Klaus Carsten Pedersen, director, The Foreign-political Association, wrote in a letter to the editor the 11th of June 2010 to WeekendAvisen, a Danish newspaper:

"You often hear that Danish soldiers do their work well. Here I'd like to pass on some formidable credentials:

The other day in Helsinki, I spoke to Stefan Foss, who's a senior scientist the Finnish Foreign Ministry's strategic planning and research unit and adjunct professor at the FDF's university. He related the story about a meeting last year with an American professor, Dr Amin Tarzi, former officer in the Marine Corps and the now the director of middle eastern studies at the USMC university.

At the meeting, someone had asked who were the best soldiers in Afghanistan, and Dr Tarzi had said, "you might not believe it; but it's the Danes!"

Today, Forss sent me his post in Hufvudstadsbladet from the 28th of August 2009 about Denmark's strong effort in Afghanistan, where he quotes from his meeting with Dr Tarzi:

The professor was full of admiration for the Danes. They have the most effective, best trained and best equipped soldiers in Afghanistan. They voluntarily take on the hardest assignments. They solve them with exquisite professionalism and unique resilience, and they never complain. The rest of us might have looked a little distrustful, since he found it necessary to underline the message with a "believe me, I know what I'm talking about." His own training in the Marine Corps had certainly been strenuous, and on top of that he'd seen and experiences a fair deal in the field.

There were no Danes at the meeting, so this evaluation from a hardened American Marine Officer and Afghanistan-expert wasn't a thing of courtesy.

It was uttered in an international group of defense politics experts and mediated to me (and the readers of Hufvudstadsbladet) by Stefan Forss and can be assumed to have a high degree of reliability."