Award-winning Danish Afghan journalist and filmmaker Nagieb Khaja’s most recent documentary, Winning Heart and Minds, is an investigation into what went wrong in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In the film, Khaja travels to Musa Qala, the capital of the southern Helmand province. Danish and British troops had been deployed to Musa Qala in 2006 to defend their allies, the local police, against Taliban insurgents.
While urban areas benefited from U.S. occupation during the war, “Western forces allied themselves with forces that in rural Afghanistan were considered worse than the Taliban,” says Khaja. “The police forces and the warlords that were fighting side by side with American, Danish and British forces, they were drug cartels, they were ruthless criminals, they were rapists.”
