Agency that it is not able or in the process of moving towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. That makes the United States more safe. It makes our allies and partners in the region and the world more safe including Israel. So it has been a net positive by any measure. And the notion that there was any ball to hide or spin to put on it, I think is really misguided.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: We'll be back in a moment with much more with the president's National Security adviser, Susan Rice.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

[10:15:59] ZAKARIA: Ambassador Rice, let me ask you about your commencement address. You gave a commencement address recently in Florida in which you had some tough words about the foreign policy establishment. You said it is not diverse enough.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICE: In the faces of our national security leaders, America is still not fully represented.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RICE: I wasn't talking about the foreign policy establishment, I was talking about the national security work force. Those who work -- civil servants and foreign service officers in our State Department, our development agencies, our Defense Department, our intelligence community. So these are the -- the U.S. government work force in this realm.

And what I said was that we would all benefit if the senior leadership and indeed the rank and file of our National Security work force looked more like America. One of our greatest strengths as a nation in addition to our innovation and our fearlessness, when you look at our people is our extraordinary diversity and that's an asset that serves us well as we lead the world but it is not serving us as well as we could given that we are a country that is now about 40 percent minority, and the leadership of our intelligence community, our military leadership are less than 15 percent minority, our senior diplomats, less than 20 percent minority.

We can do better. And we are meanwhile producing higher numbers of well-educated, well-trained minorities that we ought to encourage to come into national security and foreign policy, recognizing that those with diverse backgrounds, different ethnicities, races, religions, sexual orientations, gender, bring a perspective that may not be the perspective that has been predominant from generations ago, and that's a good thing.

I think we've all learned the dangers of group think. And when you have people around the table trying to solve the world's toughest problems, whether it is how to deal with ISIL as we discussed or climate change or combating the Ebola epidemic, to the extent that we have people who can bring different perspectives to bear in solving a given problem, the more likely we are to be to come up with more creative and effective solutions and solutions that are likely to be acceptable in the environments in which they need to stick.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that you're -- that being a woman gives you a different perspective on international relations?

RICE: That's a very hard to question to answer. I think many different aspects of who I am cause me to perhaps think and analyze and perceive problems differently than some others around the table. Whether that's a function of the fact that I'm a woman or an African- American, or somebody born in the 1960s and somebody who had the opportunity to go and be educated and very good institutions. And I think all of the elements that combine to make me who I am, like everybody else who brings to bear their particular backgrounds and experience to a decision-making table bring a different perspective.

And the point I was trying to make at the commencement address at Ford International University, which, by the way, is one of the most diverse universities in the country, 60 plus percent Hispanic, is to suggest that the more we bring the full fabric and all of its diversity to bear in our decision-making, whether on national security or education or any other sphere, the better our decisions are likely to be. And I also very consciously was trying to encourage young people at this university to consider careers in public service and in particular in national security and foreign policy.

ZAKARIA: You are heading out to Vietnam and Japan. The president is going to be the first American president to visit Hiroshima. And your deputy Ben Rhodes said in his speech that he will not revisit the decision to drop the atomic bomb.

[10:20:08] I wonder why not. It seems like that is the elephant in the room and why not discuss the -- you know, what the president thinks about it?

RICE: No.

ZAKARIA: Surely the Japanese must be wondering.

RICE: Well, it's interesting. The Japanese have not asked us to come and reflect on the wisdom or not of that decision. Nor have they asked for the United States to apologize. And in any event, we would not. This is something that we think is important to do to --

ZAKARIA: Do you think it was the correct decision to drop the atomic bomb?

RICE: Yes -- yes -- I'm sorry. I misunderstood your question. I thought you're going to ask if I think it was the right decision to visit Hiroshima. I do you think it is the right decision to visit Hiroshima. I'm not going to give you my historian's judgment on the decision.

ZAKARIA: Why? Why not?

