The history of Pakistan

Pakistan occupies the basin of the Indus River and the mountains and deserts around it, the land where one of the world's first urban civilisations arose some 4,500 years ago. Because its north-western passes are the main gateway into South Asia, the region was ruled in turn by Persian, Greek, Indian, Central Asian and Arab empires, and from the eleventh century by a series of Muslim dynasties, culminating in the Mughals, followed by the Sikhs and the British. Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslims of British India, in a partition that killed hundreds of thousands and uprooted millions, and its eastern wing broke away as Bangladesh in 1971. Since independence the country has alternated between elected governments and military rule, fought several wars with India, mostly over Kashmir, and become a nuclear power.

Stone tools from the Soan valley near Rawalpindi show that early humans lived in the region hundreds of thousands of years ago. At Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, villagers were growing wheat and barley and herding cattle, sheep and goats by about 7000 BCE, one of the earliest farming settlements in South Asia. Over the following millennia communities across the Indus plains developed copper working, pottery wheels and long-distance trade.

From about 2600 to 1900 BCE these communities formed the Indus Valley Civilisation, the largest of the Bronze Age world in extent. Its cities, among them Harappa in Punjab, Mohenjo-daro in Sindh and Ganweriwala in the Cholistan desert, were laid out on grids, with baked-brick houses, covered drains, wells and great platforms, but no obvious palaces or royal tombs. Indus merchants used standard weights and stamp seals carved with animals and short inscriptions in a script that has never been deciphered, and they traded with Mesopotamia by sea. The civilisation was rediscovered in the 1920s, when excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro revealed its age. From about 1900 BCE the cities declined, probably in part because of a drier climate and shifting rivers, and the population dispersed into smaller villages.

In the second millennium BCE speakers of Indo-Aryan languages settled in the Punjab, the land of five rivers, where the oldest hymns of the Rigveda, the founding texts of Hinduism, were composed. By the sixth century BCE the north-west was home to the kingdom of Gandhara, whose city of Taxila became a famous centre of learning. Around 516 BCE the Achaemenid Empire under Darius I conquered Gandhara and the lower Indus, which paid the Persian kings a huge tribute in gold dust.

In 327 BCE Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush. He took Taxila, defeated King Porus at the river Hydaspes, the modern Jhelum, in 326 BCE, and sailed down the Indus before his exhausted army forced him to turn back. Within a few years Chandragupta Maurya had taken the region from Alexander's successors in the Seleucid Empire, and the north-west became part of the Maurya Empire. Ashoka carved edicts on rocks at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra and sponsored Buddhism, which became the dominant religion of Gandhara for a thousand years.

After the Mauryas, the region passed to a succession of foreign dynasties. Indo-Greek kings descended from Alexander's settlers in Bactria ruled from Taxila and Sagala, near today's Sialkot. They were followed by Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian rulers, and in the first century CE by the Kushan Empire, a power from Central Asia. Under Kanishka, who reigned in the second century from Purushapura, today's Peshawar, the Kushans controlled trade routes linking the Silk Road with India and Rome. Gandharan sculptors, blending Indian and Hellenistic styles, created some of the first images of the Buddha in human form, and missionaries carried Buddhism from Gandhara into Central Asia and China.

In the third and fourth centuries the Sasanian Empire took much of the Kushan territory. In the fifth and sixth centuries Hunnic invaders, the Alchon and Hephthalites, swept through, and their king Mihirakula is remembered in Buddhist sources for destroying monasteries. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, travelling in the 630s, found many of Gandhara's monasteries in ruins. Later the Turk Shahi and then the Hindu Shahi kings ruled the north-west, while Sindh was governed by the Rai and then the Brahmin dynasty of Chach and his son Dahir.

In 711 and 712 an Arab army sent by the Umayyad Caliphate and led by the young general Muhammad bin Qasim took the port of Debal near modern Karachi, defeated and killed Raja Dahir, and conquered Sindh as far as Multan. Islam spread gradually through conversion, trade and the work of Sufi teachers, and Sindh and Multan were ruled by local Arab dynasties loosely loyal to the caliphs in Baghdad.

