Mason Inman - science journalist

Today is the 60th anniversary of Pakistan, so it seemed appropriate to post some quintessentially Pakistani stuff here the things that really identify the country and that they're proud of.

First there's the high-stepping border guards at Wagah, who put on a macho act of foot stamping, muscle flexing, head shaking, and marching straight out of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, all supposedly to intimidate their counterparts a few meters away on the Indian side of the border. (For what it's worth, the Indians put on the same kind of show, and had even more people in the stands cheering their side.) With the guards' headdressses, their strutting and their head shaking, two things kept coming to mind: roosters, and American pro wrestlers.

In addition to the show put on by the guards, there were flag guys, one who wore a cowboy hat and ran around, yelling and riling people up and an old, white-haired guy who puttered around and looked really cute. The men sat in stands on one side of the road, the women in stands on the other side, and I think the women chanted "Pakistan, Pakistan" louder than the men, over all. Loudspeakers blared a bunch of songs, some sing-songy anthems that repeated "Pakistan, Pakistan," over and over, and a couple of dancy remixes, too (although no one was dancing, something I have yet to see in Pakistan outside of Sufi shrines—see below).

The other, equally enjoyable and equally strange performance I went to was a qawwali music show at a Sufi shrine in Lahore.

Instead of paying a fee to get in, people give money directly to each group, who come on stage with a dozen or so people and play one long song lasting about 10 minutes or so. The groups' arrangements were almost all the same: they usually had two guys playing squeezeboxes (I don't know the real name for these instruments that are a hybrid between accordian and piano), two singers, one or two drummers (who, as in rock bands, sit in the back) and then a bunch of clappers.

Guys walk around and collect money for the bands, and people usually give one, or maybe two, 10 rupee notes (about 15 cents). If you don't have change, you can hand a 100 to the collector, and he takes it up to the band, and they make change themselves! (That's one of the jobs of the on-stage clappers.)

Some more generous souls literally shower the money on the groups, like in this video:

Most of the crowd sat still, and one guy near me seemed to be really into it because he was rhymically shaking his head back and forth. But one guy, in the video below, got up and danced.

Apparently he got a little too into it, because soon after the video ended, a security guard appeared to gently escort him out of the area near the stage. The guy seemed pretty confused and out of it, so I'm guessing he was pretty stoned—not too surprising for a Sufi gathering.

Later that same night I went to another Sufi shrine where most of the crowd was smoking joints and eating pot roti (we didn't partake), while listening to drumming... But that will have to wait for another posting.

Finally, here's a video of the most charismatic of the qawwali singers I saw that day. Unlike the others, who almost all stayed on their butts, he got up on his knees and used his long arms to make a lot of expressive gestures. I have no idea what he was saying, but he was the only one who really moved me.

Also, if you want to read a little bit about Pakistan's history, the BBC had a nice, short article yesterday about how the governments keep turning over: "Pakistan's Circular History." No democratically elected prime minister has finished their term. Every time the military has taken over in a coup before the civilian government had a chance to finish up.

How has the world looked upon these coups? Here's the United States' track record (from the BBC article):

Aid to dictators
Last, but not least, the Americans have tended to use their crucial financial and military support selectively against democratic governments.

The pattern is unmistakably clear.

The first large-scale American food and military aid started to pour into Pakistan in late 1953, months after the dismissal of its first civilian government.

It continued for a decade as Pakistan under a military regime joined various US-sponsored defence pacts against the Soviet Union.

The US started having problems with Pakistan when an elected government came to power in 1972, but poured billions of dollars into the country when another military regime took over in 1977 and agreed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Similarly, while the elected governments that followed during 1988-99 had to live with a decade of US sanctions, the military regime of Gen Musharraf, that ousted the last civilian government in 1999, remains a 'well supplied' ally in the US' 'war on terror'.

There are, however, indications that the Americans may finally be getting fed up with Gen Musharraf, just as they got fed up with General Ayub Khan when he started to warm up to the Soviet Union after the 1965 war with India, or of General Zia-ul Haq when the Soviets decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in 1987.

The book is really engrossing, describing how one alcoholic and patriotic congressman teamed up with a rogue CIA agent to funnel tons of money through back channels to get the war going. The press and the public didn't really notice for the first few years, probably in part because people were focused on the CIA's bungling in the Iran-Contra scandal. But when people did notice, they tended to lionize the "freedom fighters"—tribal, sometimes fundamentalist Muslims, some of whom the U.S. ended up fighting when they went into Afghanistan after 9/11.

I highly recommend the book if you're into this kind of of stuff and have the time to read it. But for the more time-pressed, there's a movie version coming out in December, directed by Mike Nichols.