RICE: Because I think it's important rather than to revisit that debate, the purpose of the president's going to Hiroshima is, one, to lift up the extraordinary cost of war as it affected civilians around the world in World War II and continues to today. Secondly, it is very important in our judgment to reinforce what is American policy and the president's own vision of eventually achieving a world without nuclear weapons, with the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

That's something that we continue to believe is important to aspire to. And while we've made significant strides in terms of arms control agreements and securing nuclear materials, we have a long way to go. The other message of this visit is that years on from the end of World War II, we now have an alliance and partnership with Japan which is one of the strongest in the world. And while the president is in Hiroshima, he'll have the opportunity to visit with American servicemen and women and Japanese service men and women who are side- by-side working as allies and partners.

That is also very important. So this will be a forward-looking visit. Yes, it will happen in the context of history, but we don't think it's particularly useful to give a long discourse on the past. This is about the future. And about what we -- working with Japan and other allies in the region can build together in terms of nonproliferation and a safer world for all of us.

ZAKARIA: And the president must have a view on whether it was the correct decision to drop the atomic bomb. He's a man who studies history deeply. Surely he has a view.

RICE: I'm not saying he doesn't.

ZAKARIA: Donald Trump says that he wants a U.N. ambassador who will shake things up at the U.N. and get the United Nations to start actually ending conflicts in the world. You were ambassador to the U.N. Is that a reasonable requirement for the U.N. ambassador?

RICE: Well, I think U.N. ambassadors come in different flavors and styles. Some would call Ambassador John Bolton as somebody who sought to -- under President Bush, George W. Bush, to shake up the U.N. and show -- throw some tough elbows. I'm not sure that that approach was altogether successful in terms of changing the U.N.

I think, in fact, what I found, when I was in ambassador to the United Nations, is you need a combination of toughness and diplomacy, a willingness to work with others in a constructive and collaborate way, but to be very plain about what we stand for and what we believe in. And I think that when America leads with respect for the institution of the United Nations, fully cognizant of the many flaws and tries to make it a better institution, we are most effective there.

ZAKARIA: Ambassador Susan Rice, thank you very much.

RICE: It is good to be with you again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Donald Trump is not just an American phenomenon. We will take you to Europe to meet the many mini Trumps.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:05] ZAKARIA: Now for our "What in the World" segment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. (END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Where does all of this come from? What explains the rise of Donald Trump and the popularity of some of his most incendiary proposals?

The truth is Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. Not even a purely American one. In fact, the same currents that have allowed Trump and his message to rise are running through most of the established democratic countries of Europe.

Let's start with France. April 22, 2012. Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front Party, an anti-immigrant party that has been called fascist by some, won about 20 percent of the vote in the first round of the French presidential election.

Post-war Europe has had radical right-wing parties for decades, of course, but it's clear that the great recession and the great austerity that followed led to a precipitous rise in the power and support of such parties across the continent.

2014 proved to be the perfect political storm. As Europe recoiled from the economic crisis, the continent was flooded from refugees fleeing Syria. Far-right nationalists capitalized on the anxiety and anger storming to victory in the 2014 E.U. parliamentary elections. Anti-immigrant platforms proved successful for Euro skeptic parties which won parliamentary seats in France, Denmark Greece and the United Kingdom.

In France, a historic victory for Marine Le Pen's National Front Party. One in four French voters cast ballots for La Pen's extreme right party. The French prime minister called it a shock and earthquake. La Pen's father, the founder of the party, has offered a solution for Europe's immigration problem, saying, "Monsignor Ebola could sort that out in three months."

[10:30:00] Take a look at this map. In all of the countries in red, the far right made significant gains in 2015.

Let's dig in and look at some examples. Poland, the far right party swept parliamentary elections, consolidated its grip on power and began to erode checks and balances. The country, which is considered one of Europe's economic success stories, elected a far-right-wing president who has warned that migrants bring possible epidemics. Denmark and Hungary also saw major gains for far-right parties. And look at Sweden, which has a history of welcoming immigrants. There the far-right party became the nation's third biggest political party in 2015. This is a party with roots in the neo-Nazi movement, a party that has been accused of inciting arson attacks on asylum centers.

And the trend continues. Just this past week Austria's chancellor, Werner Faymann, resigned abruptly after almost eight years in office. The move marked the death of the moderates in a country where the far- right wing has won the first round of Austria's presidential elections. Quartz recently reminded us that Rome mismanaged a migrant crisis

1,700 years ago, turning inwards and losing its universal appeal. And it marked the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.

