Pakistan Overview
Pakistan officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the fifth most populous country in the world with nearly 242 million inhabitants and has the second largest Muslim population in the world. Pakistan is the 33rd largest country by land area and has an area of 881,913 square kilometers (340,509 sq mi). It has 1,046 kilometers (650 mi) of coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman to the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is closely separated from Tajikistan by Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor in the north and also shares a maritime border with Oman.
Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Mehrgarh Neolithic in Baluchistan and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization, the most extensive civilization in Afro-Eurasia. The area that includes the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of several empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenids; briefly that of Alexander the Great; Seleucids, Mauryas, Kushans, Guptas; The Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahis, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, the British East India Company and most recently the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.
Spurred on by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for Muslims from British India, and the 1946 electoral victories of the All India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the partition of the British Indian Empire, which granted independent statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by unprecedented mass migration and loss of life. Initially a British Commonwealth Dominion, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956 and became a self-declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month civil war. For the next four decades, Pakistan was ruled by governments whose descriptions, though complex, routinely alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008 and adopted a parliamentary system with regular elections in 2010.
