This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, I'm Samira Shackle and I'm the author of how Western travel influences got tangled up in Pakistan's politics, which was published by The Guardian Long Read in 2020.

So I first came across the story. I was travelling back and forth to Pakistan a lot, working on a book, and I noticed that everyone

I spoke to practically from my older relatives who lived there down to younger friends

working in the media. We're all talking about this trend of Western influences, predominantly

young white women, coming to Pakistan and doing this very

sort of promotional tourism content. It was quite sort of jarring to the sorts of things that I was

covering, you know, terrorism, recovery from years and years of urban violence. And I was very

intrigued at what this was about and started paying closer attention to it.

I'd noticed that some people were really happy about this, particularly the older relatives I mentioned,

really happy to see a positive view of Pakistan being portrayed to the world as they saw it,

whereas some other people I knew, the more media savvy maybe were a bit more skeptical

about the types of narratives that were being pushed and the types of access to very restricted areas that these women appeared to have.

When I started looking at some of this content, I myself was really surprised that there were these videos

showing the admittedly incredibly beautiful landscapes in areas like Balochistan

where I, as a journalist and as a person of Pakistani heritage, who spends a lot of time in the country,

had never been able to visit because it's so heavily restricted.

And that really piqued my interest about what exactly was going on here.

So when I wrote this article, Pakistan was really trying to open up to tourism and there was

a big governmental push to try and promote the country as a tourist destination, pull people in. That was

obviously before the pandemic, slightly paid to that. But I think there's been a lot of upheaval in Pakistan in recent years,

...