Tonight’s guest Janus Metz, who with his cinematographer Lars Skree, spent six months embedded with a Danish infantry company at Armadillo, a forward operating base in Afghanistan’s Helmand province –part of the NATO-led ISAF (International Security Assistance Force).

The result is Armadillo, winner of the Cannes International Critics Week, an unselfconscious look at war and those who have to wage it; because as the men are told at the film’s beginning, their government has determined a national policy and it is the duty of soldiers to implement it.

The Afghanistan Study Group report is out, and the fight is on. A number of critiques have been leveled at the report, one of the most influential being Joshua Foust’s over at Registan.net, chunks of which are percolating upward into larger outlets. Foust is a smart guy with whom I regularly debate, but there’s a particularly offensive landmine hiding at the end of Foust’s post that I want to highlight, where Foust states that the anti-war movement “relies on assumption and beliefs to shape reality”.