Next on "GPS," we'll continue on this theme. Who in the world could have predicted the rise of Trump? Well, my next guest says, if you had the right skills, the right eye for patterns and connections, the right filter to see the important data amidst the flood, you could.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Most of us in the animal kingdom have five main senses, touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste. Some humans are said to have a sixth sense, which Merriam-Webster defines as "a power of perception like but not one of the five senses."

Well, along comes an author who posits another sense entirely. Joshua Cooper Ramo's new book is called "The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks."

Cooper is co-chief-executive and vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates, which, among other things, advises companies that wish to do business in China.

Josh Ramo, pleasure to have you on.

JOSHUA COOPER RAMO, CO-CEO, KISSINGER ASSOCIATES: Great to be here.

ZAKARIA: So explain very simply what does it mean when you talk about having a seventh sense? What are we trying to understand?

RAMO: So I think we live in this world today where, all around us, we see things that we didn't expect, that are just kind of exploding, and that some people, sort of, had an early feeling for. And so I'll give you an example. If, a year ago, somebody had come up to you and said "There is one presidential candidate who has $150 million raised, four decades of political experience and two presidents in the family and another presidential candidate who has 5 million Twitter followers. Which one is more likely to be successful," most people would have said "This guy over here."

It's the ability to look at things and see the way in which connection changes their nature, whether it's presidential candidates or terrorists or financial instruments, that really defines the new sensibility for this age.

And to you Trump is actually a very powerful illustration of this seventh sense because what we didn't realize was that being a celebrity and having created this very deep connection with people through Facebook and Twitter, and of course the TV show, he had a kind of reach that was completely different from a conventional...

(CROSSTALK)

RAMO: That's right, and completely invisible, if you use the traditional way of looking at it. And this is -- it's, kind of, a common thread that runs through a lot of the problems we have today. And so looking at ISIS two years ago, when the president said "This is the J.V. of terror" because, admittedly, using a traditional metric, they looked like the J.V. of terror. And what ISIS understood is that beheading 12 guys on video gave them a viral power and a level of connectivity that was going to be very difficult for even the sixth fleet to defeat.

So the seventh sense really is that ability that marks the most successful figures in our age, to look at something and understand how it has changed as a result of connection.

ZAKARIA: And the ISIS one, again, very interesting -- what they were doing was producing these very slick videos, very short compared to the Al Qaida videos, which were very long, highly produced and designed to be just gory enough to go viral but not so gory that people would -- would, you know, refuse to -- to share them.

RAMO: That's exactly right. And I think that instinct that, sort of, how you tailor the content, which is another thing related to the Trump phenomenon, by the way, which is, independent of where you fall politically, just the way we absorb information now is very much, sort of, like the way we absorb information on our Facebook feed, which is that whatever is there today is the most important, and by tomorrow it goes -- it disappears.

And so the view that something you said five weeks ago ought to obtain today has been replaced in an era where you have that constancy. And when we look at the -- the way networks operate -- and what's important about this is that networks, whether they're financial networks or information networks or DNA networks -- and by networks I just mean connected systems -- all have certain regularities. And one of them is this feature, this hunger to be constantly on. And so that constant refreshing that Trump is doing, that owning of the news cycle -- remember there was this moment when he and Rubio briefly had, sort of, a spat on Twitter, and Rubio, sort of, gave up after a day or so, and Trump just kept on going.

So as you think about our politics writ large, independent of Trump and Clinton and what's going to happen there, this notion that connection is fundamentally changing the way we interact, I think, is very important.

ZAKARIA: You spend a lot of your time in China. And China features prominently in the book, in fact. You begin with this discussion of a Chinese sage.

RAMO: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Where does China fit into this picture?

RAMO: What's going on in China is really a tremendous experiment, in a sense, which is how do you engineer a country and a political system that is designed for a world of constant connection and where a lot of the fundamental ideas of capitalism and democracy are going to have to be reinterpreted because of network forces. ZAKARIA: But China is -- is decidedly not connected in the sense that

the party acts as a huge great firewall, monitoring the Internet, slowing it down, blocking outside companies, blocking outside information. How can it survive in the world you are describing?

