Pakistan is bordered by Iran to the west, Afghanistan to the northwest, China to the northeast, India to the east, and the Arabian sea to the south.

Geopoltically, the nation is situated within some of the most hostile regional boundaries, characterized by territorial disputes and historical tensions, particularly the Kashmir conflict with India, which has led to multiple military confrontations between the two countries.

Pakistan shares its borders with four neighboring countries—People's Republic of China, Afghanistan, India, and Iran—while Tajikistan is separated by the narrow Wakhan Corridor.

In total, Pakistan's land borders span approximately 7,307 km (4,540.4 mi), excluding its coastline along the Arabian Sea.

The eastern tip of the Wahan Corridor starts the Sino-Pak border between the People's Republic of China and Pakistan spanning about 559 km (347.3 mi).

This line was determined from 1961 to 1965 in a series of agreements between China and Pakistan and finally on 2 March 1963 both the governments, of Karachi and Beijing, formally agreed.

The international border-line has been a matter of pivotal dispute between Pakistan and 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.

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 1923–1924.

They were less dangerous and less widespread, however, than the conflict that erupted in Kashmir in the Indo-Pakistani War of August 1965, which 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.

Beyond the western terminus of the tribunal's award, the final stretch of Pakistan's border with India is about 80 kilometres long, running east and southeast of Sindh to an inlet of the Indian Ocean.

[1] Modern Iran has a province named Sistan va Baluchistan that borders Pakistan and has Baluchis in an ethnic majority.

[15] Urdu was the native language of the Muhajirs, a community that migrated from India to Pakistan after the 1947 Partition and today constitutes approximately 7-9% of the country's population.

[13] Beyond cultural and ethnic factors, Pakistan also shares geographical connections with multiple regions, including the Himalayas in the north, the Iranian Plateau in the west, the Thar Desert in the east, and a coastline along the Arabian Sea in the south.

[17][18] These connections create natural geographical ties with neighboring countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and India.

[27][28][29][30] Pakistanis and Afghans argue that an exclusive classification of their countries as South Asian could be misinterpreted as an implicit validation of such expansionist ideologies, threatening the national and cultural identity of their homelands.

As a result, they contend that Pakistan and Afghanistan's connections to Central Asia and the Middle East must be acknowledged and emphasized to counter any expansionist narratives that challenge the countries' sovereignty.

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.

North-south valleys in Balochistan and Sindh have restricted the migration of peoples along the Makran Coast on the Indian Ocean east toward the plains.

[33] The Indus, one of the great rivers of the world, rises in southwestern Tibet only about 160 kilometres west of the source of the Sutlej River, which first flows through Punjab, India and joins the Indus in Pakistani Punjab, and the Brahmaputra, which runs eastward before turning southwest and flowing through India and, Bangladesh.

[citation needed] Balochistan is located at the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau and in the border region between Southwest, Central, and South Asia.

It is geographically the largest of the four provinces at 347,190 km2 (134,050 sq mi) of Pakistani territory; and composes 48% of the total land area of Pakistan.

Much of the province south of the Quetta region is sparse desert terrain with pockets of inhabitable towns mostly near rivers and streams.

In January 1991 a severe earthquake destroyed entire villages in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, but far fewer people were killed in the quake than died in 1935.

Pakistan has four seasons: a cool, dry winter marked by mild temperatures from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November.

Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, which is also the country's industrial center, is more humid than Islamabad but gets significantly lesser rainfall.

The forests of Pakistan are a main source of food, lumber, paper, fuel wood, latex, medicine as well as used for purposes of wildlife conservation and Eco tourism.

Pakistan has extensive mineral resources, including fairly sizable reserves of gypsum, limestone, chromites, iron ore, rock salt, silver, gold, precious stones, gems, marbles, tiles, copper, sulfur, fire clay and silica sand.

[37] Pakistan is a party to several international agreements related to environment and climate, the most prominent among them are: Parts of region and settlement names: