ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the debate about Danish responsibilities after the withdrawal of Danish combat forces in 2011 to local interpreters in the service of Danish armed forces in Helmand, Afghanistan. It describes how moral duties and political responsibilities to Afghan interpreters are negotiated, eschewed and in the end reluctantly accepted by the Danish state. The chapter discusses the unbearable lightness facing a small state in coalition warfare, where political risks and responsibilities can be bought and sold, embraced and imposed, showing the malleability of the boundaries of state’s extra-territorial duty of care claimed by different kinds of communities with different political powers and identities. Different ways of minimizing or appropriating risk – to political futures, to own troops and civilian populations, to the legitimacy of the war and to moral, even legal, responsibilities – together form a kind of political economy of risk in war.
