Pakistan’s conflict history begins with the Partition of British India, which created a homeland for South Asian Muslims amid mass displacement and communal violence. Its defining historical process has been Partition and the unresolved search for national cohesion: a state formed through religious nationalism had to unite regions divided by language, class, and geography while confronting India over Kashmir. That rivalry elevated the military, drew Pakistan into Cold War alliances, and eventually made South Asia a nuclear region. The 1971 war exposed the limits of the founding idea: East Pakistan’s Bengali majority rejected rule from the west, and Bangladesh emerged from secession and war. Pakistan’s enduring influence therefore lies in how Partition transformed a subcontinental dispute into a nuclear-armed great-power rivalry. Continuing conflict in Kashmir and political instability at home show that the state’s founding crisis remains unfinished.
In 2025, the Pakistan conflict intensified as the military fought the TTP and Baloch separatists (BRAS), alongside a brief armed confrontation with India and border clashes with Afghanistan. UCDP recorded 3,331 battle-related deaths, including 372 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Pakistan’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Pakistan is a large country in South Asia, built around the plains of the Indus River as it runs from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan and Iran to the west, and a narrow mountain frontier with China to the north. The mainstream account of its founding begins with the end of British rule over the Indian subcontinent in 1947, when the territory was divided along religious lines into two new states: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, created as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims. That division, known as Partition, followed decades of political argument that the Muslims of British India formed not merely a religious community but a separate nation deserving a state of its own — a position historians call the “Two-Nation Theory,” championed by the lawyer and politician Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his party, the Muslim League. Pakistan’s founding was thus explicitly ideological: a state built to express a religious identity, assembled at birth from two wings a thousand miles apart across northern India, joined by faith and separated by nearly everything else. Historians treat this founding logic — a nation defined by religion rather than by language or territory — as the fact everything in Pakistan’s later history has had to work around.
Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (2012)
Five thresholds mark the mainstream account, and each mattered because it reset the country’s institutions, not merely its calendar. The first was the 1940 Lahore Resolution, in which the Muslim League formally called for separate Muslim-majority states in British India. The second was Partition itself in August 1947, which created Pakistan out of two disconnected wings, West and East, with India lying between them. The third was the war of 1971, when East Pakistan, after a brutal military crackdown and nine months of civil war, seceded to become the independent country of Bangladesh — cutting the state in half and disproving, at a stroke, the idea that shared religion alone could hold a nation together. The fourth was the military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq from 1977 to 1988, who pushed the state toward a stricter, legally enforced Islam and, backed by Washington, turned Pakistan into the staging ground for the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation. The fifth was the alliance with the United States after 2001, which drew Pakistan into a long war against militants on its own soil. Each threshold reshaped the balance among religion, the army, and civilian government that still defines the state.
Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (2012); Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (1984)
In the mainstream account, Pakistan is an unusual case in which the demand for a state preceded any settled sense of a single nation, and the two were never fully reconciled. The Muslim League’s campaign of the 1940s secured a country before it had secured agreement on what, beyond religion, its people actually shared: Bengalis in the east and Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns, and Baloch in the west spoke different languages, followed different customs, and lived a thousand miles apart with India between them. Independence in 1947 handed this assembly of provinces a shared faith and a shared new flag, but not a shared language, economy, or political culture. The strain showed almost immediately in disputes over whether the eastern wing’s language, Bengali, would hold equal status with Urdu, and it broke the state apart entirely in 1971. What survived afterward was a western remainder still working, imperfectly, to convert a religiously defined state into a single nation — a project historians describe as incomplete rather than failed, still visible today in the country’s unsettled relationship with its own regional and ethnic minorities.
Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (2012)
The long-term force mainstream historians identify is the repeated, unresolved contest among three claimants to authority — elected civilian governments, the military, and Islam as a source of legitimacy — none of which has ever secured lasting, uncontested control. Pakistan has spent roughly half its independent life under direct military rule, and even its civilian periods have unfolded under the army’s shadow, with elected prime ministers repeatedly dismissed, exiled, or imprisoned. Islam has been invoked by soldiers and civilians alike to justify their rule, so that the religious identity meant at the founding to unite has instead become one more resource fought over by rival claimants to power. This is not simply instability for its own sake; it is a structural pattern, in which no single institution — parliament, army, or clergy — has built the kind of durable authority the others consistently accept. Historians point to this cycling of power, rather than to any single crisis, as the thread that best explains Pakistan’s governance from 1947 to the present day, and the pattern shows no sign of resolving itself.
Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (2012); Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (1984)
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
Set against the standard story of a nation demanding its own state, a revisionist reading — associated above all with the historian Ayesha Jalal — argues that Muhammad Ali Jinnah did not, in fact, set out to break up British India at all. On this account, Jinnah’s demand for “Pakistan” functioned chiefly as a bargaining counter: a threat meant to force the Indian National Congress, the subcontinent’s dominant political party, into accepting a loose, federal India in which Muslim-majority provinces would hold near-total autonomy while remaining part of one country. Partition, in this reading, was not the fulfilment of a long-held plan but the byproduct of a failed negotiation — the collapse, in 1946, of a British-brokered federal scheme known as the Cabinet Mission Plan, after which neither Jinnah nor the Congress leadership could find a way back from the brink. The facts of 1947 are not disputed — a Muslim-majority state was created, and quickly — but the intention behind them is: whether Pakistan was the goal all along, or the consolation prize left after a larger settlement collapsed.
Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985)
The revisionist account keeps the same run of events the mainstream uses — the 1940 Lahore Resolution, Partition in 1947, the loss of the eastern wing in 1971 — but reads each one differently. The Lahore Resolution itself is read as deliberately vague, a document that never explicitly demanded one sovereign country and that League leaders interpreted in different ways, evidence that a hardened two-state demand was not fixed until very late. Partition is read less as an orderly transfer of power than as an improvised catastrophe: the new border was drawn only days before independence, and the resulting migration and communal killing, which displaced some fourteen million people, was far larger and more chaotic than colonial planners anticipated or later official memory admits. The 1971 war is read, in turn, as proof that the state built in 1947 rested on a shakier foundation than its founders claimed, since religion alone failed to bind two peoples separated by language and geography. Historians broadly accept these events; what remains contested is how deliberate, and how inevitable, they really were, and how much of the outcome owed to design as against the pressure of a rapidly collapsing timetable.
Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (1985); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007)
In this reading, Pakistan’s Muslim political identity was not a timeless fact waiting to be given political form, but something substantially shaped by how colonial administration organised its Indian subjects. The historian David Gilmartin‘s study of Punjab — the province that supplied the Muslim League’s decisive mass support — shows political Islam there taking root less through pure conviction than through the colonial-era power of rural landholders and Sufi spiritual leaders known as pirs, whose networks of kinship and patronage the League learned to mobilise on Islam’s behalf. On this account, the “Muslim nation” that backed Pakistan in the 1940s was, in large part, assembled out of existing local hierarchies of land and loyalty, redirected toward a new religious-political cause rather than expressing one that had always been there. This does not deny that Islam mattered to Pakistan’s supporters; it argues that the form their support took owed as much to colonial-era rural power structures as to theology — a reinterpretation, not a rejection, of the standard account, and one mainstream historians continue to weigh against explanations that give religious conviction more independent force.
David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (1988)
The force this school foregrounds is contingency: the idea that Pakistan’s history turns less on any deep, inevitable logic — religious, geographic, or civilisational — than on a sequence of negotiations that could plausibly have gone otherwise. Jalal’s account of the 1940s treats Pakistan’s creation as a near-accident of failed bargaining rather than the destined outcome of the Two-Nation Theory; Khan’s account of 1947 treats the violence and disorder of Partition as evidence of colonial improvisation rather than careful design; Gilmartin’s account of Punjab treats Islamic political mobilisation as built from existing colonial-era rural hierarchies rather than flowing straight from doctrine. Together these arguments push back against any single-cause explanation of Pakistan’s founding, mainstream or otherwise, and ask readers to treat the country’s origin as the product of choices, failures, and administrative habits rather than of destiny. This is a genuine departure from the consensus emphasis on the Two-Nation Theory as a settled ideological cause, and it remains disputed precisely on that point: how much weight belongs to ideas, and how much to circumstance, negotiation, and the accidents of a rushed and improvised transfer of power.
Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (1985); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition (2007)
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through belief and political culture, Pakistan is a country whose founding purpose — a homeland for the Muslims of South Asia — has never settled into agreement on what kind of Muslim state that actually means. Since 1947, governments, courts, and religious movements have argued over whether Pakistan should be a Muslim-majority country with a broadly secular state, or an Islamic state whose laws are drawn explicitly from religious sources. Both positions can claim roots in the founding: Jinnah himself spoke at times of a state where religion was a private matter, and at other times of Pakistan as a homeland built expressly to protect Islam. That unresolved question has never gone away. It surfaces in disputes over the constitution’s Islamic clauses, over blasphemy law, over the treatment of religious minorities, and over the relationship between the country’s many strands of Islam — including the more devotional, saint-centred practice known as Sufism, and the stricter reform movements that oppose it. Historians of political culture treat this open question — never resolved, only managed — as the deepest and most persistent fact about Pakistani public life.
Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (2009)
Seen through religion and political culture, Pakistan’s turning points are moments when the unsettled place of Islam in the state was forced into the open. The 1949 Objectives Resolution, passed within two years of independence, declared that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God rather than the people alone — a formula every later constitution has kept, and one both religious and secular politicians have claimed for their own purposes. General Zia-ul-Haq’s rule from 1977 to 1988 marked the sharpest turn: he introduced Islamic criminal punishments, a religious taxation system, and a broad programme of enforced piety, reshaping courts, schools, and the army along explicitly religious lines. The rise of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant movement that emerged in the tribal districts along the Afghan border in the mid-2000s and has fought the state ever since, marked a further turn — proof that religious politics, once encouraged from above, could turn violently against the state that had encouraged it. Each moment reshaped how Islam and government relate, and each left institutions — the courts, the tax code, the army’s own self-image — permanently altered rather than merely disturbed for a season, which is why cultural and political historians read them as a single continuous story rather than as isolated crises.
Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (2009); Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011)
On this reading, the sense of belonging that actually holds Pakistani society together runs less through the official, religiously framed nation than through older, local networks of kinship and patronage. The scholar Anatol Lieven argues that day-to-day loyalty in Pakistan flows chiefly through extended kinship groups called biradaris, through landed families and the spiritual authority of Sufi shrines, and through webs of mutual obligation that predate the state and operate largely outside its formal institutions. The national identity proclaimed at independence — a single Muslim nation, defined against India — sits, on this account, as a thin layer over a much denser and older set of loyalties to family, clan, region, and local religious figures. This is why the central government has often struggled to govern effectively even in areas nominally under its full control: real authority is frequently brokered locally, through these informal structures, rather than delivered from the capital. Cultural and political historians favour this account because it explains a paradox a purely national narrative cannot: a state that appears fragile on paper has nonetheless proved durable, precisely because its people rely on these informal bonds rather than on the state itself.
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011)
The lasting force, in this cultural and political reading, is the unresolved partnership — sometimes cooperative, sometimes openly hostile — between formal state power and the country’s deeper religious and kinship-based social order. From the ambiguous religious language of the 1949 Objectives Resolution, through Zia-ul-Haq’s state-directed Islamisation, to today’s violence by religious militants who now target the state itself, Pakistan’s rulers have repeatedly tried to borrow the legitimacy of Islam and of local social hierarchies without ever being fully bound by either. The state needs these forces to govern, since it cannot reach every village or valley on its own authority, yet those same forces — the mosque, the shrine, the biradari, and now the armed religious movement — carry their own independent claims to loyalty, which they have sometimes turned against the government that once cultivated them. What best explains Pakistan’s political life over the long run, on this account, is this uneasy, unfinished bargain between formal state authority and the informal religious and social order running alongside it — a bargain renewed, on different terms, by every generation of rulers rather than settled once by any of them.
Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (2009); Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011)
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Pakistan’s shape is set by one river system: the Indus, which rises in the high Himalayas and Karakoram mountains and runs the length of the country to the Arabian Sea, fed by four great tributary rivers that give the eastern province of Punjab its name — “land of five waters.” This single watershed makes Pakistan’s agricultural heartland possible, irrigating some of the largest continuous farmland on earth, and explains why the population clusters overwhelmingly along the river’s course rather than spreading evenly across the country’s deserts and mountains. Pakistan’s location matters just as much as its water: it sits at the hinge between South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, sharing a long and difficult mountain frontier with Afghanistan, a disputed border with India over the region of Kashmir, and a stretch of Arabian Sea coastline that gives it access to Gulf shipping lanes. On this reading, Pakistan’s history is best understood as the history of a river-valley people who must share their water carefully, and a frontier state that great powers have repeatedly found strategically useful, for reasons that have little to do with religion or ideology.
