Pakistan

From the planned cities of the Indus to a nuclear-armed republic.

Pakistan occupies one of the oldest cradles of civilisation on Earth, where the Bronze Age cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa flourished more than four thousand years ago along the Indus. Over the millennia its valleys and passes carried Persians, Greeks, Buddhists of Gandhara, Muslim sultans and the Mughal emperors who made Lahore a jewel of their realm. In the twentieth century the demand of British India's Muslims for a homeland — crystallised in the 1940 Lahore Resolution under Muhammad Ali Jinnah — produced the modern state, which won independence on 14 August 1947 amid the trauma of Partition. Since then Pakistan has lived through the loss of its eastern wing in 1971, recurring cycles of civilian and military rule, and its emergence as a nuclear power and the world's fifth most populous nation.