Uncovering Pakistan

Pakistan is rarely out of the news and most of the headlines focus on the country's Islamist militants.

In this two part series Owen Bennett Jones, who lived in the country as a BBC correspondent, returns to look at the history of a nation where political crisis has become a way of life.

Nuclear armed Pakistan has been described as the most dangerous country on earth: what does its past tell us about its future?

Pakistan was created as a land where Muslims could live in safety.

But when the British split the sub continent in 1947 they left behind a nation that went on to suffer decades of political crises. Last year more than 750 Pakistanis died in suicide bomb attacks.

Why are Islamist radicals targeting fellow Muslims and why do they have any support in Pakistan?

Part One: The Dream Undone

Why have so many of the hopes and aspirations of Pakistan's founders remained unfulfilled?

Owen Bennett- jones discovers a nation split between powerful feudal families, the military elite, a religious establishment and tribal and regional forces.

The many crises that beset Pakistan from partition and independence in 1947 are explored, through the early military dictatorships, the wars with India over Kashmir, regional wars inside the country and the rise and fall of Benazir Bhutto's father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

He begins his story at the spot where Benazir was assassinated in Rawalpindi in December 2007.

In a bizarre twist of fate it was the same place where the country's first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was killed 57 years earlier.

In Pakistan, history has tended to repeat itself in a cruel cycle.