S. Akbar Zaidi, Issues in Pakistan’s Economy: A Political Economy Perspective (2015)
The turning points, told through resources and geography, are thresholds of water, land, and strategic use. The colonial-era construction of a vast irrigation canal network across Punjab and Sindh, completed mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, converted semi-arid land into some of the most productive farmland in the British Empire and created the settled agricultural society Pakistan inherited at independence. The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, negotiated with India under World Bank supervision, then divided the river system’s water between the two new countries and funded the dams and canal works needed to keep Pakistan’s agriculture running once the rivers’ upper reaches lay across a hostile border — a settlement historians read as completing the state’s water-dependent economic structure. The Cold War then turned geography into strategy: from the 1950s Pakistan aligned with the United States as a frontline state against the Soviet Union, a role it played again after 1979 as the staging ground for the Afghan resistance, and a third time after 2001 in the war against militant groups on its own soil. Each threshold reflects resource control or strategic position rather than ideology.
Majed Akhter, “The Hydropolitical Cold War: The Indus Waters Treaty and State Formation in Pakistan,” Political Geography (2015); S. Akbar Zaidi, Issues in Pakistan’s Economy (2015)
On this reading, the territory that became Pakistan was bound together first by water and agriculture, and only afterward by politics. The canal colonies built across Punjab and Sindh under British rule created a shared irrigation economy, worked increasingly by Muslim cultivators and landholders, well before there was any political demand for a separate Muslim state. This shared agricultural base gave the western provinces of British India a common material interest — access to water, to canal-fed land, and to the markets built around them — that ran alongside, and arguably beneath, the religious appeal of the Pakistan movement. When the country was carved out in 1947, it inherited this working irrigation economy largely intact in the west, while the geographically separate eastern wing, Bengal, shared none of this river system and depended instead on rice and jute agriculture fed by an entirely different set of rivers. Historians reading Pakistan through geography argue this helps explain why the two wings, joined only by religion, proved economically as well as culturally disconnected — and why the western half, built on one coherent watershed, held together after 1971 in a way the wider country could not.
Majed Akhter, “The Hydropolitical Cold War” (2015); S. Akbar Zaidi, Issues in Pakistan’s Economy (2015)
The force that best explains Pakistan’s development, in this reading, is the combination of a single dependent river system and a strategically valuable frontier location, both of which have repeatedly drawn outside powers into the country’s affairs. Water dependency binds Pakistan’s fortunes to a river system whose headwaters lie beyond its control, in Indian-administered territory and the mountains of the north, making irrigation politics and water-sharing a permanent feature of both domestic and foreign policy. Frontier location has done the same in strategic terms: Pakistan’s mountain border with Afghanistan and its position between South and Central Asia have made it, at different times, a Cold War ally, a haven and battleground for militant movements, and more recently a partner in Chinese-financed infrastructure linking western China to the Arabian Sea. Neither force operates by choice; both are fixed by the map. Economic and geographic historians argue that this pairing — a farming economy tied to one river, and a location great powers keep finding useful — explains Pakistan’s history more consistently than any single political or religious cause, since it accounts equally for the country’s agricultural wealth, its recurring foreign alliances, and its unusually persistent strategic relevance.
S. Akbar Zaidi, Issues in Pakistan’s Economy (2015); Majed Akhter, “The Hydropolitical Cold War” (2015)
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The origin of Pakistan itself is the sharpest dispute. The consensus reading treats Partition as the fulfilment of a long-building demand for sovereign Muslim statehood, argued for consistently under the banner of the Two-Nation Theory. The revisionist reading, following Ayesha Jalal, treats the very same events as the outcome of a failed negotiation — a bargaining position that hardened into a country only after a federal compromise collapsed in 1946. The facts of 1947 are not in dispute; whether Pakistan was always the goal, or the fallback after a larger settlement fell through, is.
The break-up of the country in 1971 divides the lenses in a different way. The consensus and cultural readings treat the loss of the eastern wing as proof that a religiously defined nationhood could not, on its own, override deep differences of language and political grievance between Bengal and the western provinces. The economic-geographic reading treats the same rupture as the predictable result of two wings that never shared a common river system, farming economy, or trading base, joined only by faith and separated by everything material. Same rupture, different root: an identity that failed to bind, or a material connection that was never really there.
