Well into four months after taking over Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban are continuing to show that they are unlikely to mend their ways.

The latest instance of this behaviour is replacing the statute of a Hazara leader with the Koran in Bamiyan. The original statue depicted Abdul Ali Mazari; a leader of the mostly Shiite minority killed by the Taliban during their first stint in power.

Soon after the Taliban returned to power in August the statue was decapitated by a rocket-propelled grenade. The Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam forbids the human form to be depicted in paintings and sculpture and printed photographs in extreme cases. Many businesses have removed or covered up billboards and posters featuring people since the group’s takeover.

Mazari’s statue stood in Bamiyan’s central square, where the Taliban blew up two massive 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha in 2001, just before the US invasion that ousted them. The square, named after Mazari, has been renamed military street by the Taliban.

Mazari continues to be loved by the people of Bamiyan and reports indicate that a new statute was being made to replace the old one, which had been partially damaged.

He was a fiercely anti-Taliban militia leader; the Taliban killed him in 1995 after taking him as a prisoner. The Taliban had then claimed that Mazari had been shot after he tried to seize the gun of one of his guards, while being transferred aboard a helicopter. He was officially named a “Martyr for National Unity of Afghanistan” by ousted President Ashraf Ghani in 2016.

The Taliban is also gradually putting in place systems of governance that will help them rule the country. The latest step in this direction is the formation of a military tribunal to enforce sharia laws and decrees.

The tribunal formed on the orders of Haibatullah Akhundzada will be headed by Obaidullah Nezami as Chairman and will have two deputies, Seyed Aghaz and Zahed Akhundzadeh. The tribunal is authorised to interpret the Sharia rulings and issue decrees relevant to Islamic civil laws and register complaints, lawsuits and petitions against the Taliban officials and personnel of the police, army and intelligence units.

Research into the Taliban’s justice system by Adam Baczko, a Research Fellow at French National Centre for Scientific Research, shows that they were well prepared for putting in place their judicial system.

Based on field research between 2010 and 2016, Baczko says the Taliban had long ago placed their version of justice at the centre of their ideology, and “made the courts a means of conquering power”.

The Taliban justice system was swift and exemplary. Little wonder then that many people accepted it. Implementing the same system in full, has been a challenge for the Taliban today. In some cases, since the takeover, Taliban judges, wary of losing support have tried to avoid being too harsh. That may partially explain why a military tribunal has been set up to implement Sharia law.

Under Taliban 2.0, law and order remains fragile across Afghanistan. Additionally, with the economy in doldrums, traders are feeling the strain of uncertain security conditions. Which is why the Taliban have recently allowed traders to carry weapons for their safety. Many traders had complained about their safety, which led the Ministry of Interior Affairs to take this decision. All traders and investors would henceforth be allowed to carry weapons and have armed security guards so that they would be protected from threats of kidnapping, looting and money heisting. This is the first time after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on 15th August that people are being allowed to carry weapons.

Despite these measures, the one area where the Taliban have failed consistently is security of civilians, particularly the minorities.  Perhaps the Taliban is unable to grasp the scale of the challenges they face.

This is a point made by Di Valerio Fabbri, in an article written in Geopolitica.info. He says the Taliban now faces its biggest test of managing the country’s governance as it struggles with the tag of being a ‘rogue state’. The situation is compounded by the mounting terrorist attacks by the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP).

Fabbri predicts that unless the Taliban steps up to tackle these challenges, Afghanistan is destined to descend into civil war. He has emphasised the point that the Taliban is now coming to grips with the actual governance of Afghanistan.

It is unclear as to how the Taliban intend to go forward in ruling Afghanistan. Baczko says they are walking a thin line between “their moral vision that can go to the worst extremes” and a “willingness to give pledges, to demonstrate a functioning bureaucracy and knowledge of norms, including on the issue of human rights”.

This moral vision also includes banning women from working and being seen alone in public. Recently, BBC reported that women had been banned from appearing in television dramas under new rules imposed by the Taliban government. Additionally, female journalists and presenters have also been ordered to wear headscarves on screen.  Films considered against the principles of Sharia, and Afghan values are banned. Also prohibited from broadcast is footage of men exposing intimate parts of the body.

Everything that has been reported out of Afghanistan in the last couple of months since the takeover suggests that the Taliban are not scared to doing what they want to. Everything that they brought into action in the late 1990s is gradually being implemented.

At this juncture however, there is weariness about the reaction of the international community. That explains, to a degree, why the Taliban does not want to do everything immediately.

There is no doubt the Taliban are back to their old ways in Afghanistan.