RAMO: So one of the great debates about all these network structures is, in fact, maybe the predominant one, is this one about open versus closed. And making that decision of how open or closed your system is turns out to be the fundamental idea of the network age.

So when Trump talks about this desire to build a wall, for instance, he's reflecting something that's actually a much broader phenomenon. One of the things I talk about in the book is, if you look at the period from 1951, with the beginning of the construction of the Berlin Wall to today, there have been 75 wall-like structures built in the world. Eighty percent of them have been built in the last ten years. And so that craving for separation is almost, kind of, a balancing out against this inclusiveness of globalization that we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

ZAKARIA: Will China be able to succeed if it continues to build walls, virtual and real?

RAMO: Nobody knows. I mean, this is the great experiment. The question is how do you modulate that open versus closed system?

The benefits of openness are obvious. It is essential, and the Chinese themselves have said it's essential to be open to the world. But they also believe the preservation of Chineseness and political order demands a degree of closedness. And so when you're in Beijing, this is a very lively debate today -- by the way, as it is here on things like should the iPhone be open or closed; should our e-mails be open or closed based on encryption?

So this really turns out to be one of the core debates of the network age.

ZAKARIA: Josh Ramo, pleasure to have you on.

RAMO: Thank you for having me.

ZAKARIA: Up next, what would you do if you were born a girl in a region where women are practically locked away for most of their lives?

We'll tell you the almost Shakespearean story of one girl in Pakistan who dressed like a boy and found great success in sport. An amazing tale, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: For the American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world. (END VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: The president was talking about the area where Maria Toorpakai was born. She grew up in Pakistan's tribal area of Waziristan, hard on the border with Afghanistan. It is a place that is not just dangerous to Americans but dangerous for many kinds of people, perhaps most importantly dangerous for women and girls. It's a place where militants rule in a patriarchal society and where females are mostly banned from school, from work, confined to spend their entire lives cloistered at home.

But young Maria Toorpakai had great aspirations. She not only wanted to be educated but also wanted to compete in sports. So she did something extraordinary. Listen in.

MARIA TOORPAKAI, PAKISTANI GIRL: So imagine that kind of -- a woman lives an entire life in the house, 60 years or 70 years in those four walls.

ZAKARIA: So you saw that life for women and you thought to yourself, "I don't want to be a woman," and you cut your hair off?

TOORPAKAI: No, I am really happy that I chose to be like that. I chose to be like a tomboy. I could explore that region more than any other girl could ever do.

ZAKARIA: So you cut your hair off?

TOORPAKAI: Yes.

ZAKARIA: You renamed yourself, or your father called you a new name?

TOORPAKAI: My father called me Genghis Khan. And that was the time when he saw me burning -- burning all my girly dresses. And it was my outrage and it was my way of explaining that I don't want to be a girl in that society. And the only thing I could see -- I was young, but I could see a difference. I could see girls at home and I -- I am really strong. I'm not a very typical girl. I -- you know, I can be equally good as boys in playing sports, so I just wanted to be outside and be part of that -- those fun games. I want to have -- want to have equal freedom as boys have, and that's why I burned all the -- my dresses and put on my boy's -- my brother's clothes. And I said "From now on, I'm going to have the equal rights as boys have."

ZAKARIA: So flash forward. Now you're 12 years old...

(LAUGHTER)

... and you take part in a national weight-lifting competition?

TOORPAKAI: Yeah.

ZAKARIA: And you're competing, and you come second, but this is a boy's competition?

TOORPAKAI: Yes. (LAUGHTER)

I -- until age 12, I lived all my life as Genghis Khan. Nobody knew that I was a girl. And when I chose to play the first weightlifting championship, it was again with the boy's name Genghis Khan, and and I -- I came second in that championship in all Pakistan.

ZAKARIA: And everybody else participating was a boy?

TOORPAKAI: Boys -- everyone was boys. And even everyone had to weigh their body, you know, in order to participate in this competition. That was a little tricky.

ZAKARIA: Because you had to strip down to...

TOORPAKAI: They had to -- yeah, they had to. And luckily my brother -- first, he refused that he doesn't want to do it -- it was a plan, you know. And then another guy there was -- he was very shy. And then I said "I don't want to do it, either."

