The story of Pakistan told in milestone years

What's the starting date to talk about Pakistan's history?

There are several ways of writing history. The most common way is to follow the chronological order when writing about a nation or an individual. For the countries under discussion, the starting date is picked, and the story is told, going from one notable event to the next. For Pakistan, the starting date is not necessarily 1947, when the country won independence, or 1906, when British India's large Muslim population formed the All-India Muslim League to focus on protecting the rights of the followers of their distinct faith.

The choice of the starting date can be controversial. For the United States, should 1776 be the beginning of the story when a group of leaders issued what came to be called the Declaration of Independence? With that as the starting date, the country is getting ready to celebrate its 250th birthday in 2026. Or, as some historians have argued, the starting date should be much earlier, when the first boat carrying slaves arrived from Africa to the eastern shores of America. The argument for choosing the earlier date is that the country's black population was to play a critical role in developing it.

For some historians, migration becomes the dominant feature of the entire history of a nation. For Alexander Gershenkron, who taught me economic history at Harvard University, migration — or generally the large-scale movement of people — is the defining feature of the lives of nations. He was a Russian Jew who had first left his country and gone to France, from where he moved to the United States. He encouraged me to look at the large movements of people that followed the decision by Britain to leave its large colony by dividing it into two parts — a predominantly Hindu India and a largely Muslim Pakistan.

Under his guidance, I came up with an estimate of 14 million people who had left their homes and moved to the country where they wanted to be citizens. Eight million Muslims came from India to Pakistan, and six million Hindus and Sikhs moved in the other direction.

I have been telling the story of a Pakistan now for several years. I have published books on the country. In telling the story again today, I will adopt a different approach. I will identify the twelve years that matter for the story of Pakistan and then very briefly indicate why I regard these years as important historical milestones. The years are 1947, 1951, 1958, 1962, 1971, 1978, 1908, 1988, 1991, 2001, 2023 and 2025. What follows is a brief indication of why I attach significance to these thirteen years in telling the Pakistan history.

1947 is the year the British left their large Indian colony over which they had ruled for almost two centuries. They arrived as traders and stayed as the rulers. They were pressed to leave by the Indian nationalist leaders of whom the most important were MK Gandhi and MA Jinnah. The former adopted a non-violent approach to send the British home while the latter campaigned for the establishment of a Muslim state in the parts of the colony in which the followers of the Islamic faith were in majority.

The second important year was 1951 when Liaquat Ali Khan, the country's first prime minister, was assassinated while addressing a public meeting in an open ground in Rawalpindi that now carries his name. What followed the killing was political turmoil that encouraged the General Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief of the army, to remove in 1958 the civilian leadership and establish the first of five military rules in the country. There were four military presidents while most of the power today is in the hands of the chief of the armed forces.

The fourth year on my list of twelve is 1962, when the military ruler introduced a new constitution based on a system of local governance that he called Basic Democracies. This was a multi-tiered arrangement in which the lowest tier was made up Union Councils, which had ten directly elected representatives. There were 40,000 councils in each of the two provinces that then constituted Pakistan. Ayub Kan was removed from power in 1969 by General Yahya Khan, the man he had appointed as the army chief. But the second military ruler could not bring the Bengali citizens of the Pakistani state to live in the country Jinnah had created. They rebelled, leading to a bloody civil war and the creation of Bangladesh as an independent state. India sent in its troops to aid the Bengali rebels. This was in 1971, the fifth year in my list.

In 1978, the sixth year in my list, the Soviet Union sent in its troops to Afghanistan to help the Communist government they had installed to stay in power. However, the Soviet presence was resisted by a group of Islamic extremist fighters who prevailed, leading Moscow to pull back from Afghanistan. Moscow's withdrawal led to the resignation of the leader Mikhael Gorbachev and the collapse in 1991 of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. Dozen or so countries left the USSR and became independent states. Six of these were the Muslim majority countries in Central Asia.

The next year in the list is 2001 which is distinguished by two events: the attack by Islamic extremists who hit hijacked airplanes into the iconic twin towers in lower Manhattan, killing more than 3,000 people. A third plane hit the Pentagon, the head quarter of the US military but didn't do much damage. The attack was on September 11 and has come to be known as 9/11. The United States President George W Bush, to avenge the attacks, sent in American troops into Kabul. The Taliban regime was held responsible since the attackers had been trained in a sanctuary that the Afghan government of the time had granted an extremist group called Al Qaeda.

The Americans stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years but were not able to defeat the Taliban who took over the country on August 15, 2022, which brings me to the next important year in Pakistan's history. The final year in the list is 2025, when Donald Trump moved into the White House for the second term as the US president. What he has already done has changed the United States and the world to which his country belongs.