A few weeks ago there was a brief uproar when it appeared that the Taliban was hanging a dead body from a helicopter; it subsequently turned out that it was not the case, and that the individual hanging from the helicopter was apparently part of some work detail.

Would that this latest outrage were a similar mixup, but that does not seem to be the case:

The Taliban hanged a dead body from a crane parked in a city square in Afghanistan on Saturday in a gruesome display that signaled the hard-line movement's return to some of its brutal tactics of the past.

Taliban officials initially brought four bodies to the central square in the western city of Herat, then moved three of them to other parts of the city for public display, said Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the edge of the square.

Taliban officials announced that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping earlier Saturday and were killed by police, Seddiqi said. Ziaulhaq Jalali, a Taliban-appointed district police chief in Herat, said later that Taliban members rescued a father and son who had been abducted by four kidnappers after an exchange of gunfire. He said a Taliban fighter and a civilian were wounded by the kidnappers, and that the kidnappers were killed in crossfire.

We won't link to any of the uncensored images, which are gruesome and terrible.

Nor do we need to: It is unmistakable at this point what kind of regime the Taliban is going to be running in Afghanistan. This is, unfortunately, only the beginning.