So I survived that competition. But the next one when I started playing squash, that was a little -- that was a time when people came to know about me.

ZAKARIA: And what happened? How were you then able to move forward as a woman?

TOORPAKAI: It wasn't -- it's the worst ever memories I have. All my life, I had a freedom. I had fun. I had an amazing life. And then all of a sudden people come to know that I'm a girl. They started treating me really badly. I -- everyone is telling my father to -- to not allow me outside. They don't want to see me outside; he's a shameful person or he doesn't have any honor, and...

ZAKARIA: Even though, at this point, you are a -- you are a nationally competitive sports person?

TOORPAKAI: Yes. Yes. And even mullahs come to our house every time and they keep telling my dad, "It's not right; it's not" -- all these kinds of things what he is -- the way he thinks. And then you see, even in the mosque, the mullah will talk about me, saying that, you know, "Today our girls are playing sports; it's not right; we are moving, you know, our society; it's completely un-Islamic, so we have to learn and we have not to do these kind of dishonorable things."

ZAKARIA: So you almost had an experiment in your life where you had a period where you were a boy and there was a period where you were a girl, and you could see how the society was treating you differently?

TOORPAKAI: That's what I think. I think that I lived two lives in one person. I have lived a life of a boy. I have lived the life of a girl. And I have seen huge differences. And I, today, I'm more connected to myself, who I am, who I should be and how the society should be. I feel that it's unjust to women there. It's -- they have -- they should have all the equal opportunities as boys, as men out there. And they should -- they have equal -- like, they have so much strength. They are so talented. They're just wasted.

You see, sometimes I go to the -- sometimes when you see the girls, you would see, at a young age, they would be in a burka. They can't see the world; they can't see the beauty outside. Do you think this is a life? They -- the more you get knowledge, I think that's -- that's the most beautiful thing one person can have.

ZAKARIA: Maria, amazing story. Thank you so much for coming on.

TOORPAKAI: Thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: Next on "GPS," from gun models to fashion models, why the maker of the world's most famous assault rifle is moving from machine guns to men's wear -- really -- when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Earlier this week NASA announced its planet-finding spacecraft Kepler had discovered 1,284 new planets. It brings me to my question. According to NASA, how many of the newly discovered planets could potentially support life, zero, nine, 24 or 57? Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

This week's book of the week is Rana Foroohar's "Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business." We've spent a lot of time understanding Donald Trump. This book provides a window into the twin appeal of Trump and Bernie Sanders. Finance, she points out, represents 4 percent of America's jobs but 25 percent of corporate profits. And maybe that's why only 19 percent of millennials say they support capitalism. This is an important book with an important message.

And now with for last look. Will you be sporting Dolce & Gabbana this season? What about Burberry, Fendi or Kalashnikov?

You heard me correctly. The makers of one of the world's most popular assault rifles, the AK-47, is now expanding its brand to fashion. Kalashnikov will unveil a military-style clothing line, complete with accessories, this September, as the BBC has pointed out.

The company has not yet released images of the clothes, but we have a few suggestions. Look sharp in your AK-47 custom jacket. How about a trigger tie, a barrel baseball cap or maybe some bullet bling?

Russian news reports say there will be 60 Kalashnikov retail stores across Russia by the end of this year. You see, following Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea, sanctions have blocked sales of the Russian-made weapons to the United States and the E.U., so Kalashnikov needed to rethink its strategy to help boost domestic revenues, according to the company's marketing director.

Who knows, perhaps American manufactures will follow suit and we'll see a series of Smith & Wesson bars popping up all over the country. On the other hand, America's gun makers don't really need to extend their brand. There is plenty of demand for the core product, guns, to keep them profitable here for decades. The correct answer to our "GPS Challenge" question is B. NASA says

nine planets that it has just verified are in a zone which could support life. Launched in 2009, NASA's Kepler mission is tasked with finding earth-like planets. NASA says that, thanks to Kepler, astronomers now believe that there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky. Imagine if just a tiny fraction of those planets had life on them. As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "To declare that earth must be the only planet with life in the universe would be inexcusably bigheaded of us."

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.