Danes Buck Broader Antiwar Trend

In the newspaper article a chart detailing ratios of soldier deaths as % to soldiers sent shows Denmark's ratio as 4.1: 31 deaths, 750 troops. Also accompanying the article was a picture of Denmark's Crown Princess Mary with troops in November.

Denmark's forces in Afghanistan—along with Britain, the Netherlands, Estonia and Canada—have formed a rump of non-U.S. allies essential to the U.S.-led war effort that do battle in Helmand province and other Afghanistan hot spots, contributing to high casualty rates for these countries' contingents.

Curious sentence structure.

* EUROPE NEWS
* FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Danes Buck Broader Antiwar Trend
As Afghan operation's popularity wanes elsewhere, Danes support effort amid high casualties

By ALISTAIR MACDONALD

Among allied forces fighting in Afghanistan, few countries have deployed a bigger share of their armed forces than Denmark, and fewer still have taken higher levels of casualties. But the small Scandinavian country is emerging as an unlikely example of how to maintain public support for the war.

The popularity of the international campaign in Afghanistan has fallen across Europe and in the U.S. On Tuesday, the Dutch government set a June 9 date for general elections, nearly one year ahead of schedule. The move followed the unraveling of the Netherlands' coalition government last weekend after it failed win support to extend the mandate of the nation's 1,600 troops in Afghanistan, presaging a likely withdrawal this year.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Tuesday that the NATO military alliance is facing "very serious, long-term, systemic problems" sparked by European nations' unwillingness to adequately fund their militaries.

"I believe we have reached an inflection point, where much of the continent has gone too far in the other direction," Mr. Gates told an audience at Washington's National Defense University.

Amid this shift, the Danes have largely maintained public support for the effort, selling the mission as a humanitarian effort rather than simply protection against a terrorist threat, and building consensus among political parties. They have reaped the benefits of a largely supportive media and the country has, to some degree, rediscovered its pride in an active military.

"The key to sustaining public support is an elite consensus that includes politicians in government and opposition as well as key opinion leaders: influential intellectuals, academics and columnists," says Peter Viggo Jakobsen, a security expert at the University of Copenhagen.

Denmark has paid a high price in Afghanistan. Its 750 troops represent almost 5% of its entire military, including reserves—among the highest in Afghanistan. Of the total, 31 Danish troops have died there, an allied casualty rate behind only Canada and Estonia, which has just 150 soldiers fighting.

Yet throughout a difficult 2009, polls consistently showed around half of Danes surveyed by TNS Gallup believed Danish troops should be in Afghanistan; only one-third said they didn't. In NATO nations such as the U.K., Germany and Netherlands, meanwhile, polls reveal over half wanting troops back home.

"If you can't win the public opinion, you have lost the war," Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade said in a recent interview.

Mr. Gade, who has led Danish efforts to maintain public support, announced Monday he is stepping down. Mr. Gade's ministry has been accused of leaking news of the deployment of Danish special forces to Iraq and he said this was attracting attention away from Afghanistan.

Denmark's forces in Afghanistan—along with Britain, the Netherlands, Estonia and Canada—have formed a rump of non-U.S. allies essential to the U.S.-led war effort that do battle in Helmand province and other Afghanistan hot spots, contributing to high casualty rates for these countries' contingents.

Now some of those nations are growing weary of the effort. The Netherlands and Canada have set pullout dates, and some foreign armies remain reluctant to fight in restive regions like Helmand. British politicians face hostile media that chronicle the return of every dead soldier's coffin.

Mr. Gade, a former Danish army officer, said a key to winning the public was giving reporters deep access to soldiers, who were allowed to talk.

When troops say, " 'We did a job and we did it good, and it is worth doing,' then it is very hard indeed for a lot of people to oppose, because those are the men and women who risk their lives," he said.

That doesn't mean the public doesn't struggle with the country's involvement. Frank Erik Carlsen says that on "down days," he questions why Denmark is in Afghanistan, where his brother Henrik lost his life to a roadside bomb in August 2009. Doubts pass, he says, when he thinks of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan and of Denmark's efforts to build wells and schools there.

"It is too easy to stay at home, and Denmark is doing its part," he said. Next month, Mr. Carlsen begins training for his own deployment to Afghanistan.

Denmark only recently returned to military action following a long stretch of neutrality that followed its 1864 defeat to Prussia, in modern-day Germany. With the end of the Cold War, Danish forces, long tasked with home defense, had little to do.

A stint in NATO's military intervention in Kosovo saw a Danish tank force rout a Serbian attack in 1994. Suddenly Danish politicians found it advantageous for the military to punch above its weight internationally and become a point of national pride, Dr. Jakobsen says.

—Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.

Danes Study Immigrants After Cartoonist Attack

The housing project near central Copenhagen where the man accused of trying to kill a Danish cartoonist lived.

January 7, 2010

Danes Study Immigrants After Cartoonist Attack

By SARAH LYALL - NY Times

COPENHAGEN  As part of the prolonged national headache caused by a Danish newspaper's decision to publish 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, last weekend's attack on one of the cartoonists responsible had a certain awful inevitability about it.

Once again, the motivation was fury, still fresh after all this time, over the dissemination of the cartoons. And once again, the circumstances ? in this case, the news that the person accused of the attack was a Muslim immigrant suspected of having links to terrorists ? has led Danes into an uneasy examination of their relationship to their Muslim population.