On one point all four perspectives agree: Pakistan is a state whose religiously defined founding identity has never been matched by a single, settled sense of nationhood across its regions. They part only on why — a strain of holding diverse regions together under one religious banner, a contingent and improvised founding, an unresolved argument over what kind of Islamic state the country should be, or a hard geographic fact that its regions were never bound by a shared resource base to begin with.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (2012); Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (1984); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (1985); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition (2007); David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam (1988); Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (2009); Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011); S. Akbar Zaidi, Issues in Pakistan’s Economy (2015); Majed Akhter, “The Hydropolitical Cold War” (2015). Jalal’s bargaining-counter reading of the Pakistan demand and Gilmartin’s colonial-administrative account of Punjabi political Islam are both influential but actively contested interpretations, presented here as such rather than as settled fact.
Pakistan’s oldest structural strains remain open, and in several places violent. In the northwest, the Pakistani Taliban has intensified its campaign against the state through 2025 and into 2026, striking security forces and infrastructure across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in coordinated waves the group has branded “Operation Khyber.” In the southwest, the decades-old Baloch separatist insurgency has likewise escalated: the Balochistan Liberation Army and allied factions, operating under a joint banner known as Baloch Raaji Aajoi Sangar, have carried out bombings and ambushes against security forces and Chinese-linked infrastructure into early 2026. In the east, a militant attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir in April 2025 triggered the most serious India-Pakistan military confrontation in decades: four days of missile and air strikes in May 2025, India’s Operation Sindoor, ended in a ceasefire, but the underlying dispute over Kashmir remains unresolved, and analysts a year on still describe the risk of renewed conflict as elevated. At home, the army, under a chief now promoted to the rank of field marshal, continues to dominate civilian politics; former prime minister Imran Khan has by August 2026 spent three years in prison on charges his party calls politically motivated, with his health and legal treatment still disputed between his supporters and the courts. The country’s oldest problem — a state still working to convert a religiously defined founding into a settled, shared nationhood — remains, at the time of writing, unresolved.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Al Jazeera, Amnesty International, The Diplomat, CSIS, Congressional Research Service); verified 2026-08-20.
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Pakistan became independent in 1947 when British India was partitioned into a mostly Muslim Pakistan and a mostly Hindu India. This division created lasting tensions, especially over Kashmir, a region both states claim; violence first broke out in 1948 and has flared at different times since. Pakistan also faced internal strains, including the 1971 conflict that ended with East Pakistan breaking away to become Bangladesh.
According to UCDP, Pakistan faces several types of organized violence. The deadliest state-based conflict is over government power, with the TTP as the main armed group and HGB also fighting the state. Another major conflict is in Balochistan, where BRAS and other separatist forces fight the government over the region’s status. Pakistan also sees non-state sectarian violence, including deadly clashes between Sunni and Shiite communities in Kurram.
UCDP reports that violence escalated again in 2024, making it Pakistan’s deadliest year since 2015, with over 1,800 fatalities. Attacks included shootings, suicide bombings, and landmines, alongside government intelligence-led operations. Civilians have been directly targeted in one-sided violence, including around elections and in Balochistan. Regionally, the Kashmir dispute with India remains important, though a 2021 ceasefire reduced recent fighting.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Pakistan has emerged as a critical diplomatic and security actor in West Asia following its May 2025 military conflict with India, which restored its regional credibility. The country signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025 and participates in the Gaza Peace Board. Under the U.S. strategy of “burden shifting,” Washington has positioned Pakistan to play a larger role in West Asia and Central Asia, while India focuses on the Indo-Pacific. This shift reflects a fundamental reassessment that managing both India and Pakistan within a single regional security framework was untenable given their intractable rivalry.
Sources: [1], [5]
Pakistan has positioned itself as a crucial mediator between the United States and Iran following the U.S.-Israeli invasion of Iran and Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Islamabad hosted the first face-to-face talks between Iran and U.S. leadership since 1979 and continues backdoor diplomacy to narrow differences between both sides. Pakistan’s security pacts with Saudi Arabia and friendly ties with Iran motivated its mediation efforts to prevent regional escalation. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar secured Chinese endorsement of a five-point peace plan, cementing Pakistan’s position as an indispensable diplomatic bridge for maintaining regional energy flows and preventing broader regional conflict.
