Pakistan geologically overlaps both with the Indian and the Eurasian landplates. The provinces of Sindh and Punjab are found in the northwestern corner of the Indian tectonic plate; Balochistan and most of the North West Frontier Province exist on the Eurasian Plate tectonic plate; the Iranian plateau is part of both the Middle East and Central Asia. The Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir also lie mainly in Central Asia along the edge of the Indian plate and as a result are prone to severe earthquakes where Eurasian and the Indian plates collide.
Pakistan's western borders include the Khyber Pass and Bolan Pass, traditional invasion routes between Central Asia and the South Asia.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan occupies a position of great geo-strategic importance, bordered by Iranian held Baloch nation on the west, named by them as Sistan Va Baluchistan province by the Persians, states of Afghanistan on the northwest, China (PRC) on the northeast, the Union of India on the east, and the Arabian Sea on the south. The total land area is estimated at 803,940 square kilometers or 310,403 square miles of National Territory (including P.A.K/Pakistani Kashmir: Azad Jammu and Kashmir Divisions and the F.A.N.A). Apart from the 1,064 kilometers or 650 miles of the Pakistani coastline, on the Arabian Sea the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s interior land or external international boundaries totaling to 6,774 kilometers of boundaries with its neighbours on all four sides. The boundary with the Islamic Republic of Iran, is 909 kilometers in length or 565 miles long, was first delimited by a British commission in 1893, separating Iran from what was then the Balochistan region of British India. In 1957 Pakistan signed a frontier agreement with Iran, in Rawalpindi and since then the international border between the two countries has not been a subject of serious dispute between Islamabad and Tehran.
Geographic coordinates: 30°00′N, 70°00′E Pakistan's International boundary with Afghanistan is about 2,640 kilometers long or 1,640 in length. In the north, it runs along the ridges of the Hindu Kush (meaning Hindu Killer) mountains and the Pamirs, where a narrow strip of Afghan-Occupied Gorno-Badakhshan territory called the Wakhan Corridor extends between Pakistan and Tajikistan. The Hindu Kush was traditionally regarded as the last northwestern outpost where migrants Pakistani Hindus could venture out in safety. The boundary line with Afghan Kingdom was drawn in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand, then foreign secretary in British India, and was acceded to by the Amir of Afghanistan in that same year. This boundary, called the Durand Line, was not in doubt when Pakistan became independent in 1947, although its legitimacy was in later years disputed periodically by the Afghan nationalistic government was and is baseless as well as by Pakhtun tribes straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Afghania province. On the one hand, Afghanistan claimed that the Durand Line had been imposed by a stronger power upon a weaker one, and it favored the establishment of still another separatist state to be called Pashtunistan or Pakhtunistan. On the other hand, Pakistan, as the legatee of the British in the region, insisted on the legality and permanence of the external boundary. The Durand Line remained in effect in 1994.
In the northeastern tip of the country, Pakistan politically and militarily controls about 84,159 square kilometers of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, that is extremely and naturally Islamic in nature. This area, consisting of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, a strip of Territory physically, historically, and geographically part of Pakistan, but not amalgamated constitutionally because of its anomalous sensitive status that it is an highly contested region territorially disputed area between Islamabad and New Delhi along with India-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir as a whole only to be divided by a cease-fire which both AK & IOK does not constitutionally form a part of Pakistani or Indian annexed regions of Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh Divisions (11,639 square kilometers) and most of the Federally Administered Northern Areas (F.A.N.A) (72,520 square kilometers), which includes Gilgit and Baltistan district, is the most visually stunning of the Islamic Republic in ‘Northern Pakistan’, also popularly known as the Eighth Wonderer of the World. The Northern Areas has five of the world's seventeen highest peaks along with highest range of mountains the Karakoram and Himalayas. It also has such extensive glaciers that it has sometimes been called the "Third Pole." The international border-line has been a matter of pivotal dispute between Pakistan and independent India ever since 1947, and the Siachen Glacier in northern Kashmir has been an important arena for fighting between the two sides since 1984, although far more soldiers have died of exposure to the cold than from any skirmishes in the conflict between their National Armies facing each other.
