The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  It impressed the celebrated German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who told a radio interviewer the other day that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art ever.” I’m reminded of the late Sir Thomas Beecham when asked if he’d ever played any Stockhausen: “No,” he said. “But I once stepped in some.” Last week, Stockhausen stepped in his own.

  With Oklahoma City I remember the smell of the bodies. At Ground Zero’s burial mound the devastation is so total that there are no bodies to smell. Thousands of people lie under there, all but atomized by their killers and all but forgotten by the appeasing left. At San Francisco’s service of remembrance for its dead this week, Amos Brown, representing the city’s Board of Supervisors, used the occasion to launch into an examination of the “root causes” of the regrettable incident. “America, what did you do,” he wailed, “in Africa, where bombs are still blasting? America, what did you do in the global warming conference when you did not embrace the smaller nations? America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn’t show up?” The Bay Area lefties roared their approval.

  Paul Holm, the partner of Mark Bingham, a gay six-foot, five-inch rugby jock who died on Flight 93, felt differently. He walked up to Senator Dianne Feinstein and said sadly, “This was supposed to be a memorial service.” Then he quit the stage. Mark Bingham died heroically, and all the City of San Francisco can do is denigrate the cause and the nation for which he gave his life.

  The totalitarian left has finally found its perfect soul mate. With Communism, the excuse was always that, whatever the practical difficulties on the ground, it retained its theoretical idealism. But the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are perfectly upfront: they’re openly racist; they’d strip Dianne Feinstein of her senatorship and make her a mere chattel; they’d execute Paul Holm for being gay, by building a wall and then crushing him under it. True, I don’t know their position on global warming, but it doesn’t seem to be a priority.

  A few blocks north of Ground Zero, I dined with some friends. “This is the biggest event in my life,” said one. “Bigger than the death of Kennedy.” Even the Pearl Harbor comparison doesn’t seem quite right. I wonder if we aren’t revisiting August 1914, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. It seemed a simple war: the British Tommies marching off were told it would all be over by Christmas, as today Slate’s Mickey Kaus is confident the World Trade Center will be off the front pages by Thanksgiving. By the time the Great War was really over, four of the world’s great powers lay shattered—the German, Austrian, Russian, and Turkish Empires, all gone and so easily, though who would have predicted it in that last Edwardian summer? We don’t know what this latest thread of history will unravel. But we should at least understand the stakes.

  THE BRUTAL AFGHAN WINTER

  The National Post, January 7, 2002

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO the “brutal Afghan winter”? It was “fast approaching” back in late September, and apparently it’s still “fast approaching” today. “Winter is fast, fast approaching,” reported ABC’s Nightline on September 26.

  Two weeks on, New York’s Daily News announced that, “realistically, U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options.”

  Two or three weeks passed and the brutal Afghan winter’s relentless approach showed no sign of letting up. “A clock is ticking,” declared The Oregonian on October 24. “The harsh Afghan winter is approaching.”

  The clock ticked on. On November 8 NBC’s Tom Brokaw alerted viewers to the perils posed by “a rapidly approaching winter.” “They expect the conditions to deteriorate rapidly as the brutal winter soon sets in,” wrote Newsday’s Deborah Barfield on November 11, updating her earlier sighting of “the typically brutal winter approaching” a month earlier on October 9.

  Another month ticked on, and the brutal winter carried on brutally approaching. “Winter is approaching fast,” said Thomas McDermott, Unicef’s Regional Director, on December 9. “With winter fast approaching, women wait in line for blankets,” The Los Angeles Times confirmed, after the clock had ticked leisurely on a couple more days.

  And not just any old approaching winter, but the “brutal Afghan winter,” according to ABC, NBC, National Public Radio, The Boston Globe, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, etc. “Former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy is in Pakistan”—in case you were wondering—“to find out how to speed up aid deliveries before the brutal Afghan winter sets in,” reported the BBC in November. “The temperature can drop to 50 below, so cold that eyelids crust and saliva turns to sludge in the mouth,” said Tom Ifield of Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

  Yesterday, it was 55 and clear in Kandahar and Herat. Ghurian checked in at 55, with 62 predicted for tomorrow. Fifty-seven and sunny in Bost and Laskar, with 64 expected on Thursday. In Kabul, it was 55, though with the windchill factored in it was only—let me see now—54.

