PAKISTAN

This web page is to give people the general understanding of PAKISTAN. People will learn where it is located, how big the country is, and what kind of people live there. This page is for mostly college students, tourists, adult learners and the military.

The Pakistan flag was designed by a man named Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He is also the founder of Pakistan. The national flag of Pakistan is dark green with a white bar and a white cresent moon in the center and a five point star. The white and green represents Minorities & Muslim majority. The cresent moon represents progress and the five point star represents light and knowledge.

Pakistan is located in South Asia where it shares the eastern border with India and the northeastern border with China. Iran makes up the south-west border and the Arabian Sea is the southern boundary with 1064 km of coastline. Pakistan takes up a total of 796,095 sq km and is nearly four times the size of the United Kingdom. The northern and western parts of Pakistan contain the towering Karakoram and Pamir mountain ranges, which include some of the worlds highest peaks, such as: K2 (28,250 ft; 8,611m) and Nanga Pardat (26,660 ft; 8,126m). The Baluchistan Plateau lies to the west, and the Thar Desert and an expanse of alluvial plains, the Punjab and Sind, lie to the east. The 1,000-mile-long (1,609 km) Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. Pakistan is about twice the size of California.

Pakistan was one of the two original successor states to British India, which was partitioned along with religious lines in 1947. For almost 25 years following independence, it consisted of two separate regions, East and West Pakistan, but now it is made up only of the western sector. Both India and Pakistan have laid claim to the Kashmir region; this territorial dispute led to war in 1949, 1965, 1971, and 1999, and remains unresolved today.

What is now Pakistan was in prehistoric times the Indus Valley civilization (c. 2500–1700 B.C.). A series of invaders—Aryans, Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and others—controlled the region for the next several thousand years. Islam, the principal religion, was introduced in 711. In 1526, the land became part of the Mogul Empire, which ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from the 16th to the mid-18th century. By 1857, the British became the dominant power in the region. With Hindus holding most of the economic, social, and political advantages, the Muslim minority's dissatisfaction grew, leading to the formation of the nationalist Muslim League in 1906 by Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876–1949). The league supported Britain in the Second World War while the Hindu nationalist leaders, Nehru and Gandhi, refused. In return for the league's support of Britain, Jinnah expected British backing for Muslim autonomy. Britain agreed to the formation of Pakistan as a separate dominion within the Commonwealth in Aug. 1947, a bitter disappointment to India's dream of a unified subcontinent. Jinnah became governor-general. The partition of Pakistan and India along religious lines resulted in the largest migration in human history, with 17 million people fleeing across the borders in both directions to escape the sectarian violence accompanying the partition.

Pakistan became a republic on March 23, 1956, with Maj. Gen. Iskander Mirza as the first president. Military rule prevailed for the next two decades. Tensions between East and West Pakistan existed from the outset. Separated by more than a thousand miles, the two regions shared few cultural and social traditions other than religion. To the growing resentment of East Pakistan, the West monopolized the country's political and economic power. In 1970, East Pakistan's Awami League, led by the Bengali leader Sheik Mujibur Rahman, secured a majority of the seats in the National Assembly. President Yahya Khan postponed the opening of the National Assembly to skirt East Pakistan's demand for greater autonomy, provoking civil war. The independent state of Bangladesh, or Bengali nation, was proclaimed on March 26, 1971. Indian troops entered the war in its last weeks fighting on the side of the new state. Pakistan was defeated on Dec. 16, 1971, and President Yahya Khan stepped down. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took over Pakistan and accepted Bangladesh as an independent entity. In 1976, formal relations between India and Pakistan resumed.

Pakistan's first elections under civilian rule took place in March 1977, and the overwhelming victory of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was denounced as fraudulent. A rising tide of violent protest and political deadlock led to a military takeover on July 5 by Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. Bhutto was tried and convicted for the 1974 murder of a political opponent, and despite worldwide protests he was executed on April 4, 1979, touching off riots by his supporters. Zia declared himself president on Sept. 16, 1978, and ruled by martial law until Dec. 30, 1985, when a measure of representative government was restored. On Aug. 19, 1988, Zia was killed in a midair explosion of a Pakistani Air Force plane. Elections at the end of 1988 brought longtime Zia opponent Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Bhutto, into office as prime minister.

