The Persistent Past and Imponderable Future 879lords and crime leaders. Increasingly insurgents bor-
rowed techniques that had proven effective in Iraq,
especially suicide bombers and roadside bombs.
Afghanistan was slipping into chaos.
The election scheduled for the fall of 2009 made
matters worse. The first round was marred by voting
fraud, which UN observers confirmed. During the
final campaign the chief opposition candidate with-
drew, charging Karzai’s government with rigging the
outcome. Karzai “won” by default. Enemies of
Karzai’s regime exploited the controversy.
By late 2009 Obama, who had opposed the
“surge” in Iraq, sent another 30,000 troops to
Afghanistan. American forces increasingly relied on
drones—unmanned planes—to drop guided bombs
on suspected enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When the bombs missed the targets and killed civil-
ians, riots ensued and UN casualties mounted.
For some time, General Stanley McChrystal,
commander of the United Nations troops, had
chafed at rules of engagement designed to limit civil-
ian casualties. Obama’s administration, McChrystal’s
aides complained to reporters for Rolling Stone, was
weak and ineffective. The article appeared in June
2010, the month with the heaviest losses of the war.
Obama sacked McChrystal for insubordination,
replacing him with David Petraeus, architect of the
“surge” in Iraq. “We have arrived at a critical
point,” Petraeus declared on July 4, 2010. “We are
in this to win.”
A month later secret government documents,
leaked to the press, revealed that while Pakistan had
pledged to support the war on terror, its intelligence
service helped the Taliban plan attacks on American
soldiers. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan persisted
in blowing up crowded marketplaces, mosques, and
government offices. Prospects for victory in the
region remained bleak; no one could even imagine
what it would look like.
The Persistent Past and Imponderable Future
But the previous eighteen years had shown that
human events rarely unfold in predictable ways. The
9/11 terrorist attack, the subsequent wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the near-collapse of the economy
in 2008–2009, Hurricane Katrina, and the massive
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico all shocked the
American people. And the surprises were not all
bad. No one in 1992 could have predicted that the
tidal wave of crime would recede the following
decade. For that matter, the relative absence of
racial references during the 2008 campaign that
resulted in the election of the nation’s first African
American president would have been unimaginable
decades earlier.
But if the past does not enable us to predict the
future, what do we ever “learn” from history?
Consider an analogy with seismology, the study of
earthquakes. Seismologists cannot predict exactly
when and where any earthquake will strike, but their
study of the underlying forces—the shift and colli-
sion of tectonic plates—helps explain the phenome-
non. Historians similarly cannot predict the future
course of human events. But the study of history can
provide insights on the underlying forces that gener-
ate historical change. No one predicted, for example,
that a particular deep-sea oil well would explode and
release millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of
Mexico in the summer of 2010; but the American
nation’s voracious thirst for oil—a result of many
developments during the previous century—led to
the demand for the exploitation of deep-water oil
resources. Similarly, in the first decades of the
twenty-first century Americans fought and died in
Iraq and Afghanistan because of a wide variety of his-
torical forces, ranging from a commitment to demo-
cratic values and human rights to a demand for cheap
Middle Eastern oil. History does not predict the
future, which emerges through the convergence of
infinite actions and reactions. But history can help
reveal the various forces that are heaving beneath the
surface of time.
This book was conceived as a reminder that the
past is never truly past. It radiates through time. It
touches our lives, just as what we do today will influ-
ence the future. By connecting to the past, we better
understand ourselves and perhaps gain an inkling of
what will become of us.
Just about everything that happens in one part of
the modern world is in some way related to every-
thing else that is going on. Far too many things are
happening for anyone to sort out which is going to
have what effect on tomorrow’s events, let alone
those that occur a year from now. “Then” (whether
tomorrow or next year) historians will be able to
study those particular events and puzzle out their
chief causes—but not “now.”
Yet “now” is where we happen to be, and thus
this book, so full of events and their causes and
results, must end inconclusively. No one knows what
will happen next. But not knowing what will happen
is one reason why life is so interesting.