Welcome back, Toad. You've been missed.
Brother, I agree with you on Pakistan. I had two assignments to that benighted country. One of them occurred shortly after Muslim extremists had stormed and burned the U. S. Embassy in Islamabad in November 1979, killing two Americans one of whom was a Marine Security Guard.
General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had seized power from Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977 and then had Bhutto tried and executed in 1979, had imposed Sharia Law on the country. The consumption of alcoholic beverages was banned. The only way a "foreign infidel" could get a drink was to repair to a darkened room resembling a 1920s "Speakeasy" in the basement of your hotel, present your passport, sign a paper declaring yourself to be an "alcoholic in need of medication," and then pay an outrageous price for cheap liquor measured out in a tiny shot glass.
Somewhere, a' mouldering in the basements of various hotels of Karachi and Islamabad there may still be boxes of paper forms, a few of which contain my signature declaring me to be hopelessly addicted to alcohol. I think of that and smile now and then of an evening when I gaze into a crystal glass of well-aged single malt .
The only thing good I brought out of Pakistan was a horse. The British "ex-pats," former colonials all, were packing up, selling out, and returning to jolly old England. One of them was a banker who owned a Thoroughbred stud that had won just about every race in which he was entered. His registered name was "Sculptor." I was able to purchase him for a fraction of his value -- in fact, it cost more to have him shipped by air through France to the United States than it did to buy him. He stood at stud on my little Maryland horse farm for eight years until his death in 1988, giving me seven winners at the track. I still miss him.
(http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y30/RichardS/sculptorpak1970.jpg)