In the 1990s, Pakistan saw a shaky succession of governments—Benazir Bhutto was prime minister twice and Nawaz Sharif three times, until he was deposed in a coup on Oct. 12, 1999, by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The Pakistani public, familiar with military rule for 25 of the nation's 52-year history, generally viewed the coup as a positive step and hoped it would bring a badly needed economic upswing.

To the surprise of much of the world, two new nuclear powers emerged in May 1998 when India, followed by Pakistan just weeks later, conducted nuclear tests. Fighting with India again broke out in the disputed territory of Kashmir in May 1999.

Close ties with Afghanistan's Taliban government thrust Pakistan into a difficult position following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Under U.S. pressure, Pakistan broke with its neighbor to become the United States' chief ally in the region. In return, President Bush ended sanctions (instituted after Pakistan's testing of nuclear weapons in 1998), rescheduled its debt, and helped to bolster the legitimacy of the rule of Pervez Musharraf, who appointed himself president in 2001.

On Dec. 13, 2001, suicide bombers attacked the Indian Parliament, killing 14 people, including 5 assailants. Indian officials blamed the attack on Islamic militants supported by Pakistan. Both sides assembled hundreds of thousands of troops along their common border, bringing the two nuclear powers to the brink of war.

In April 2002, voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to extend Musharraf's presidency for another five years. The vote, however, outraged opposing political parties and human rights groups that said the process was rigged. In August, he unveiled 29 constitutional amendments that strengthened his grip on the country.

Pakistani officials dealt a heavy blow to al-Qaeda in March 2003, arresting Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the top aide to Osama bin Laden, who organized the 2001 terrorist attacks against the U.S. The search for bin Laden intensified in northern Pakistan following Mohammed's arrest.

In Nov. 2003, Pakistan and India declared the first formal cease-fire in Kashmir in 14 years. In April 2005, a bus service began between the two capitals of Kashmir—Srinagar on the Indian side and Pakistan's Muzaffarabad—uniting families that had been separated by the Line of Control since 1947.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, was exposed in Feb. 2004 for having sold nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Musharraf had him apologize publicly, and then pardoned him. While much of the world reviled him for this unconscionable act of nuclear proliferation, the scientist remains a national hero in Pakistan. Khan claimed that he alone and not Pakistan's military or government was involved in the selling of these ultraclassified secrets; few in the international community have accepted this explanation.

President Musharraf declared in December 2004 that he would retain his post as head of the army, a reversal of an earlier promise.

President Bush said in March 2005 that the U.S. would sell Pakistan F-16 fighter jets. Pakistan had been trying to buy the planes since 1990 but had been repeatedly denied because of its nuclear-weapons programs. In what was considered an attempt to balance the offer to Pakistan, Bush also would allow American companies to provide India with several types of modern combat weapons, including F-16s and F-18s. After October's devastating earthquake that will cost the country about $5 billion in reconstruction, President Musharraf postponed the purchase of the F-16s.

Pakistani officials announced that three of the four suicide bombers who attacked London's transit system in July 2005 had visited Pakistan in 2004. Days later, about 200 suspected Islamic militants were detained after a series of raids on mosques and madrassas. Despite the move, many have questioned President Musharraf's sincerity in rooting out militants and remnants of the Taliban. Indeed, during the summer of 2005, violence intensified in the mountainous North and South Waziristan regions, which border Afghanistan, suggesting that the insurgents are regrouping.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 struck Pakistani-controlled Kashmir on October 8, 2005. More than 81,000 people were killed and 3 million left homeless. About half of the region’s capital city, Muzaffarabad, was destroyed. The disaster hit at the onset the Himalayan winter. Many rural villages were too remote for aid workers to reach, leaving thousands vulnerable to the elements. A shortage of tents only increased frustration and sense of helplessness felt by the Kashmiris. India suffered about 1,300 casualties.

People of Pakistan

The people of Pakistan have a multi-linguistic and multi-ethnic background. The majority of the population is made up of Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns (Pakhtuns), Mohajirs and Baluchis. All the people follow many different cultural traditions and speak many different languages and dialects. They are, in fact, a mixture of Dravidians, Indo-Aryans, Greeks, Scythians, Huns, Arabs, Mongols, Persians, and Afghans.