The north was conquered from Afghanistan. From 1001 Mahmud of Ghazni, ruler of the Ghaznavid Empire, raided across the Punjab, defeating the Hindu Shahis, and his successors made Lahore their capital when they lost their Afghan lands in the twelfth century. The shrine of the eleventh-century mystic Ali Hujwiri, known as Data Ganj Bakhsh, is still the city's most visited place. In 1186 the Ghurids took Lahore, and their generals founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. For three centuries the Punjab was the sultanate's frontier, exposed to repeated raids by the Mongol Empire and sacked in 1398 by Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire. In Sindh the local Soomra and then Samma dynasties ruled; the Samma capital, Thatta, is known for the Makli necropolis and its thousands of decorated tombs. Great Sufi shrines grew up at Multan, Pakpattan and Sehwan, and in 1469 Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, was born at Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib near Lahore.

In 1526 Babur, the Timurid ruler of Kabul, defeated the last Delhi sultan at Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire. Lahore was one of its great cities, and Akbar made it his capital from 1585 to 1598. Shah Jahan laid out the Shalimar Gardens, and Aurangzeb built the Badshahi Mosque in 1673. Sindh, Multan and Kashmir were Mughal provinces, while Balochistan was largely left to tribal rulers, notably the Khans of Kalat.

After Aurangzeb's death in 1707 Mughal power collapsed. The Persian ruler Nadir Shah invaded in 1739, and from 1747 Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Durrani state, took the Punjab, Sindh and Kashmir and defeated the Maratha Empire at Panipat in 1761. In the Punjab, Sikh bands steadily drove out the Afghans, and in 1799 Ranjit Singh captured Lahore and built the Sikh Empire, which stretched from the Khyber Pass to Kashmir. In Sindh, the Baloch Talpur family ruled as emirs from 1783.

The East India Company, already master of most of India, moved into the region in the 1840s. It conquered Sindh in 1843 and, after two wars with the Sikhs following Ranjit Singh's death, annexed the Punjab in 1849. Balochistan came under British control by agreements with Kalat, and in 1893 the Durand Line fixed the border with Afghanistan, dividing the Pashtun tribes. Under the British Raj, which replaced Company rule after the rebellion of 1857, huge canal systems turned western Punjab into one of the most productive farming regions in Asia, the Punjab supplied a large share of the Indian Army, and Karachi grew into a major port.

Muslims across British India, a minority overall but a majority in the north-west and Bengal, worried about their future under a Hindu-majority government. The reformer Syed Ahmad Khan founded a college at Aligarh in 1875 to give Muslims a modern education, and the All-India Muslim League was founded at Dhaka in 1906. In 1930 the poet Muhammad Iqbal proposed a Muslim state in the north-west, and in 1933 a student in Cambridge, Choudhry Rahmat Ali, coined the name Pakistan. Under the leadership of the lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League passed the Lahore Resolution on 23 March 1940, calling for independent states in the Muslim-majority regions. The Indian National Congress of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru opposed division, but the League won most Muslim seats in the 1946 elections, and communal violence spread.

Britain partitioned India in August 1947. Pakistan became independent on 14 August, with Jinnah as governor-general and Liaquat Ali Khan as prime minister, in two wings separated by some 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory: West Pakistan in the Indus basin and East Pakistan in eastern Bengal. The Partition of India divided the Punjab and Bengal along lines drawn by a British boundary commission and set off massacres and one of the largest migrations in history. Estimates of the dead range from a few hundred thousand to two million, and between ten and fifteen million people were displaced, as Muslims fled to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs to India. Karachi became the first capital.

The fate of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a Muslim majority and a Hindu ruler, became the central dispute between the two new states. In October 1947 Pashtun tribal fighters from Pakistan invaded, and Maharaja Hari Singh signed an instrument of accession to India, which sent troops. The first India-Pakistan war ended in a United Nations ceasefire on 1 January 1949 that left Pakistan holding the west and north, now Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and India the larger and more populous part. India regards the accession as legal and final, while Pakistan maintains that it was invalid and that Kashmiris should decide their future in the plebiscite called for by the UN Security Council in 1948, which has never been held. China later came to hold a further part of the region.

Jinnah died in September 1948, and Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in 1951. Politicians struggled to agree a constitution balancing the two wings, and East Pakistan, which had the majority of the population, resented the dominance of the West Pakistani elite and army; in 1952 police killed students in Dhaka demanding official status for Bengali. A constitution in 1956 made Pakistan an Islamic republic, but in October 1958 President Iskander Mirza declared martial law and was himself pushed aside by the army commander, General Ayub Khan. Ayub ruled for a decade, allied Pakistan with the United States in the Cold War, presided over rapid industrial growth, signed the Indus Waters Treaty with India in 1960 and built a new capital at Islamabad. A second war with India over Kashmir in 1965 ended in stalemate, and mass protests forced him to hand power to General Yahya Khan in 1969.

