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By Root 1410 0

created a powerful synthesis of modern Western military organization with local traditions, and underpinned this with a system of land grants to reward loyal soldiers and recruiters. The British military system was entwined with the vast irrigation projects started in central Punjab by the British; the new ‘canal colonies’, in what had formerly been wasteland, were intended not only greatly to increase food production (which they did) but to provide both men and horses to the British Indian army.

1. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan

2. Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, military ruler 1958 – 69

3. Surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, Dhaka, 16 December 1971

4. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister 1971 – 77

5. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, military ruler 1977 – 88

6. Pakistani soldiers on the Siachen Glacier, Kashmir, August 2002

7. Asif Ali Zardari (left) and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, with the portrait of the late Benazir Bhutto (2007)

8. Benazir Bhutto (1989)

9. Poster of the Bhutto-Zardari family (2010)

10. Nawaz Sharif (left) and Shahbaz Sharif (2008)

11. General Pervez Musharraf (right), military ruler 1999 – 2008, with US Vice-President Dick Cheney, Islamabad, 26 February 2007

12. General Ashfaq Kayani, Chief of the Army Staff, November 2007

13. President Asif Ali Zardari with President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad (centre) of Iran and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan (left), Tehran, 24 May 2009

14. MQM women activists with pictures of Altaf Hussain (2007)

15. MQM Rally in Karachi (2007)

16. The aftermath of the suicide attack by the Pakistani Taleban on the Lahore High Court, 10 January 2008

17. A demonstrator with a placard of Osama bin Laden, Karachi, 7 October 2001

18. A demonstration in support of the Afghan Taleban, Karachi, 26 October 2001

19. Jamaat Islami demonstrating in Peshawar against US drone attacks, 16 May 2008

20. Mahsud tribesmen meet for a jirga to discuss US drone attacks, Tank, 20 April 2009

21. Pakistani soldiers in South Waziristan, October 2009

22. A terrorist attack in Peshawar, 5 December 2008

23. Destruction caused by the floods in Azalkhel, NWFP, 9 August 2010

24. A terrorist attack by Lashkar-e-Taiba in Mumbai, India, November 2008: the aftermath of the attack on the railway station

25. Muslim Khan, Pakistani Taleban spokesman, Swat, 28 March 2009

26. Pakistani Taleban supporters celebrate promulgation of the Nizam-e-Adl agreement, Swat, 16 April 2009

27. A Taleban patrol in Swat, April 2009

28. Pakistani soldiers on guard in Swat, September 2009

29. Hakimullah Mahsud, Amir (leader) of the Pakistani Taleban, Orakzai Tribal Agency, 9 February 2010

30. A victim of a suicide bombing, Kohat, 7 September 2010

The development of electoral politics from the 1880s led to political mobilization along religious lines. There were periodic explosions of communal violence, such as the riots in Rawalpindi in 1926 over the building of a cinema next to a mosque. However, British patronage, common agrarian interests and fear of communal violence meant that until the very last years of British rule, Punjab politics was dominated by the Unionist Party, which brought together Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landowners and their rural followers.

As independence approached in 1945 – 7, the Unionists collapsed under the triple blows of Muslim League agitation for Pakistan, Sikh agitation for a Sikh-dominated province or even independent state (something that was to resurface in the Sikh extremist rebellion against India in the 1980s), and the refusal of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress to accept a confederal India with a semi-independent position for Punjab. Exacerbated by the haste of the British withdrawal, and some perverse decisions by the Radcliffe boundary commission, the result was the appalling bloodletting that gripped the province after March 1947, and resulted in a crescendo of violence in the weeks following independence and partition in August.

In the resulting massacres on both sides, between 200,000