Geograph y: Karak orams to Kalat

Geography: Karakorum to Kalat

Comprised of 310,000 square miles, with 16,000 square miles covered with

water, Pakistan is slightly smaller that twice the size of California and overall

about a twelfth the size of the United States. Three times as large as Britain,

it is inhabited by 160 million people. To its north, the People’s Republic of

China shares Pakistan’s immensely majestic and scenic Karakorum, and the

Sino-Pakistani borders run for 330 miles through the glacial mountains. To the

west, Afghanistan neighbors Pakistan for 1,600 miles across a predominantly

mountainous region extending from the peaks of the Hindu-Kusch in the north

toward the borders with Iran farther south. Demarcated by the British in the

closing years of the nineteenth century and often called the Duran Line, this

borderland retains the world’s oldest and still intact tribal heritage, where

traditional values like hospitality, resistance against alien influences and

control, and a greater devotion to one’s own family, land, religion, and language

supersede everything else. Iran, located to the west of Pakistan, shares

a 570-mile border; Pakistan’s southern frontiers are in fact demarcated by 660

miles of the coastline on the Arabian Sea, which brings it quite close to the

vital Straits of Hormuz in the west. Toward the east, coastal Pakistan extends

well into the marshes of Kuchen. India is Pakistan’s only neighbor in the east;

they share 1,835 miles of borders, mostly characterized by the plains of Punjab

and the deserts of Sindh and Rajasthan. The disputed territory of Jammu

and Kashmir—equal to the size of the United Kingdom—is wedged between

China, Pakistan, and India, with all three states controlling parts of it. Here the

 The Indus Heartland and Karakoram Country

Line of Control (LOC), demarcated after the Indo-Pakistani wars of 1948 and

1971, keeps these two rivals apart, although in recent years their often tense

relations have greatly thawed, allowing some restrictive movements of relatives

and goods across the borders.3 Pakistan’s location might pose serious geopolitical challenges to its rulers, but it also accounts for its regional and extraregional significance, allowing the country a rather larger-than-life profile in foreign relations. Pakistan’s northern regions proximate it with central Asia and the historic Silk Road;

its northwestern territories have been geographically and culturally linked

with Afghanistan and the Turkic regions farther north, which, for centuries,

fashioned the sociopolitical life in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan’s shared

history with Iran and other west Asian regions over the centuries played

an important role in the evolution of a unique Perso-Islamic culture, sometimes

referred to as Persianate, or the Indo-Islamic heritage. Pakistan’s multiple

relations with the Gangetic valleys and areas farther south forming the

present-day Indian Union allowed it a vanguard role in the expansion of the

Indus Valley civilization. Future waves of immigrants and invaders played

Provinces and regions of Pakistan. Iftikhar Malik, State and Civil Society in Pakistan:

Politics of Authority, Ideology, and Ethnicity, 1997, Palgrave Macmillan. Reproduced

with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Reproduced by Book comp, Inc.