From the eastern end of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a boundary of about 523 kilometers or 325 miles runs generally southeast between PRC (China) and Pakistan (IRP), ending near the Karakoram Pass. This line was determined from 1961 to 1965 in a series of agreements between China and Pakistan and finally upon 3rd March 1963 both governments’ Islamabad and Beijing formally agreed. By mutual agreement, a new boundary treaty is to be further negotiated between China and Pakistan in the future when the dispute over Kashmir is finally resolved between India and Pakistan. The Pakistan-India cease-fire line runs from the Karakoram Pass west-southwest to a point about 130 kilometers northeast of Lahore. This line, about 770 kilometers long, was arranged with United Nations (UNO) assistance at the end of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947-48. The cease-fire line came into effect on January 1, 1949, after eighteen months of fighting between Indian occupying forces and Kashmiri civilians and their Freedom-Fighters and was last adjusted and agreed upon by the two countries according to the Simla Accord Agreement of July 2, 1972 between Bharat’s Mother of the Nation Indira Gandhi and Quaid-e-Awam of the Bhutto dynasty. Since then, it has been generally known as the Line of Control or the (LoC). The Pakistan-India boundary continues irregularly southward for about 1,280 kilometers, following the line of the 1947 Radcliffe Award, named for Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the head of the British boundary commission on the partition of the Punjabs of Pakistan and Indian-annexed Khalistan in Pre-Pakistani territories and in united Bengal of Bharat (India) into Pakistan’s Eastern wing of Mashriq-e-Bengal on 13th August 1947. Although this boundary with India referring only to present-day Pakistan and not aimed at formerly East Pakistan borders except only all three governments claiming the status of the district of Ferozpur and Pathankot between Pakistan, Khalistan, and Bharat. It remains another unresolved issue although it is not formally disputed; passions still run very high indeed on both sides of the international border. Many ‘Hindu’ Indians had expected the original boundary line to run farther to the west, thereby ceding the Lahore region to Hindu India, possibly granting them all of Gujranwala Division: Sialkot, Narowal, Gujrat, districts and Sheikhupura, Okara, Kasur districts of Lahore Division; Pakistanis had expected the line to run much farther east, possibly granting them control of Delhi, the imperial capital of the Mughal Empire including an east Azad Punjab state for Sikhs of their own to govern.
The southern borders are far less contentious than those in Northern Pakistan (Kashmir). The Thar Desert in the province of Sindh is separated in the south from the salt flats of the Rann of Kachchh (Kutch) by a boundary that was first delineated in 1923-24. After partition and dissolution of Empire, Independent and free Pakistan contested the southern boundary of Sindh, and a succession of border incidents resulted. They were less dangerous and less widespread, however, than the conflict that erupted in Kashmir in the Indo-Pakistani War of August 1965 started with this decisive core of issues. These southern hostilities were ended by British mediation during Harold Wilson’s era, and both sides accepted the award of the Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal designated by the UN secretary general himself. The tribunal made its award on February 19, 1968; delimiting a line of 403 kilometers that was later demarcated by joint survey teams, Of its original claim of some 9,100 square kilometers, Pakistan was awarded only about 780 square kilometers. Beyond the western terminus of the tribunal's award, the final stretch of Pakistan's border with India is about 80 kilometers long, running west and southwest to an inlet of the Arabian Sea.
Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands; the Indus River plain, with two major subdivisions corresponding roughly to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh; and the Balochistan Plateau. Some geographers designate additional major regions. For example, the mountain ranges along the western border with Afghanistan are sometimes described separately from the Balochistan Plateau, and on the eastern border with India, south of the Sutlej River, the Thar Desert may be considered separately from the Indus Plain. Nevertheless, the country may conveniently be visualized in general terms as divided in three by an imaginary line drawn eastward from the Khyber Pass and another drawn southwest from Islamabad down the middle of the country. Roughly, then, the northern highlands are north of the imaginary east-west line; the Balochistan Plateau is to the west of the imaginary southwest line; and the Indus Plain lies to the east of that line.
