It should be straightforward: those killed in battle should be allowed to rest in peace and not have their bodies mutilated or otherwise mistreated. Once someone is dead, they’re highly unlikely to play any further role in the fighting, so shouldn’t they be afforded a last vestige of dignity and respect?

What would we say, for example, if it emerged that Turkish soldiers at Gallipoli dismembered the bodies of dead Anzacs? To ask the question is to answer it.

Respect for the bodies of enemy soldiers has long been part of the rules of war – inscribed in the Geneva Conventions and elsewhere. Breaches have, justifiably, been regarded as war crimes.

In Australia today, however, it seems it’s a bit more complicated. That much has been made clear by the controversy surrounding Andrew Hastie, the former SAS commander who is the Liberal Party candidate in the by-election for the Western Australian seat of Canning.

During a 2013 tour of Afghanistan, soldiers under Hastie’s command chopped off the hands of three dead Taliban fighters. As he sees it, there’s nothing particularly untoward about this. The soldiers were, in his words, “acting in what they believed to be the appropriate process laid out by Defence”.

An “appropriate process” for cutting off the hands of dead enemy soldiers? Nothing to see here. All part of standard operating procedure no doubt. One of many “how to” guides produced by the Australian military authorities for those cases where violations of the Geneva Conventions are deemed unavoidable.

The executive director of the Australian Defence Association, Neil James, is similarly perplexed by all the hand chopping fuss. Such acts, he says, “although shocking to some”, are nevertheless “justified by the principle of military necessity”. The mutilation of corpses was okay in this case, because it served a definite military purpose.

What was the purpose? According to Hastie, the hands were needed for identification: “It is critical when you fight the Taliban that you gather evidence and do what you can to investigate the … identification of your enemy”.

Fair enough. Leaving aside the question of whether there were alternatives to carrying severed hands back with them to the lab, identification of the enemy is no doubt important.

One might think, however, that it should be undertaken before you kill them. Otherwise (and this is something that Western forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere should well know), the person you kill might turn out not to have been your enemy at all but an Afghan citizen trying to go about their business.

When it comes to the mainstream political and media discussion, all this is beside the point. Those fighting Australian and other Western forces in Afghanistan are “fundamentalists” and “terrorists” – a threat to civilisation as we know it. As such, we’re conditioned to believe that pretty much anything goes when it comes to their treatment, dead or alive.

Kidnapping (known in military jargon as “extraordinary rendition”), torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial – all this is par for the course. So we cut off the hands of some dead fighters. Why not take their heads as well? Why not drag their mutilated corpses through the streets and string them up to a tree as a message to others?

Given the steady stream of racism and brutality that has accompanied the “war on terror” over the past decade and a half, we shouldn’t be surprised that the hand-chopping controversy seems to have done Andrew Hastie’s electoral prospects little harm.

We live in a society where chopping hands off corpses is just the tip of a gigantic iceberg of barbarity. Maybe someone like Hastie, who can evidently “walk the walk” as much as “talk the talk”, is just the kind of leader we need?