The best film I have seen about the West’s 20-year debacle in Afghanistan is A War, which showed the tensions and moral complexities facing soldiers in such a struggle.

It is part war movie and part courtroom drama, opening with scenes of a patrol suffering a landmine blast before wrestling with issues of fidelity, grief, guilt and truth as an officer faces trial for ordering a lethal air strike.

Tobias Lindholm, the director, said he made it to “provoke a conversation” about how Danes fought alongside the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan, defining his generation.

It is exactly a decade since that Oscar-nominated film about the wounds of war was released in the UK. It served as a stark reminder about the human cost of Danish support for Washington in those foolish conflicts. This small Scandinavian nation – having rushed again to back the United States after the 9/11 terrorist atrocities – suffered the heaviest per capita losses of any Nato ally in Afghanistan.

Yet less than five years after the end of that doomed mission to defeat the Taliban, this same country, that paid such a heavy price in support of Washington, now faces a barrage of belligerent threats from the White House about an assault on its own terrain.

As ever with Donald Trump, it is hard to work out what is serious amid all the bile and bulls**t. Yet it does seem the 47th US President is serious in his

© iNews