White travel influencers, who often receive extraordinary privileges such as access to restricted areas and meetings with top officials, have been useful to a government trying to sell a new vision of the country – and the debate about their role has divided Pakistan. “The military wants to control the discourse,” I was told by Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US. “They want to shut down all dissenting voices.” To Haqqani, the influencers were part of the “discourse industry” that the government had promoted.
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Big-name travel influencers, such as the Food Ranger (4.66 million YouTube subscribers) and Drew Binsky (2.01 million YouTube subscribers) were also joining the scramble. One of Binsky’s videos, which celebrated the country’s hospitality culture, showed him trying to pay for things at market stalls and in restaurants and being rebuffed. The title of the
video was “
Why is everything free in Pakistan?” He concluded that “The people of Pakistan are incredibly joyful. They’re laid-back, they don’t stress much, they don’t care about living in a nice house or driving a fancy car, they are just living a happy life and that’s all there is to it!”
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Alex Reynolds, who has Filipino heritage, also noticed the gora complex on her travels. “The first time I went to Pakistan, I had a
white boyfriend,” she told me. “Then, people were giving us rides, and food, and gifts and things.
When I started travelling alone, that stopped.”