Sources: [1], [5]
Pakistan maintains simultaneous working relationships with Washington, Beijing, Tehran, and Gulf capitals—a position few formally aligned states possess. This diplomatic flexibility gives Pakistan strategic relevance as U.S. crises across the Middle East, Red Sea, and Indo-Pacific increasingly overlap. Islamabad is consolidating alignment with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt while India deepens ties with Israel and the UAE, positioning Pakistan as an anchor of an alternative network of Muslim-majority middle powers. Pakistan’s ability to preserve communication channels across deeply polarized geopolitical camps makes it valuable to Washington and other great powers navigating fragmented regional orders.
Sources: [1], [5], [7]
The Indus Valley civilization, one of the world’s oldest and dating back at least 5,000 years, spread across much of modern-day Pakistan. During the second millennium B.C., remnants of this culture fused with migrating Indo-Aryan peoples.
In subsequent centuries, the area experienced successive invasions by Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Arabs (who brought Islam), Afghans, and Turks. The Mughal Empire flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries, before British power came to dominate the region in the 18th century.
The 1947 partition of British India created the Muslim state of Pakistan, with West and East sections, and a largely Hindu India. This division produced lasting tension between the two countries.
Pakistan and India fought two wars and a limited conflict—1947-48, 1965, and 1999—over the Kashmir territory, a dispute that continues to this day.
A third war in 1971 resulted in East Pakistan becoming the separate nation of Bangladesh. In this conflict, India assisted an indigenous movement reacting to Bengali marginalization in Pakistani politics.
In response to Indian nuclear weapons testing, Pakistan conducted its own tests in 1998.
Pakistan has been engaged in a decades-long armed conflict with militant groups, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other militant networks that target government institutions and civilians.
Pakistan’s conflicts are driven by insurgencies from various militant groups such as the TTP, IS, BRAS, and HGB who oppose state authority, as well as sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni communities. These internal issues are compounded by interstate conflicts with Afghanistan and Iran, involving state actors contesting border and political problems. Political faction supporters, such as those backing MQM and PPP, further add to the complex landscape of violence within urban areas.
Civilians in Pakistan suffer both collateral and deliberate violence from multiple actors in this complex conflict environment. Groups like TTP, BRAS, and Jaish al-Adl have caused severe deliberate civilian harm, while state actors and other militant groups have also been responsible for collateral casualties. This results in a high human cost for local populations caught between insurgencies, sectarian clashes, and political violence.
Sources: UCDP data.
The Government of Pakistan is engaged in multiple armed conflicts with insurgent groups such as BRAS, HGB, IS, and TTP, aiming to maintain state security and territorial control. It is allied with the Government of Afghanistan in interstate conflict dynamics and is responsible for mixed civilian harm, both collateral and direct, through its security operations.
The Government of Afghanistan is involved in interstate tension and conflict with Pakistan while also causing collateral harm to civilians within its operations. It is allied with the Government of Pakistan against common threats, but the relationship remains complex due to overlapping conflicts.
The Government of Iran is engaged in conflict with Jaish al-Adl, a non-state armed group, focusing on controlling insurgency and maintaining border security, with collateral civilian casualties reported in the conflict zone.
Jaish al-Adl is an insurgent group fighting the Government of Iran and responsible for deliberate violence against civilians, often targeting ethnic and sectarian groups, contributing significantly to civilian casualties.
BRAS is an insurgent faction opposing the Government of Pakistan and conducting deliberate attacks causing civilian deaths, often overlapping with other militant groups like TTP in regional violence.
HGB is a militant insurgent group active against the Government of Pakistan, but with relatively low recorded civilian harm, and unclear alliances based on available data.
IS operates as a non-state insurgent actor against the Government of Pakistan and also conflicts with the Taleban, their ideological rival, creating both deliberate and collateral civilian casualties in the region.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is a major insurgent group targeting the Government of Pakistan and civilians, causing severe civilian harm through violent tactics and attacks; it is allied with groups like BRAS to further its objectives.
The Taleban is a non-state insurgent group primarily fighting IS, with its role in Pakistan's conflicts complex due to cross-border influences; civilian harm related to Taleban actions is reported as relatively low here.
The Shia community in Pakistan is engaged in sectarian violence with Sunni groups, with limited recorded civilian harm and uncertain alliances based on available evidence.
