One of the pictures in the French magazine Paris Match that has stirred controversy.

Jim Bitterman
CNN Senior European Correspondent

It’s what’s made French magazine Paris Match’s reputation…taking risks, bending the rules to get the edgy photos that everyone talks about. This time, though, many here furiously say, the magazine went too far.

A photographer and reporter from the magazine daringly returned to the rough country in Afghanistan where the Taliban killed 10 French soldiers only days before, to try to meet those who ambushed them.

The result is a ten-page story that includes and interview and four photos with the guerrillas, one dressed in a uniform stripped off a dead French soldier, and others displaying their war prizes: helmets, flak jackets, a walkie talkie, assault rifles and the wristwatch of one of the slain soldiers.

The Afghanis knew exactly the message they wanted to send through Paris Match …warned their leader , “If the French leave, all will be fine…if they stay here, we’ll kill them…all of them.”

And they could not have hoped for more impact than their brazen display has had back in France. Even before the magazine came out where many have been shocked at the military loss, the worst in a single confrontation in 25 years. But the shock turned to outrage at the photos and interview.

One French soldier based in Afghanistan told a radio reporter, “It’s like the Taliban came and pissed on their coffins.”

Others here reacted as people did in the U.S. back in 1993, when video was shown of American soldiers’ bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after the “Blackhawk down” incident. Said the French defense minister, “The Taliban have understood that pubic opinion is the Achilles heel of the international community.”

He may be right. Even before Paris Match came out polls showed only 36 per cent of the French thought the government should stay the course in Afghanistan. Now support for French involvement will surely take another hit.

But journalists get into trouble when they start trying to make public policy. Until the French soldiers were back in coffins there never was a serious public debate here about why French troops are engaged in Afghanistan…that is happening now.

Talking to the enemy never makes a journalist very popular, but taking time to talk to the public about the reasons troops have been put in harms way is not a very popular– or easy–thing to do either. Paris Match must have calculated the stir it would cause when it dispatched the reporting team. But the Match reporter’s retort is telling. “No one talks about propaganda,” he said, “when we go off embedded with NATO troops.”

See more on Paris Match's Web site