Grand economics society

Before the Taliban seized power in August 2021, the illicit trade in opium, a gum produced from poppies, helped pay for their insurgency. The mullahs encouraged farmers to plant poppies and taxed the trade. But drugs are deemed haram (prohibited) under Islamic law. Shortly after taking power the Taliban's supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, banned narcotics. And stunning recent evidence from across the Country's opium belt in the south and east suggests he meant it. According to satellite imagery from Alcis, a British firm, poppy cultivation in the southern province of Helmand, where most of the crop is groWn, fell from over 120,000 hectares in April 2022 to less than 1,oo0 hectares a year later. Anti-poppy units are patrolling the province, meting out the treatment Mr Mohammad received. The results in Nangarhar province, another big producer, are similar. Only 865 hectares are under poppies now, compared with over 7,000 hectares in 2022. It will be harder to eli...

In recent years, there has been a precipitous drop in the number of cases making it to court and this has suggested fresh failures in the criminal justice system. In the year to March 2016 there were 3,910 charges for rape; in the year to March 2022 there were 2,223.  It is not clear why charges have fallen so far. Some reckon that changes to the way the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decides whether or not to bring a case to court have played a part. Prosecutors have also become increasingly likely to ask to see everything on a complainant's phone, "making an already distressing process feel even more intrusive", according to one government report. Reports of rape have increased exponentially, perhaps because the #MeToo movement has changed people's understanding of it: police recorded 69,905 cases of rape in the year to March 2022 compared with 36,334 sİx years earlier. Overstretched officers seem less likely to conduct thorough investigations. A big backlog of cas...