Pakistan historical timeline

Pakistan's history is the history of the Indus, which has carried cities since Mohenjo-daro, and of the passes above it, through which every conqueror of the subcontinent came. What a visitor sees -- the brick grid of Mohenjo-daro, the Buddhist stupas of Taxila, the Mughal fort and mosque at Lahore, Sher Shah's Rohtas, the British cantonments, the planned capital -- is the record of each.

Chronology

1. c. 2500 BC Mohenjo-daro is built on the Indus: one of the largest settlements of the Indus Valley civilisation and one of the world's earliest major cities, with at least 40,000 people, contemporary with Egypt and Mesopotamia; abandoned by about 1700 BC, and in 1980 the first World Heritage Site in South Asia.
2. 1st millennium BC Taxila, 25 kilometres from modern Islamabad, becomes the centre of Gandhara, visited by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims along the Silk Road and inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.
3. 1541 Sher Shah Suri commissions the Rohtas fort in the Pakistani Punjab, one of the largest and most formidable in the province, World Heritage since 1997.
4. 1584 Lahore serves as the Mughal capital under Akbar; the fort that Aurangzeb and his predecessors built there is inscribed in 1981, and Aurangzeb's Badshahi mosque remains the largest in the world for over three hundred years.
5. 1849 The Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh, who had made his residence in Lahore Fort, falls to the British, who rule the Indus lands as part of British India for a century.
6. 1947 Pakistan becomes independent on 14 August in the partition of India, which displaces between 12 and 20 million people along religious lines. Karachi is the capital until 1959.
7. 1947 The first Kashmir war is fought over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir from 1947 to 1948. Pakistan's frontier tribal militias crossed the state border on 22 October 1947; the state acceded to India on 26 October and Indian troops were airlifted to Srinagar; the fronts solidified along what became the Line of Control, and a formal ceasefire took effect on 1 January 1949. Every restriction a traveller meets in the far north -- permits, closed roads, no crossing -- descends from that line.
8. 1965 The second Kashmir war runs from August to September 1965: seventeen days, thousands of casualties on both sides, and the largest tank battle since the Second World War. It ended with a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 211 and the Tashkent Declaration, brokered by the Soviet Union and the United States. Neither side moved the line, which is the pattern every later round repeats.
9. 1971 East Pakistan secedes as Bangladesh after a nine-month civil war. Islamabad, built in the 1960s and established in 1967, is by then the capital; the country alternates between civilian and military governments for the rest of the century and becomes a declared nuclear power.
10. 1979 The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, following the 1978 Saur Revolution, begins the first great wave of Afghan migration into Pakistan. More than 20 per cent of Afghanistan's population fled the country between 1979 and 1992, and 6.3 million Afghan refugees were living in Pakistan and Iran by 1990. Peshawar and the whole north-west were remade by it, and the Afghan presence a visitor notices there is four decades deep.
11. 1999 The Kargil war is fought from May to July 1999 in the Kargil district of Ladakh and along the Line of Control, triggered by the infiltration of Pakistani troops disguised as Kashmiri militants into positions on the Indian side. It is the most recent example of high-altitude warfare in mountainous terrain, fought in the same ranges that the trekking industry sells, and both sides had nuclear weapons by then.
12. 2001 Anti-terror operations and terrorism take more than 65,000 lives between 2001 and 2018. In 2019 the government opens online visas to 175 countries and visa on arrival to 50, and in January 2021 ten climbers make the first winter ascent of K2.
13. 2005 A magnitude 7.6 earthquake strikes Azad Kashmir on 8 October at 08:50 local time, with its epicentre near Muzaffarabad. At least 87,350 people were killed and 200,000 injured in Pakistan; Muzaffarabad, Balakot, Bagh and Battagram were worst hit, and all 4,000 inhabitants of the destroyed village of Jabri Kailash died. Balakot was rebuilt on a new site, and the seismic risk it demonstrated applies to the whole northern mountain belt.

What survived, and how

The oldest city survived by being buried in its own river's silt and is now threatened by the water table and bad restoration; the Buddhist north survived as ruins after Islam arrived; the Mughal city survived because the Sikhs and then the British used it. The mountains survived everything and were opened to the world only by the Karakoram Highway, built with China to 4,714 metres and called the eighth wonder for it.

What survives least is calm: the state made in 1947 has been at war or under generals for much of its life, and the advisories that shape this page are its present tense.