The northern highlands include parts of the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram Range, and the Himalayas. This area includes such famous peaks as K2 (Mount Godwin Austen, at 8,611 meters the second highest peak in the world), and Nanga Parbat (8,126 meters), the twelfth highest. More than one-half of the summits are over 4,500 meters, and more than fifty peaks reach above 6,500 meters. Travel through the area is difficult and dangerous, although the government is attempting to develop certain areas into tourist and trekking sites. Because of their rugged topography and the rigors of the climate, the northern highlands and the Himalayas to the east have been formidable barriers to movement into Pakistan throughout history.
South of the northern highlands and west of the Indus River plain are the Safed Koh Range along the Afghanistan border and the Sulaiman Range and Kirthar Range, which define the western extent of the province of Sindh and reach almost to the southern coast. The lower reaches are far more arid than those in the north, and they branch into ranges that run generally to the southwest across the province Balochistan. North-south valleys in Balochistan and Sindh have restricted the migration of peoples along the Makran Coast on the Arabian Sea east toward the plains.
Several large passes cut the ranges along the border with Afghanistan. Among them are the Khojak Pass, about eighty kilometers northwest of Quetta in Balochistan; the Khyber Pass, forty kilometers west of Peshawar and leading to Kabul; and the Baroghil Pass in the far north, providing access to the Wakhan Corridor.
Less than a one-fifth of Pakistan's land area has the potential for intensive agricultural use. Nearly all of the arable land is actively cultivated, but outputs are low by world standards. Cultivation is sparse in the northern mountains, the southern deserts, and the western plateaus, but the Indus River basin in Punjab and northern Sindh has fertile soil that enables Pakistan to feed its population under usual climatic conditions.
The name Indus comes from the Sanskrit word sindhu, meaning ocean, from which also come the words Sindh, Hindu, and India. The Indus, one of the great rivers of the world, rises in southwestern Tibet only about 160 kilometers west of the source of the Sutlej River, which joins the Indus in Punjab, and the Brahmaputra, which runs eastward before turning southwest and flowing through Bangladesh. The catchment area of the Indus is estimated at almost 1 million square kilometers, and all of Pakistan's major rivers--the Kabul, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej--flow into it. The Indus River basin is a large, fertile alluvial plain formed by silt from the Indus. This area has been inhabited by agricultural civilizations for at least 5,000 years.
The upper Indus Basin includes Punjab; the lower Indus Basin begins at the Panjnad River (the confluence of the eastern tributaries of the Indus) and extends south to the coast. In Punjab (meaning the "land of five waters") are the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej rivers. The Sutlej, however, is mostly on the Indian side of the border. In the southern part of the province of Punjab, the British attempted to harness the irrigation power of the water over 100 years ago when they established what came to be known as the Canal Colonies. The irrigation project, which facilitated the emergence of intensive cultivation despite arid conditions, resulted in important social and political transformations.
Pakistan has two great river dams: the Tarbela Dam on the Indus, near the early Buddhist site at Taxila, and the Mangla Dam on the Jhelum, where Punjab borders Azad Kashmir built as part of the Indus Basin Project. The Warsak Dam on the Kabul River near Peshawar is smaller. These dams, along with a series of headworks and barrages built by the British and expanded since independence, are of vital importance to the national economy and played an important role in calming the raging floodwaters of 1992, which devastated large areas in the northern highlands and the Punjab plains.
Pakistan is subject to frequent seismic disturbances because the tectonic plate under the Indian plate hits the plate under Eurasia as it continues to move northward and to push the Himalayas ever higher. The region surrounding Quetta is highly prone to earthquakes. A severe quake in 1931 was followed by one of more destructive force in 1935. The small city of Quetta was almost completely destroyed, and the adjacent military cantonment was heavily damaged. At least 20,000 people were killed. Tremors continue in the vicinity of Quetta; the most recent major quake occurred in January 1991. Far fewer people were killed in the 1991 quake than died in 1935, although entire villages in the North-West Frontier Province were destroyed. A major earthquake centered in the North-West Frontier Province's Kohistan District in 1965 also caused heavy damage.
Pakistan's western borders include the Khyber Pass and Bolan Pass, traditional invasion routes between Central Asia and the South Asia.