In a country that already has one of the strictest immigration policies in Western Europe, the attack has also spurred politicians from across the political spectrum to demand ever more stringent rules about who should be allowed to live here.

?I?m sorry to say, but it?s d?j? vu ? every time we experience an episode, then in 10 minutes we have them saying we have to have a new law,? said Naser Khader, a member of Parliament and the spokesman on foreign affairs and immigration for the Conservative People?s Party. He was speaking of the increasingly powerful Danish People?s Party, whose votes the government relies on to pass legislation and whose populist, anti-immigrant rhetoric has informed and inflamed debate in recent years.

After the attack, the People?s Party leader, Pia Kjaersgaard, said that it should be easier to deport Danes linked to terrorists. ?It must be crystal clear to everyone in this country that we cannot accept having Islamists who associate with terror being more or less tolerated in this country,? she said.

Mr. Khader is just as hostile toward Islamists as anyone in Danish politics; he recently proposed banning burqas. But he said the latest comments had gone too far. ?You have to be responsible when such incidents happen, and not let emotions take over,? he said.

New details about the suspect in the attack on the cartoonist, 74-year-old Kurt Westergaard, have increased complaints that the security service has been lax in monitoring people suspected of being terrorist sympathizers.

The attack took place late last Friday when Mr. Westergaard was threatened in his townhouse in Aarhus, Denmark?s second largest city, by a man carrying a knife and an ax. Mr. Westergaard has been a focus of Muslim ire since drawing perhaps the most provocative of the 12 cartoons, showing Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb. He fled into a locked safe room and summoned the police with a panic button.

The suspected assailant, 28-year-old Muhudiin Mohamed Geele, was charged with two counts of attempted homicide, on Mr. Westergaard and on a police officer, and has pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Geele arrived in Denmark in 1995, a refugee from the civil war in Somalia, the authorities said, and the next year was granted indefinite leave to remain. He lived in the city of Aalborg and, as a boy, was a role model for others in a youth club there, said Nuuradiin Hussein, who worked at the club.

?He was one of my favorite boys at the club,? said Mr. Hussein, who is now a social worker. ?Most of the boys his age wanted to talk about girls and football, but he wanted to talk about the future and about getting an education.?

Mr. Geele married and had three children, and at some point, according to the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, known as PET, developed ties to the Shabab, a Somali terrorism organization, and to Al Qaeda in East Africa.

He also began making frequent trips abroad. Last summer, he was detained by the authorities in Nairobi, Kenya. The proximate cause was that he had lost his passport, but intelligence officials said he also was believed to have connections to suspects in a plot to blow up several buildings, including a hotel where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was staying.

Nicholas Kamwende, head of Kenya?s antiterrorism police, said that the Kenyan authorities verbally shared ?intelligence information? about him with the Danish Embassy.

?We told them, ?He is a dangerous man,? but their reaction was negative,? Mr. Kamwende said in an interview.

In an interview with the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Mr. Geele?s now ex-wife said that PET had tried to recruit him in 2006.

?The police wanted him as an informant,? she told the newspaper, ?and he became sad and more and more introverted. The police thought that he had participated in combat actions in Somalia against Ethiopian forces, and that he traveled back and forth to take part in war. But he had only been in Somalia in 2005 to visit the family.?

Officials declined to say whether the agency had indeed made overtures to Mr. Geele, but said that it was normal for PET to conduct ?interviews with individuals that may be of interest to the service.? And Jakob Scharf, the director general, said that there had been no evidence that might have been ?deemed sufficient grounds for arresting, prosecuting or expelling? him, despite his suspected terrorism links.

More recently, Mr. Geele had been living in an apartment in a down-at-heel housing project of concrete buildings typical of an immigrant neighborhood, about seven miles from central Copenhagen.

Residents said that Mr. Geele had been renting a room in an apartment owned by an Egyptian taxi driver and that he was known for his religious convictions ? one neighbor said he had been asked several times to turn down music and recordings of the Koran ? and also for being, at least at first, aloof and unfriendly.

After the arrest, the police spent more than eight hours searching the apartment, neighbors said.

What the attack on Mr. Westergaard shows perhaps more than anything is how the publication of the cartoons has irrevocably changed Denmark?s place in world affairs. The damage was compounded in 2008, when in response to a separate plot to kill Mr. Westergaard, all of Denmark?s major newspapers reprinted the cartoons.

It was then that Osama bin Laden denounced the cartoons as part of ?a crusade? against Islam, and other Qaeda officials called on Muslims to make Denmark a target of their fury. That June, a suicide bomber in Islamabad, Pakistan, killed eight people at the Danish Embassy.

In the latest manifestation of Denmark?s troubles, the Sudanese government on Tuesday publicly denounced ?The Revenge,? a movie about the Sudanese war by the Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier. The government compared the film ? which has not yet been screened, and which is due to be released this summer ? to the cartoons.

Each new incident forces the more extreme circles of both the anti-immigrant and Islamist groups to become more deeply entrenched in their positions, said Ole Waever, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen. Meanwhile, as the rhetoric grows ever more strident, he said, Denmark?s sense of itself is being sorely tested.

?There?s a strange dialectic in the reaction,? Mr. Waever said in an interview. ?There is an identity crisis where we can no longer recognize ourselves. This view of ourselves as a liberal, relaxed society no longer fits the reality.?

Walter Gibbs contributed reporting from Oslo, Johan Spanner from Copenhagen, and Reuben Kyama from Nairobi, Kenya.