In December 1970 Pakistan held its first general election. The Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, campaigning for autonomy for East Pakistan, won almost all of the eastern seats and an overall majority, while Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party won most seats in the west. The military government and western politicians refused to transfer power. On the night of 25 March 1971 the army launched Operation Searchlight in Dhaka, and the next day Bengali leaders declared the independence of Bangladesh. Over the following nine months the army and allied militias killed large numbers of Bengali civilians, targeting students, intellectuals and Hindus in particular, and committed mass rape. Estimates of the dead range from 300,000 to three million. Bangladesh and many scholars describe the killings as genocide, while Pakistan has disputed the scale and the term. About ten million refugees fled to India, which backed the Bengali guerrillas. After Pakistani air strikes on India on 3 December, India entered the war, and on 16 December 1971 Pakistani forces in Dhaka surrendered, with more than 90,000 taken prisoner. Bangladesh became independent.

The defeat brought Bhutto to power. He nationalised major industries, launched the nuclear weapons programme in 1972 and gave Pakistan the 1973 constitution that, much amended, remains in force. The Simla Agreement with India in 1972 turned the Kashmir ceasefire line into the Line of Control. In 1974 a constitutional amendment declared the Ahmadi community non-Muslim. Accused of rigging the 1977 election, Bhutto was overthrown on 5 July 1977 by the army chief, General Zia-ul-Haq, and hanged in April 1979 after a disputed murder trial.

Zia ruled for eleven years and set out to Islamise the law and society, introducing sharia-based punishments and religious courts. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan became the base of the resistance: some three million Afghan refugees crossed the border, and Pakistani intelligence channelled American and Saudi weapons and money to the mujahideen. The war brought aid to Pakistan but also weapons, drugs and militant networks. Zia died in a plane crash in August 1988.

In the elections that followed, Bhutto's daughter Benazir Bhutto became the first woman to lead a modern Muslim-majority state. For a decade she and Nawaz Sharif alternated in power, each dismissed before completing a term. After India's nuclear tests, Pakistan tested its own nuclear weapons in the Chagai hills in May 1998. In 1999 Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control at Kargil, provoking a short war, and in October the army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, overthrew Sharif.

After the attacks of 11 September 2001 Musharraf allied with the United States against the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which Pakistan had previously backed. The war spilled across the border: militant groups, including the Pakistani Taliban, waged a campaign of bombings that killed tens of thousands of Pakistanis, and the army fought major campaigns in the tribal areas. Benazir Bhutto, returning to contest elections, was assassinated in Rawalpindi on 27 December 2007. Her widower Asif Ali Zardari became president after Musharraf resigned in 2008, and in 2010 the eighteenth amendment restored parliamentary government and devolved power to the provinces. On 2 May 2011 American special forces killed Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad, and in December 2014 militants killed more than 140 people, most of them children, at an army school in Peshawar. In 2013 power passed from one elected government to another for the first time, and Chinese investment under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor deepened ties with China.

The former cricket captain Imran Khan became prime minister in August 2018 and was removed by a vote of no confidence on 10 April 2022. Shehbaz Sharif, brother of Nawaz, succeeded him. He was arrested in May 2023 and again in August 2023, has been held in prison since, and was sentenced to fourteen years in January 2025 and a further seventeen years in December 2025 on corruption charges he says are politically motivated. In the February 2024 election independents backed by his party won the most seats, but Shehbaz Sharif returned as prime minister in a coalition with Zardari's party, and Zardari became president again.

On 22 April 2025 gunmen killed 26 civilians, most of them Hindu tourists, near Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan-based militants and suspended the Indus Waters Treaty; Pakistan denied involvement. On 7 May India struck targets in Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir that it said were militant camps, and four days of air, missile, drone and artillery exchanges followed before a ceasefire on 10 May. Both sides claimed success. In November 2025 the twenty-seventh amendment created a Federal Constitutional Court and made the army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, also Chief of Defence Forces, changes the government called necessary reforms and critics called a weakening of the judiciary and of civilian control.