Read Afghanistan's 1997 Taliban radio ban report

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+# Afghanistan follow-up: the 1997 Taliban radio ban
+
+26 October 2026. Follow-up to [the Afghanistan early pass](history-afghanistan-early-2026-10-21.md).
+That pass added `afghanistan-taliban-radio-hashish-ban-1997` unchecked because the UN PDF
+download returned an empty file or 403, and only an indexed paragraph had been read. This note
+reads the complete PDF and closes the check. No score changed.
+
+## The document
+
+**UN General Assembly, A/52/493, 16 October 1997.** Note by the Secretary-General transmitting
+the interim report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan,
+Mr Choong-Hyun Paik. The PDF is 42 pages; paragraph 130 is on printed p. 33. The copy read was
+downloaded from the UN Digital Library on 26 October 2026 (101,082 bytes; PDF creation date
+6 November 1997).
+
+Paragraph 130 reads:
+
+> The Taliban authorities are reported to have taken measures to ban the cultivation, sale and
+> use of illegal drugs and have warned that anyone engaging in this type of activity would be
+> punished. It was reported that Radio Shariah had announced on 20 August in Kabul that the
+> production, sale and taking of both heroin and hashish were banned. The Taliban representative
+> in Islamabad informed the Special Rapporteur that in addition to constituting a hazard for
+> health, drugs were considered as bad in Islam and voiced the readiness of the Taliban to
+> cooperate with the international community in eradicating them. He indicated that one of the
+> ways to address the issue was to provide the farmers growing opium poppy with an incentive to
+> plant alternative crops and provide them with agricultural tools, seeds and fertilizers. It was
+> reported that the Taliban authorities had announced that smugglers addicted to drugs were
+> arrested, beaten up on a daily basis and left in cold water for three hours.
+
+The paragraph is explicit that the radio announcement is reported, not a text issued by the
+Taliban. It also places the announcement in the wider human-rights report, not in a drug-law
+survey.
+
+## What changed
+
+- `afghanistan-taliban-radio-hashish-ban-1997`: `checked: true`; the locator now records the full
+  PDF read and the missing original broadcast. The description adds the 20 August date, changes
+  "seeking cooperation" to "expressed readiness to cooperate", and specifies that the alternative
+  crops were for opium poppy farmers. The `unscored` reason is unchanged.
+- No score change. The chain remains 1924 100 → 7, 1973 7 → 1; the 1997 announcement is not a
+  scored step because it was a reported radio announcement by one authority in a civil war, not a
+  verified nationwide law.
+
+## Limits
+
+The original Radio Shariah broadcast or a Taliban decree has not been recovered. The report is a
+human-rights interim report, not a drug-law text, and it does not establish the announcement's
+implementation, its territorial reach, or whether the Taliban enforced it against hashish as well
+as heroin. The report's language ("are reported", "it was reported") is retained in the entry. No
+article was written: the source is a brief report mention, and the prior pass's reasons for not
+building one on an unverified order still apply.
+
+## Validation
+
+- `node scripts/data-status.cjs chain af`: 1924 100 → 7, 1973 7 → 1; 1997 unscored; 0 flagged.
+- `npm run history:test`: 39 passed.
+- `npm run answers:test`: 16 passed.
+- `npm run build`: 4,166 pages (includes unrelated uncommitted Iraq entries in the working tree).
+- `git diff --check`: clean.