On 21 August, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers formally issued “vice and virtue” laws codifying rules of lifestyle and behaviour, entrenching their control over social interactions and the private lives of people in the country. Unsurprisingly, the strictest measures relate to the dress and demeanour of women. The laws say that Muslim women must cover their faces and bodies around non-Muslim women and all men who are not “mahrams” – their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, grandfathers or uncles. They also deem a woman’s voice to be intimate and say that it should not be heard singing, reciting or reading aloud in public.

The diktat came a week after the Taliban celebrated three years of establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in August 2021, after the withdrawal of US troops from the country and the fall of a republican government. Soon after the group took power, the Taliban government set up a ministry for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, which has issued edicts and enforced them through a “morality police”. A UN report from July said that such decrees had created a climate of intimidation and fear among Afghans. The decrees have disproportionately affected women, who have had severe restrictions placed on their movement, attire and education under the Taliban. Men have also been affected. For example, last week, the morality police dismissed 280 men who did not have beards from the security forces.

The two most immediate and momentous fallouts of the change in Afghanistan’s leadership in 2021 were the drying up of foreign-exchange reserves, leading to the collapse of the economy, and the crackdown on the freedoms of women. In this episode of ‘State of Southasia’, Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research organisation in Kabul, about how the Afghan people have been coping with deprivation under the repressive regime.