  Meanwhile, in Toronto it’s 28, New York 38. Overseas? Belfast and Glasgow report 46, London 44, Birmingham and Manchester 42. If those Afghan refugees clogging up the French end of the Channel Tunnel ever make it through to Dover, they face a gruelling battle for survival against the horrors of the brutal British winter.

  Just under four months ago, when the doom-mongers first started alerting us to the “fast approaching” “brutal Afghan winter,” it was 70 degrees and I was sitting here in shorts and T-shirt. Today, in my corner of Quebec, the daytime high is 21, the predicted overnight low is 5 degrees, and tomorrow we’ll be lucky to hit 14. For Saturday, they’re predicting 3 degrees. Three Fahrenheit is, as the metrically inclined would say, minus 16 Celsius. So you’ll understand my amusement at the Sunday Telegraph headline of October 21: “British Unit Prepares to Defy Extremes of the Afghan Winter / Crack Troops Will Have to Work in Temperatures as Low as -20C.”

  Big deal. Crack columnist has to work in temperatures as low as -16C. And for my neck of the woods, this is a very mild winter.

  Now pedants will point out that there are one or two brisk parts of the Hindu Kush. On top of Mount Sikaram, at 15,620 feet the highest elevation in Afghanistan’s White Mountains, it would no doubt freeze the proverbial knackers off a brass monkey. Similarly, on top of Mount Washington, highest elevation in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, it’s -15 with the wind chill, while down in the state capital of Concord it’s a balmy 36. That’s why no one except a couple of meteorologist types lives on top of Mount Washington, but thousands do down in Concord. Amazingly, despite the vast cultural differences, the same patterns of population dispersal prevail in Afghanistan. Up on Mount Sikaram, a convenient eight-day donkey-ride to the nearest 7-Eleven, the only guys interested in buying a ski condo are Osama and Mullah Omar. Al-Qaeda operatives aside, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan population live in towns currently enjoying temperatures most Canadians won’t see for another three or four months.

  So where did this “brutal Afghan winter” business come from? It came, pre-eminently, from spokespersons for the relief agencies. There are some special-interest groups—the National Rifle Association, Right to Life—whose press releases get dismissed by the media as propaganda, and others—environmental groups, for example—whose every claim is taken at face value. Into this last happy category fall the “humanitarian lobby.” Throughout the rhetorically brutal autumn, they bombarded us:

  Predicting even more desperate times for millions of Afghans, international relief groups and federal humanitarian aid officials are scrambling to get food and medical supplies into a country they say is on the verge of famine. . . . They expect the conditions to deteriorate rapidly as the brutal winter sets in.

  Gosh.

  The UN Children’s Fund estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger within weeks if vital aid did not reach them.

  Oh, my.

  The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating rapidly, inter
national aid agencies say, and they are predicting the worst humanitarian crisis ever.

  The aid agencies, you’ll recall, campaigned aggressively for a “bombing pause” during Ramadan. This would have enabled them to truck some food convoys through the mountains from Pakistan. These routes get snowbound and become impassable, and that’s really the only salient fact about the “brutal Afghan winter.”

  Why are the roads to Pakistan more important than the roads to Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan? Because Pakistan, being Afghanistan’s most westernized neighbor, is where the western aid agencies are based. These are the fellows like my old chum from The Independent in London, Alex Renton. Alex, the son of former Tory minister Lord Renton, is now an Oxfam big shot in the region. A lot of the other humanitarian coves running around out there are also English boarding-school boys, chaps with names like Rupert and Sebastian on a benign version of the journey of self-discovery that that Taliban guy from Marin County went on. I’m sure they’re all very well-intentioned, but when they start shrieking about the fast approaching brutal Afghan winter and the imminent deaths of millions, what they’re mainly doing is protesting that the American military action is disrupting their act.

