From K2 on the Chinese border to the mangroves of the Arabian Sea, Pakistan is a South Asian country between Iran, Afghanistan, China and India, with a 1,046 km coastline on the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman. It covers roughly 882,000 km², a figure that includes Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, parts of the Kashmir region also claimed by India. Its land falls into three broad regions: the northern highlands of the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalaya; the Indus plain of Punjab and Sindh; and the dry Balochistan Plateau in the west. The highest point is K2, 8,611 m, the world’s second-highest mountain, on the Karakoram border with China; the lowest is sea level on the Arabian Sea. The great river is the Indus, roughly 3,180 km long. It gathers the Gilgit, Kabul, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej before reaching the sea south-east of Karachi, and it waters most of the country’s 241.5 million people (2023 census). The clearest way to see how those regions fit together is to travel them: down the Karakoram Highway from the Chinese border, then along the Indus to its delta.
Khunjerab Pass, 4,693 Metres, on the Chinese Border
The route begins at the top. The Karakoram Highway, or N-35, crosses from China’s Xinjiang into Pakistan at the Khunjerab Pass, 4,693 m above sea level; the road itself peaks at about 4,714 m nearby, making the highway one of the highest paved roads in the world. The name comes from the local Wakhi language and is usually explained as “waterfall house”, after the spring-fed creeks of the valley. China and Pakistan built the highway between 1962 and 1979 and opened it to the public in 1986. Pakistan had first wanted a route over the Mintaka Pass, but in 1966 China recommended the steeper Khunjerab instead. About 810 Pakistani and some 200 Chinese workers died building it, mostly in landslides and falls.
The pass sits on the China–Pakistan boundary, given as anywhere from 523 to 596 km long depending on the source, which the two governments agreed in 1963. India, which claims the whole of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, does not recognise that agreement, and its Article 6 provides for the line to be renegotiated if the Kashmir dispute is ever resolved. Just west of here, the narrow Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan is all that separates Pakistan from Tajikistan.
Down the Hunza Valley: Passu, Attabad Lake and Karimabad
From the pass the highway drops into the valley of the Hunza River, which forms near Passu from glacier-fed streams including the Khunjerab, Shimshal, Chupursan and Misgar. This is the Karakoram at its most extreme, the most glaciated place on Earth outside the polar regions, with eighteen summits above 7,500 m. Across Pakistan’s northern highlands more than half the summits exceed 4,500 m and more than fifty pass 6,500 m, and the ice is so extensive that the region has been called the “Third Pole”. K2 itself stands off to the east in Baltistan, well away from the road.
The valley’s newest landform is a lake. On 4 January 2010, a huge landslide at the village of Attabad, about 14 km upstream of Karimabad, buried a stretch of the highway, killed twenty people and dammed the Hunza River. The water backed up into Attabad Lake, which drowned part of the old road. Since 2015 traffic has bypassed it on a realigned 24 km stretch with five tunnels, the Pakistan-China Friendship Tunnels, and the lake has become a destination for boating and fishing. Lower down, the valley widens around Karimabad and Aliabad, facing the broad wall of Rakaposhi. That mountain is almost 20 km wide and is described as the only peak on Earth that falls directly and without interruption for almost 6,000 m from summit to base.
Jaglot, Where the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalaya Meet
Just outside the town of Gilgit the Hunza joins the Gilgit River, supplying more than half of its flow, and a little further south, near the town of Jaglot, the Gilgit flows into the Indus. Jaglot sits at the junction of three of the world’s great ranges: the Karakoram to the north, the Hindu Kush to the west and the Himalaya to the south-east. It is also where the road to Skardu branches off. The Indus, which has come down from Tibet through Ladakh and past Skardu at about 2,500 m, now turns sharply south.
It does so round the shoulder of Nanga Parbat, 8,126 m, the ninth-highest mountain on Earth and the western anchor of the Himalaya. Its name comes from the Sanskrit nagna and parvata, “naked mountain”, after its usually snowless south face; locally, in Shina, it is called Diamer. Nanga Parbat rises far above everything around it, with the second-highest prominence of any of the world’s 100 tallest peaks, after Everest. Guinness World Records lists it as the fastest-growing mountain in the world, rising about 7 mm a year. To the south its Rupal Face rises about 4,600 m above its base, and to the north the Rakhiot Flank climbs some 7,000 m from the Indus in just 25 km. Below it the Indus cuts a gorge some 4,500–5,200 m deep, and the highway clings to the gorge wall for much of the way south through Chilas and Kohistan.