Sunni groups in Pakistan participate in sectarian clashes with Shia communities, marked by low recorded civilian harm and unclear alliance structures.
Supporters of the MQM are involved in violent clashes with supporters of the PPP within Pakistan’s political landscape, resulting in low levels of civilian harm and unclear alliances.
Supporters of the PPP engage in violent clashes with supporters of the MQM, contributing to political violence in Pakistan, though this conflict is marked by low civilian harm and ambiguous alliances.
The conflicts in Pakistan stem from a combination of state efforts to maintain territorial integrity against multiple insurgent groups, sectarian divisions, and political factionalism. Regional dynamics, including interstate tensions with Afghanistan and Iran, as well as internal insurgencies like TTP and IS, further complicate the security environment. These multifaceted conflicts reflect ethnic, religious, and political grievances deeply rooted in the country’s history and geopolitics.
British India is partitioned, creating Pakistan as a Muslim-majority dominion in two wings separated by India. Massive communal violence and disputed borders, especially over Kashmir, embed security concerns and militarization that later shape Pakistan’s internal conflicts and frontier governance.
General Ayub Khan seizes power, beginning Pakistan’s cycle of military-led governments. Centralized decision-making, marginalization of provinces, and heavy security focus deepen grievances in regions like Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, laying groundwork for later separatist and Islamist armed movements.
Civil war and Indo-Pakistani conflict lead to the secession of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. The trauma of disintegration reinforces military dominance and suspicion of ethno-nationalist movements, shaping harsh responses to Baloch and Pashtun demands that still influence today’s insurgencies.
Dismissal of Balochistan’s provincial government and heavy-handed federal rule trigger a major Baloch insurgency. The conflict is fought over autonomy and resource control, establishing patterns of militarization and mistrust that continue in today’s Baloch separatist violence, including BRAS activities.
General Zia overthrows civilian government and promotes Islamization, expanding Sharia-based laws and empowering Islamist groups. State-backed religious politics, combined with repression of dissent, foster sectarian identities and militant networks that later evolve into organizations like TTP and sectarian militias.
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan makes Pakistan a key US ally. Pakistani and foreign intelligence arm Afghan mujahideen via tribal areas. Weapons, refugees, and jihadist networks entrench militancy and porous borders, conditions that later incubate Pakistani Taliban and cross-border armed groups.
Pakistan conducts nuclear tests after India, formalizing a nuclear-armed rivalry. Strategic focus on India diverts resources to conventional and nuclear deterrence while internal security strains grow, contributing to limited state capacity in peripheral regions where insurgencies and sectarian violence take root.
After 9/11, Pakistan joins the US-led ‘war on terror’ while hosting Afghan Taliban elements. Operations in tribal areas and drone strikes generate local resentment and militant blowback, setting conditions for Pakistani Taliban formation and radicalization in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA.
Militant factions in tribal areas unite as TTP, targeting Pakistani security forces and civilians to challenge state authority. Insurgency and counterinsurgency concentrate in northwest Pakistan, creating the core government–TTP confrontation that remains central to Pakistan’s present organized armed violence.
Army launches major offensive in North Waziristan to dismantle TTP infrastructure. Violence temporarily declines, but many militants disperse to Afghanistan or urban cells, leading to reconfigured networks and a protracted conflict that resurges later rather than a decisive end to insurgency.
In response to the 2014 Peshawar school massacre, Pakistan adopts the National Action Plan, empowering military courts and intensifying crackdowns on militants. While reducing some attacks, it does not resolve roots of militancy or provincial grievances, leaving space for renewed violence.
As CPEC projects expand through Balochistan, Baloch insurgent groups, including BRAS’s components, intensify attacks against security forces and infrastructure. Perceptions of resource exploitation without local benefit reinforce separatist narratives, directly contributing to today’s heightened fatalities in the Balochistan conflict.
The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan strengthens TTP’s sanctuary and morale. Failed or fragile Pakistan–TTP ceasefire attempts coincide with rising attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, significantly escalating state–insurgent fighting that underpins Pakistan’s elevated conflict death tolls by 2024.
BRAS-linked attacks increasingly target military and economic sites in Balochistan, while Shia–Sunni clashes in Kurram, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, kill hundreds before late-2024 ceasefires. Combined with intensified TTP operations, these trends produce Pakistan’s highest annual conflict fatalities since 2015 and sustain civil-war conditions.
