Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Washington's Pakistan Meltdown.

In 1948, George Orwell published his classic dystopian novel 1984, flipping the numbers in the publication year to speed us into a future that is now, of course, 18 years in our past. In that book, he imagined a three superpower world of regularly shifting alliances in which war was a constant, but its specific nature eternally forgotten. As he wrote, "To trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one." Of course, predicting the future is a perilous thing. Instead of three squabbling superpowers ruling the globe, we have one, and yet there are some eerie real world parallels to Orwell's fiction. By 1984, for instance, the US and the Saudis were funneling huge sums of money and vast quantities of weaponry through Pakistan's intelligence outfit, the Inter Services Intelligence directorat, to support the most fundamentalist and extreme of the Afghan mujahedeen, who were then fighting that other superpower, the Soviet Union, in their country. These included Gulbuddin Hekmatar and, as Anand Gopal has pointed out at TomDispatch, Jalaluddin Haqqani, who received millions of dollars, anti aircraft missiles, and even tanks. He was, at the time, so beloved by Washington officials that former congressman Charlie Wilson once called him 'goodness personified.'Hekmatyar and Haqqani were among those President Ronald Reagan, shades of Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" dubbed "freedom fighters." Jump forward nearly two decades, and the Haqqani network is perhaps Washington's greatest bugaboo in the present Afghan War, a group regularly denounced by the Obama administration for its attacks on US troops, while Hekmatyar and his group Hizb-i-Islami, like the Haqqani's, are allied with the Taliban.