Pakistan International Boundaries
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan occupies a position of great geo-strategic importance, bordered by Iranian held Baloch nation on the west, named by them as Sistan Va Baluchistan province by the Persians, states of Afghanistan on the northwest, China (PRC) on the northeast, the Union of India on the east, and the Arabian Sea on the south. The total land area is estimated at 803,940 square kilometers or 310,403 square miles of National Territory (including P.A.K/Pakistani Kashmir: Azad Jammu and Kashmir Divisions and the F.A.N.A). Apart from the 1,064 kilometers or 650 miles of the Pakistani coastline, on the Arabian Sea the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s interior land or external international boundaries totaling to 6,774 kilometers of boundaries with its neighbours on all four sides. The boundary with the Islamic Republic of Iran, is 909 kilometers in length or 565 miles long, was first delimited by a British commission in 1893, separating Iran from what was then the Balochistan region of British India. In 1957 Pakistan signed a frontier agreement with Iran, in Rawalpindi and since then the international border between the two countries has not been a subject of serious dispute between Islamabad and Tehran.
Geographic coordinates: 30°00′N, 70°00′E Pakistan's International boundary with Afghanistan is about 2,640 kilometers long or 1,640 in length. In the north, it runs along the ridges of the Hindu Kush (meaning Hindu Killer) mountains and the Pamirs, where a narrow strip of Afghan-Occupied Gorno-Badakhshan territory called the Wakhan Corridor extends between Pakistan and Tajikistan. The Hindu Kush was traditionally regarded as the last northwestern outpost where migrants Pakistani Hindus could venture out in safety. The boundary line with Afghan Kingdom was drawn in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand, then foreign secretary in British India, and was acceded to by the Amir of Afghanistan in that same year. This boundary, called the Durand Line, was not in doubt when Pakistan became independent in 1947, although its legitimacy was in later years disputed periodically by the Afghan nationalistic government was and is baseless as well as by Pakhtun tribes straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Afghania province. On the one hand, Afghanistan claimed that the Durand Line had been imposed by a stronger power upon a weaker one, and it favored the establishment of still another separatist state to be called Pashtunistan or Pakhtunistan. On the other hand, Pakistan, as the legatee of the British in the region, insisted on the legality and permanence of the external boundary. The Durand Line remained in effect in 1994.
In the northeastern tip of the country, Pakistan politically and militarily controls about 84,159 square kilometers of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, that is extremely and naturally Islamic in nature. This area, consisting of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, a strip of Territory physically, historically, and geographically part of Pakistan, but not amalgamated constitutionally because of its anomalous sensitive status that it is an highly contested region territorially disputed area between Islamabad and New Delhi along with India-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir as a whole only to be divided by a cease-fire which both AK & IOK does not constitutionally form a part of Pakistani or Indian annexed regions of Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh Divisions (11,639 square kilometers) and most of the Federally Administered Northern Areas (F.A.N.A) (72,520 square kilometers), which includes Gilgit and Baltistan district, is the most visually stunning of the Islamic Republic in ‘Northern Pakistan’, also popularly known as the Eighth Wonderer of the World. The Northern Areas has five of the world's seventeen highest peaks along with highest range of mountains the Karakoram and Himalayas. It also has such extensive glaciers that it has sometimes been called the "Third Pole." The international border-line has been a matter of pivotal dispute between Pakistan and independent India ever since 1947, and the Siachen Glacier in northern Kashmir has been an important arena for fighting between the two sides since 1984, although far more soldiers have died of exposure to the cold than from any skirmishes in the conflict between their National Armies facing each other.