  Here’s how you feed Afghanistan: You can get Rupert and Sebastian to load up the trucks in Peshawar and drive through to Kabul, where what isn’t stolen by the Taliban can be distributed to the people. Or you can bomb the Taliban, drive them from office, put a non-deranged administration in place, re-open the year-round road-and-rail bridge to Uzbekistan, speed up construction on a second Uzbek bridge, and get air convoys to cover the places roads can’t reach. In the seven weeks since the fall of Kabul, all this has happened. The millions who are supposed to be dying aren’t. The hundred thousand child corpses are alive and kicking. The UN says all the supplies it needs to feed Afghanistan are now getting through.

  Here’s what would have happened had the aid agencies got their way and pressured the U.S. into a bombing pause: many more Afghans would have starved to death, the Taliban would have been secured in power at least for another few months and perhaps indefinitely, but Rupert and Sebastian would have enjoyed the stage-heroic frisson of bouncing along in the truck to Jalalabad. That seems a high price for the Afghan people to pay. One expects a certain amount of reflexive anti-Americanism from these “humanitarian” types, but in the brutal Afghan fall they went too far: they ought at least to be big enough to admit they were wrong and be grateful the Pentagon ignored their bleatings.

  Instead, they seem a little touchy about the fact that among the first food supplies to get through was a fresh supply of egg on their faces. When Axworthy and other self-proclaimed “humanitarians” start droning on next month about starving children in Iraq, always remember the lesson of Afghanistan: a bombing pause is not as “humanitarian” as a bomb. I would urge readers to be highly selective about supporting aid agencies who operate under tyrannies. Better yet, go see for yourself: after all, for Canadians, there’s no better time than now to spend a sultry two weeks in Kabul enjoying the charms of the brutal Afghan winter.

  By the spring of 2014, U.S. troops had been in Afghanistan for thirteen “brutal Afghan winters.” Yet after the first, we never heard the phrase ever again. The problem in Afghanistan was never the weather.

  THE BRUTAL CUBAN WINTER

  The Spectator, January 26, 2002

  NOT FAR FROM ME, in the small Coos County, New Hampshire, town of Stark, is an old German POW camp. Camp Stark was basically a logging camp with barbed wire. With so many of its men in uniform overseas, the Brown Paper Company agreed to take German prisoners in order to keep its forestry operations going. The detainees arrived in the depths of a White Mountains winter and were not impressed by the huts. There were wire mesh screens on the insides of the windows, so that even when you opened them up you couldn’t stick your hand out. The Germans pointed out that this was in contravention of the internationally agreed rules on prisoner accommodation, and insisted that the screens be removed immediately.

  The camp guards looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Sure, if that’s what you want.” The deep winter snows melted, and eventually it was safe to open the windows. A week later, Black Fly Season arrived—the black fly isn’t New Hampshire’s state animal but it ought to be—and thousands of the little fellers swarmed in through those big inviting apertures to chow down on all that good Aryan blood. There was a reason for the screens.

  I mention this to make two points: (1) there are things that are unforeseen by international conventions, and (2) let’s talk about the weather. The British, if you’ll forgive a gratuitous racist generalization, seem to be remarkably obtuse about matters meteorological. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of living in a country where it’s 54 and overcast all summer and 53 and overcast all winter, and the only divergence from that temperate constancy was missed entirely by your famous Mr. Fish.1 But at least in the old days Britons were ignorant but fearless: you were the mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun. Now, after four months of cowering in fear at the impending arrival of the entirely mythical “brutal Afghan winter”—currently 55 and sunny in Kandahar—Fleet Street’s media doom-mongers have moved seamlessly on to the horrors of the brutal Cuban winter: oh my God, how will these poor al-Qaeda boys—you know, the ones who could supposedly hole up in the Khyber Pass eating scorpions all winter making a fool of those Yank ignoramuses—how will these fearsome warriors survive the Caribbean nights and the hordes of malaria-infested mosquitoes?