Tarbela Dam: The Indus Leaves the Himalaya
The Indus emerges from the Himalayan foothills at Tarbela, about 105 km north-west of Islamabad. There it is held back by Tarbela Dam, completed in 1976 and the largest earth-filled dam in the world. It stands 143 m high, impounds a reservoir of about 250 km² with 11.9 billion m³ of storage, and its power stations have an installed capacity of 4,888 MW. The dam captures monsoon floods for release in the low-water winter months, which makes it the hinge of Pakistan’s irrigation system.
Attock, the Salt Range and Kalabagh
A short way downstream, near Attock, the Kabul River arrives from Afghanistan to join the Indus. The Karakoram Highway ends nearby, at Hasan Abdal, about 1,300 km from the Khunjerab Pass. South of here the river crosses the Potohar Plateau and then breaks through the Salt Range, a line of hills famous for the rock-salt mines of Khewra, Kalabagh and Warcha. Marine fossils in its rocks date back to the Ediacaran, up to 570 million years ago. At Kalabagh, where the Salt Range stands above the river, the Indus finally spills out onto the plains of Punjab.
Mithankot and the Panjnad: The Five Rivers of Punjab
For the rest of its journey the Indus is a lowland river, slow and heavily braided. To the east lies Punjab, whose name means “land of five rivers”: the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. The Jhelum and Ravi run into the Chenab, the Beas into the Sutlej, and the Chenab and Sutlej together form the Panjnad, “five rivers”. The Panjnad flows about 70 km south-west and joins the Indus at Mithankot. Below that point the river once had another name, Satnad, the “seven rivers”, because it then carried the Indus, the Kabul and all five Punjab streams.
This plain is Pakistan’s main farming region, irrigated by canals that take water from barrages along every river. On either side of it the land turns dry. To the west, the Sulaiman and Kirthar ranges mark the edge of the Balochistan Plateau, where the Bolan Pass leads towards Kandahar and the Kharan Desert fills much of Kharan District. To the east, south of the Sutlej, the plain gives way to the sand of the Thar Desert along the Indian border.
Sukkur Barrage and Mohenjo-daro in Sindh
In Sindh the river runs between desert banks, and the province depends on it almost entirely: rainfall averages only 100–200 mm a year, against evaporation of 1,000–2,000 mm. At Sukkur, about 500 km north-east of Karachi, the Sukkur Barrage, built from 1923 to 1932 as the Lloyd Barrage, feeds what is considered the largest single irrigation network of its kind in the world. Downstream, near Larkana, lie the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BCE as one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation. In 1980 it became the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in South Asia.
Kotri, the 2022 Floods and the Shrinking Indus Delta
The same river can turn destructive. From June to October 2022, heavier-than-usual monsoon rain and melting glaciers after a severe heatwave caused flooding that the climate change minister said left a third of the country under water; Sindh and Balochistan, which received several times their normal August rain, were hit hardest. The floods killed 1,739 people and caused about US$40 billion in damage.
The last barrage, Kotri, completed in 1955 between Jamshoro and Hyderabad, feeds the Fulleli, Pinyari and Kalri Baghar canals of lower Sindh. Below it the Indus fans out south of Thatta into a delta of about 41,440 km² that reaches the Arabian Sea along some 210 km of coast. It is a Ramsar wetland with the largest arid-climate mangrove forests in the world, seventeen major creeks and the Indus river dolphin. But it is starving. Since the 1940s, dams, barrages and canals have captured most of the river before it arrives: by 2018 the average flow below Kotri was about 33 billion m³ a year, against some 180 billion m³ before. Erosion and the advancing sea have followed, and by one estimate the delta has shrunk by about 92 percent since 1883, from roughly 12,900 km² to about 1,000 km² in 2018, with many villages abandoned. Near its mouths the Indus is one of the few rivers in the world with a tidal bore, and its course is not fixed: after an earthquake in the early nineteenth century it shifted westwards, away from the Rann of Kutch, which still receives its water when floods breach the embankments.
Every stage of this route has its own deeper story: the road in our Karakoram Highway guide, the summit in K2, the mountain, the great dam in Tarbela Dam, and the river’s end in our article on the Indus Delta.