Since Mr. Gul was not himself married, he was given the lesser punishment of 100 lashes and sent home, where a relative said he was still recovering from his wounds. (The relative, reached by telephone, asked not to be named because of fear of Taliban reprisals.) Because Rukhshana, who goes by just one name, was married, the Taliban condemned her to death by stoning.

Rukhshana was put in a deep but narrow circular pit, so that just her head protruded. On the video she could be heard crying, over and over again, “Dear God,” as rock after rock was thrown at her head from close range, mostly by men wearing Taliban-style black turbans. During the ordeal, she could also be heard reciting the Shahada, the Muslim creed: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

The Taliban are not the only ones carrying out Shariah law punishments in Ghor, or elsewhere in Afghanistan.

Two child brides in a government-held part of Ghor, ages 13 and 14, fled their husbands in 2010 and were forcibly returned by the police, then flogged in public. In 2012 in Ghazni Province’s Jaghori District, a government-held area that claims a progressive attitude toward girls’ education and women’s rights, a 15-year-old girl was lashed 101 times after she was accused of having sex with a local tailor, because she was seen alone with him in his shop for a few minutes. After the flogging, she was examined by a doctor and found to still be a virgin. She was left permanently disabled from hip injuries caused by the lashes. The men who flogged her were never punished.

Western condemnation of such attacks tends to be muted or absent compared with the reaction to outrages carried out by Taliban insurgents. When a 27-year-old woman named Farkhunda was stoned, beaten and burned to death in downtown Kabul in March by a mob reacting to concocted accusations of Quran-burning, the American Embassy expressed no criticism until the following week, after initial official and popular approval of the murder had turned to condemnation.

By comparison, the embassy was quick to condemn Rukhshana’s killing, issuing a statement on Thursday, the day after video of it was widely publicized here. “The United States stands with the people of Afghanistan in condemning violence against women,” the embassy statement said.

Maulavi Baleegh made it clear in the interview that he had no intention of sharing in that condemnation if the presidential review found that the victim was indeed an adulterer. “I have no problem with that,” he said.