  And this time it’s not just the usual America haters at The Guardian and the BBC but the likes of Alice Thomson, Stephen Glover, Alasdair Palmer, Matthew Parris, my most esteemed Telegraph and Speccie colleagues: “They are kept in cramped outdoor cages, open to the elements and the attentions of possibly malarial mosquitoes,” notes Mr. Glover. “I mind the shark cages, with their concrete floors open to the elements and the 24-hour halogen flood lights, left near mosquito-infested swamps, so the prisoners can catch malaria when some already have tuberculosis,” frets Miss Thomson.

  I don’t know whether Alice or Stephen has ever been to Disney World. Doesn’t sound quite their bag, but you never know. Disney World is in the middle of a swamp, and, if you use the employees’ exit and turn right rather than left and then on to the dirt track and into the swampy groves you’ll find within minutes the windscreen’s full of squished, bloody bugs. Yet when you’re on the other side of the fence waiting in the hot sun for two hours to go on a sixty-second ride, there are, amazingly, no bugs. Find me a mosquito in Disney World and I’ll guarantee you it’s an animatronic attraction. A local girl up here ran off to Florida and hooked up with some guy who worked for the Mouse. At their Disney wedding, he told me that, among his responsibilities, he was part of the crew who bombed the perimeter at the crack of dawn each day with industrial-strength bug spray. The same procedure is being carried out at Guantanamo: the camp is sprayed with mosquito repellent.

  As for malaria, that seems to have been conjured entirely out of Miss Thomson’s head. There is no malaria in Cuba. None. Risk of contracting malaria: Zero percent. And before you Fidel groupies start putting that down to the wonders of the Cuban health system, do you know who eliminated malaria from the island? The United States Army, after the Spanish-American War and by draining swamps and introducing bed netting and (here they come again) window screens.

  So there’s no malaria, and a tiny risk of mosquitoes. As for the “cramped outdoor cages,” they are, in fact, the factory version of Bloody Mary’s exotic hut on the tropic isle of Bali Hai in the current West End production of South Pacific. They’ve got roofs, with eight-foot ceilings—not exactly a Kensington drawing room, but hardly “cramped.” As for those concrete floors Alice disdains, all I can say is that a few years back I jacked up my old barn and poured a concrete foundation, and there are truly few more pleasurable sensations on a hot summer’s day than putting one’s bare feet on cold, shaded concrete. So these “shark ca
ges” have sloped roofs and cool floors. Granted, they have no walls. If they did, they’d be sweatboxes that would likely kill you—unless, of course, you installed air-conditioning, which, as we know, you British types find frightfully vulgar.

  Nonetheless, according to an ITN report carried on PBS over here, these poor prisoners will have to “endure the searing heat.” Actually, these beach huts are perfectly designed for one of the most agreeable climates on earth—a daytime high in the mid-eighties and an overnight low in the low seventies, with a wafting breeze caressing one’s cheek. My advice to Fleet Street is to steer clear of weather for the rest of the war. The merest nudge of the thermostat is enough to send excitable reporters rocketing from one extreme to the other, like the old cartoon of the shower faucet with only the tiniest calibration between “Scalding” and “Freezing.” Kabul in the sixties is the “brutal winter,” Cuba in the low seventies is the “searing heat.”

  So take it from me, Don Rumsfeld’s Club Fed huts are cool in the day and balmy at night. They’re a lot more comfortable than the windowless “concrete coffins” of Belmarsh in which your terrorist suspects are banged up twenty-two hours a day. True, it’s a shame they have to have wraparound wire mesh to spoil the view, and there’s no banana daiquiris from room service, but the idea is (in case you’ve forgotten) that they’re meant to be prisoners. And, unlike the three-to-a-cell arrangements in, say, Barlinnie, the Talibannies have a room of their own, so they won’t be taking it up the keister from Butch every night. They get three square meals a day, thrice-daily opportunities for showers, calls to prayer, copies of the Koran, a prayer mat—all part of a regime The Mirror calls “a sick attempt to appeal to the worst redneck prejudices.”