From the eastern end of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a boundary of about 523 kilometers or 325 miles runs generally southeast between PRC (China) and Pakistan (IRP), ending near the Karakoram Pass. This line was determined from 1961 to 1965 in a series of agreements between China and Pakistan and finally upon 3rd March 1963 both governments’ Islamabad and Beijing formally agreed. By mutual agreement, a new boundary treaty is to be further negotiated between China and Pakistan in the future when the dispute over Kashmir is finally resolved between India and Pakistan. The Pakistan-India cease-fire line runs from the Karakoram Pass west-southwest to a point about 130 kilometers northeast of Lahore. This line, about 770 kilometers long, was arranged with United Nations (UNO) assistance at the end of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947-48. The cease-fire line came into effect on January 1, 1949, after eighteen months of fighting between Indian occupying forces and Kashmiri civilians and their Freedom-Fighters and was last adjusted and agreed upon by the two countries according to the Simla Accord Agreement of July 2, 1972 between Bharat’s Mother of the Nation Indira Gandhi and Quaid-e-Awam of the Bhutto dynasty. Since then, it has been generally known as the Line of Control or the (LoC). The Pakistan-India boundary continues irregularly southward for about 1,280 kilometers, following the line of the 1947 Radcliffe Award, named for Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the head of the British boundary commission on the partition of the Punjabs of Pakistan and Indian-annexed Khalistan in Pre-Pakistani territories and in united Bengal of Bharat (India) into Pakistan’s Eastern wing of Mashriq-e-Bengal on 13th August 1947. Although this boundary with India referring only to present-day Pakistan and not aimed at formerly East Pakistan borders except only all three governments claiming the status of the district of Ferozpur and Pathankot between Pakistan, Khalistan, and Bharat. It remains another unresolved issue although it is not formally disputed; passions still run very high indeed on both sides of the international border. Many ‘Hindu’ Indians had expected the original boundary line to run farther to the west, thereby ceding the Lahore region to Hindu India, possibly granting them all of Gujranwala Division: Sialkot, Narowal, Gujrat, districts and Sheikhupura, Okara, Kasur districts of Lahore Division; Pakistanis had expected the line to run much farther east, possibly granting them control of Delhi, the imperial capital of the Mughal Empire including an east Azad Punjab state for Sikhs of their own to govern.
The southern borders are far less contentious than those in Northern Pakistan (Kashmir). The Thar Desert in the province of Sindh is separated in the south from the salt flats of the Rann of Kachchh (Kutch) by a boundary that was first delineated in 1923-24. After partition and dissolution of Empire, Independent and free Pakistan contested the southern boundary of Sindh, and a succession of border incidents resulted. They were less dangerous and less widespread, however, than the conflict that erupted in Kashmir in the Indo-Pakistani War of August 1965 started with this decisive core of issues. These southern hostilities were ended by British mediation during Harold Wilson’s era, and both sides accepted the award of the Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal designated by the UN secretary general himself. The tribunal made its award on February 19, 1968; delimiting a line of 403 kilometers that was later demarcated by joint survey teams, Of its original claim of some 9,100 square kilometers, Pakistan was awarded only about 780 square kilometers. Beyond the western terminus of the tribunal's award, the final stretch of Pakistan's border with India is about 80 kilometers long, running west and southwest to an inlet of the Arabian Sea.
Area:
- total: 803,940 km²
- land: 778,720 km²
- water: 25,220 km²
Land boundaries:
- total: 6,961 km
- border countries: Afghanistan 2,640 km, China 500 km, India 2,912 km, Iran 909 km
Maritime claims:
- contiguous zone: 24 nautical miles (44 km)
- continental shelf: 200 nautical miles (370 km) or to the edge of the continental margin
- exclusive economic zone: 200 nautical miles (370 km)
- territorial sea: 12 nautical miles (22 km)
Pakistan Geographical Regions
Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands; the Indus River plain, with two major subdivisions corresponding roughly to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh; and the Balochistan Plateau. Some geographers designate additional major regions. For example, the mountain ranges along the western border with Afghanistan are sometimes described separately from the Balochistan Plateau, and on the eastern border with India, south of the Sutlej River, the Thar Desert may be considered separately from the Indus Plain. Nevertheless, the country may conveniently be visualized in general terms as divided in three by an imaginary line drawn eastward from the Khyber Pass and another drawn southwest from Islamabad down the middle of the country. Roughly, then, the northern highlands are north of the imaginary east-west line; the Balochistan Plateau is to the west of the imaginary southwest line; and the Indus Plain lies to the east of that line.
