Where Pakistan’s generals were born

The map shades each district by the number of Pakistan Army heads and four-star officers born there, and places one dot per officer, coloured by ethnic group: 33 officers from Ayub Khan, the first Pakistani Commander-in-Chief in 1951, to Field Marshal Asim Munir. Rawalpindi district, home of the army’s headquarters, produced five, and the Potohar and Hazara districts around it seven more. Quetta, seat of the Command and Staff College, is the most common single birthplace, with three.

By ethnic group, as the officers’ biographies describe their families, eight were Punjabi and eight Pashtun (including Kakazai families settled in Punjab and the Afridi family of Rahimuddin Khan in Uttar Pradesh), four Muhajir (Urdu-speaking families from what is now India), four Kashmiri (Muhammad Aziz Khan of Azad Kashmir, and the Kashmiri families of Khalid Shameem Wynne, Raheel Sharif and Rashad Mahmood), one Hazara (Muhammad Musa) and one Qizilbash (Yahya Khan, also described as Pashtun). For seven, mostly recent officers, no source states an ethnic group, and none is assumed. Six were born in what is now India, all before Partition, and held the top posts between 1976 and 2007; Abdul Hamid Khan was born in Maymyo, Burma.

British officers who commanded the army after independence (Frank Messervy, Douglas Gracey) are left out, as are officers from East Pakistan: none of the Bengali officers of 1947–1971 reached four-star rank. Gul Hassan Khan, Commander-in-Chief in 1971–72, was a lieutenant general and is included as an army head. Birthplaces of Rashad Mahmood and Zubair Mahmood Hayat could not be found. Lieutenant generals are not mapped: no compiled record of their birthplaces exists. Districts are those of 2017; where sources disagree on a birthplace (Abdul Waheed Kakar: Peshawar or Zhob; Ashfaq Parvez Kayani: Manghot or Gujar Khan), the hover details say so.