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Poor Piotr Stanczak. He's the Polish geologist who after four months of being held hostage was killed in the most ghastly way by a Pakistan branch of the Taliban over the weekend.

Well, actually, to say he was killed in a bestial manner is putting it a tad mildly. Mr. Stanczak had his head cut off by a hooded man hacking away with a knife, while two other brave, armed-to-the-teeth hooded men watched over the whole business. Minutes before, one of those three men had initiated a "conversation" with Mr. Stanczak with a cheery, "Hi. How are you?"

The beheading part of the video, which was released first to representatives of news organizations with offices in northwest Pakistan and then to a larger group of news agencies, isn't widely available, if at all, on the Web. I couldn't find it, nor could the clever head of The Globe's research library. What was available was only the video of the last five minutes of Mr. Stanczak's life, wherein he engaged in the gunpoint chat with his captors. Asked at one point how he found the Pakistani people, he pronounced them, in his accented English, "very good ... very peace people."

Then he had his head cut off by some of them.

Showing this part of the video is probably considered a matter of taste and, after all, the Polish vice-minister of foreign affairs, Jacek Najder, appealed to the press not to broadcast the recording for the sake of Mr. Stanczak's family. I get that, though I'm not sure how protecting the world from the sight of the 42-year-old's horrific death renders it any less awful. But I understand the impulse; it's a kind one.

It if were up to me, I'd show the whole shooting match on every television network in Canada. Young Canadians are fighting the Taliban in Kandahar province and much precious Canadian blood already has been spilled there. The insurgency is and always has been effectively directed across the border from Pakistan. A good many political leaders in the West (including some in Canada) and some of the sharpest minds believe that negotiations with the Taliban are inevitable. These are smarter people than me and I grant that they may be correct.

But where they aren't smarter is that they seem to prefer to be deluded about who the Taliban are.

Some of these folks over the past seven years have complained, for instance, that the military ought not to be doing reconstruction work in Afghanistan, and that this ought to be left to civilians, who know how to really talk to the locals. They probably do too, except that it's hard to talk to people in the middle of a gunfight or bomb blast. My own view is that whether or not Canadians and our allies in Afghanistan end up formally negotiating with the Taliban, or whether they keep fighting them, or, most likely, do a bit of both, it's best to properly have the measure of the enemy. The Taliban put the video out there - this is their handiwork - and it seems only sensible to me to look at it.

Yet not only wasn't the murder shown, the language used to describe it in most news stories was egregiously tame. Most of the stories I saw described the video as "graphic" and the murder as an "execution" or a "beheading."

An army friend of mine, reading one of these stories, was nearly undone by the mildness of the words. "Charles I was beheaded with a swift axe blow," he wrote in an e-mail. "Marie Antoinette was beheaded by a quick drop of a guillotine. But having personally seen some of these videos before, it is a macabre pinning of a person and sawing off of a man's head, like a butcher working on a carcass.

"The timidity of the words lessens the vileness of the act," he said.

He didn't want the video to be shown, where I do. But, as he pointed out, the killing was done for the release of Taliban prisoners, and when passed to reporters it came with a message that it was from the Taliban.

"And this is who we are to negotiate with?"

My friend knew a woman who recently died of wounds she received in Afghanistan. I had never heard of her, or her death, but she was an American anthropologist named Paula Lloyd. A graduate of Wellesley College, she'd been working in Afghanistan since 2002, and as a former army reservist who had more recently worked for both the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and for an aid agency, she was at 36 a savvy Afghan hand.

She was working for BAE Systems, an independent defence contractor, in what the U.S. Army calls a "human terrain team," a somewhat controversial program which sees cultural anthropologists and social scientists embedded with combat troops.

On Nov. 4 last year, Ms. Lloyd and two of her team members were in the village of Chehel Gazi, about 80 kilometres west of Kandahar city. She stopped to chat about gas prices with an Afghan man who was carrying a container of fuel. In response, he lit the container and threw it on her, causing second- and third-degree burns over about 60 per cent of her body.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack.

Despite superb medical care, Ms. Lloyd died of her injuries on Jan. 7.

How do I know all this?

Well, after the attack, the man who set Ms. Lloyd on fire was physically tackled and restrained by one of her human terrain co-workers, a 46-year-old fellow named Don Michael Ayala. Mr. Ayala was armed but didn't fire out of concern for the safety of other team members. The attacker, one Abdul Salem, was eventually captured and handcuffed behind his back. Mr. Ayala kept his pistol aimed at the man's head.

After a few minutes, Mr. Ayala was advised how seriously Ms. Lloyd had been hurt; he pushed his pistol against Mr. Salem's head and shot him, killing him instantly.

Mr. Ayala was subsequently charged, and a week ago, in Alexandria, Va., pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter; the details I use come from the U.S. District Attorney's official statement of facts. Mr. Ayala will be sentenced May 8, and faces a maximum 15 years in jail.

"Amazing," wrote my army friend, "how Afghanistan consumes all those who touch it." I would, as usual, go further, and say that what's amazing is that the harshest language and criticism are reserved for the likes of Ms. Lloyd and Mr. Ayala, the gentlest for those who cut off heads.

cblatchford@globeandmail.com