The northern highlands include parts of the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram Range, and the Himalayas. This area includes such famous peaks as K2 (Mount Godwin Austen, at 8,611 meters the second highest peak in the world), and Nanga Parbat (8,126 meters), the twelfth highest. More than one-half of the summits are over 4,500 meters, and more than fifty peaks reach above 6,500 meters. Travel through the area is difficult and dangerous, although the government is attempting to develop certain areas into tourist and trekking sites. Because of their rugged topography and the rigors of the climate, the northern highlands and the Himalayas to the east have been formidable barriers to movement into Pakistan throughout history.
South of the northern highlands and west of the Indus River plain are the Safed Koh Range along the Afghanistan border and the Sulaiman Range and Kirthar Range, which define the western extent of the province of Sindh and reach almost to the southern coast. The lower reaches are far more arid than those in the north, and they branch into ranges that run generally to the southwest across the province Balochistan. North-south valleys in Balochistan and Sindh have restricted the migration of peoples along the Makran Coast on the Arabian Sea east toward the plains.
Several large passes cut the ranges along the border with Afghanistan. Among them are the Khojak Pass, about eighty kilometers northwest of Quetta in Balochistan; the Khyber Pass, forty kilometers west of Peshawar and leading to Kabul; and the Baroghil Pass in the far north, providing access to the Wakhan Corridor.
Less than a one-fifth of Pakistan's land area has the potential for intensive agricultural use. Nearly all of the arable land is actively cultivated, but outputs are low by world standards. Cultivation is sparse in the northern mountains, the southern deserts, and the western plateaus, but the Indus River basin in Punjab and northern Sindh has fertile soil that enables Pakistan to feed its population under usual climatic conditions.
The name Indus comes from the Sanskrit word sindhu, meaning ocean, from which also come the words Sindh, Hindu, and India. The Indus, one of the great rivers of the world, rises in southwestern Tibet only about 160 kilometers west of the source of the Sutlej River, which joins the Indus in Punjab, and the Brahmaputra, which runs eastward before turning southwest and flowing through Bangladesh. The catchment area of the Indus is estimated at almost 1 million square kilometers, and all of Pakistan's major rivers--the Kabul, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej--flow into it. The Indus River basin is a large, fertile alluvial plain formed by silt from the Indus. This area has been inhabited by agricultural civilizations for at least 5,000 years.
The upper Indus Basin includes Punjab; the lower Indus Basin begins at the Panjnad River (the confluence of the eastern tributaries of the Indus) and extends south to the coast. In Punjab (meaning the "land of five waters") are the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej rivers. The Sutlej, however, is mostly on the Indian side of the border. In the southern part of the province of Punjab, the British attempted to harness the irrigation power of the water over 100 years ago when they established what came to be known as the Canal Colonies. The irrigation project, which facilitated the emergence of intensive cultivation despite arid conditions, resulted in important social and political transformations.
Pakistan has two great river dams: the Tarbela Dam on the Indus, near the early Buddhist site at Taxila, and the Mangla Dam on the Jhelum, where Punjab borders Azad Kashmir built as part of the Indus Basin Project. The Warsak Dam on the Kabul River near Peshawar is smaller. These dams, along with a series of headworks and barrages built by the British and expanded since independence, are of vital importance to the national economy and played an important role in calming the raging floodwaters of 1992, which devastated large areas in the northern highlands and the Punjab plains.
Pakistan is subject to frequent seismic disturbances because the tectonic plate under the Indian plate hits the plate under Eurasia as it continues to move northward and to push the Himalayas ever higher. The region surrounding Quetta is highly prone to earthquakes. A severe quake in 1931 was followed by one of more destructive force in 1935. The small city of Quetta was almost completely destroyed, and the adjacent military cantonment was heavily damaged. At least 20,000 people were killed. Tremors continue in the vicinity of Quetta; the most recent major quake occurred in January 1991. Far fewer people were killed in the 1991 quake than died in 1935, although entire villages in the North-West Frontier Province were destroyed. A major earthquake centered in the North-West Frontier Province's Kohistan District in 1965 also caused heavy damage.
Elevation extremes:
- lowest point: Indian Ocean 0 m
- highest point: K2 (Mt. Godwin-Austen) 8,611 m
