Pakistan

A country founded on an idea about religion and demography that its own geography then tested to destruction. The Muslim League argued from 1940 that Indian Muslims constituted a nation requiring a separate state, and Jinnah secured it in August 1947 - but the Muslim-majority regions lay at opposite ends of the subcontinent, so Pakistan was created in two wings separated by a thousand miles of India, sharing a religion and almost nothing else. Partition moved perhaps fifteen million people and killed hundreds of thousands, with Punjab cut in half. The eastern wing held more people than the west but was governed from it, and when a Bengali party won the 1970 election outright the army's refusal to hand over power produced the war that created Bangladesh. Kashmir has been fought over three times. The army has governed directly for roughly half the country's existence and shaped policy for the rest, and no elected prime minister has yet completed a full term. Nuclear weapons were tested in 1998. Karachi, Lahore and the Indus valley hold most of the population. Urdu is the national language and Punjabi the most spoken. The Grand Trunk Road runs the length of it. The country has about 250 million people, the fifth most in the world. K2, the second highest mountain, stands on its Chinese border. Mohenjo-daro and Taxila are World Heritage sites. It is among the largest cotton and rice exporters. Malala Yousafzai was shot in the Swat valley in 2012 and won the Nobel peace prize two years later.

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