Pakistan

The territory of present-day Pakistan contains some of the oldest continuous records of urban civilisation in South Asia. The Indus Valley Civilisation, with major sites at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh and Harappa in Punjab, flourished from roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE and developed planned cities, standardised weights, and a still-undeciphered script. After its decline, Indo-Aryan peoples settled the Punjab and produced the Vedic corpus, while Gandhara, in the northwest, emerged as a distinct cultural region. The area later passed under the Achaemenid Persians in the sixth century BCE, was traversed by Alexander the Great in 326 BCE, and became part of the Maurya empire under Chandragupta and Ashoka, who promoted Buddhism across the region.

In the centuries that followed, Gandhara and the Indus plain saw successive Indo-Greek, Saka, Parthian, and Kushan rulers, with the Kushan emperor Kanishka presiding over a Buddhist florescence whose sculpture and monasteries remain visible at Taxila and the Swat valley. From the eighth century, Arab armies under Muhammad bin Qasim brought Islam to Sindh, and from the eleventh century Turkic and Afghan dynasties, including the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, and Delhi Sultanate, extended Muslim rule across the Indus basin. The Mughal empire, founded by Babur in 1526, integrated the territory into a vast South Asian polity centred on Delhi, Agra, and Lahore, with the latter serving as a major imperial city. Mughal authority eroded in the eighteenth century, and Punjab subsequently came under the Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh, while Sindh and the frontier were contested between local rulers and the rising British East India Company.

British paramountcy was consolidated after the annexation of Sindh in 1843 and Punjab in 1849, and the entire region became part of the British Raj following the suppression of the 1857 rebellion. During the late colonial period, the All-India Muslim League, founded in 1906 and later led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, advanced the demand for a separate Muslim-majority state. On 14 August 1947, the British partition of India produced Pakistan as an independent dominion comprising West Pakistan and the noncontiguous East Pakistan, accompanied by mass migrations and communal violence and by the first of several wars with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Pakistan adopted its first constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic, but civilian government was repeatedly displaced by military rule, beginning with the 1958 coup of Ayub Khan. A war with India in 1971, following political crisis in the eastern wing, ended with the secession of East Pakistan as the new state of Bangladesh. The 1973 constitution, drafted under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, established a federal parliamentary system, though it was suspended during the military regimes of Zia ul-Haq, who pursued Islamisation through the 1980s, and later Pervez Musharraf from 1999.

Civilian rule was restored in 2008, and Pakistan became a frontline state in the post-2001 conflicts in neighbouring Afghanistan while contending with internal insurgency, sectarian violence, and recurrent economic crises. Successive elections, most recently in 2024, have produced alternations of power between the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the Pakistan Peoples Party, and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. The country today is a federal Islamic republic with a bicameral parliament, a prime minister as head of government, and a president as head of state, whose contemporary institutions are described in the sections that follow.