Washington recognises Pakistan on its first day

Background

When British rule in India ended in August 1947, the subcontinent was partitioned into two dominions, India and Pakistan. Pakistan was born in two wings separated by some 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory, with its capital in Karachi. It had to build ministries, a central bank and armed forces almost from scratch while absorbing millions of refugees from the violence of partition.

What happened

The United States moved immediately to establish relations. According to the State Department's Office of the Historian, Washington recognised Pakistan on 15 August 1947, when President Harry Truman sent a message to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Governor-General, congratulating Pakistan on its emergence among the family of nations. The same day the department established an American embassy in Karachi, headed at first by a chargé d'affaires¹. Paul H. Alling, a career diplomat and Near East specialist, was appointed the first US ambassador on 20 September 1947; he presented his credentials on 26 February 1948 and left the post in June 1948^2,3.

The new government in Karachi quickly tested what the relationship could deliver. In the autumn of 1947 it sent Mir Laik Ali to Washington with memoranda setting out a programme of reconstruction and development projects and seeking a large dollar loan. American officials replied that the US government was not authorised to extend foreign credits for a comprehensive programme of that size without the prior approval and appropriation of Congress⁴. The request is usually put at about $2 billion; Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, has said that the Americans offered roughly $10 million in response⁵.

Why it mattered

The prompt recognition gave Pakistan a diplomatic foothold in the most powerful capital of the post-war world, and Karachi's embassy became the base for every later phase of the relationship. But the early exchanges also revealed a lasting asymmetry. Pakistan's founders saw the United States as a potential source of the capital and arms they needed to survive alongside a much larger India. In Washington, Pakistan was at first a low priority; American policymakers in South Asia were more focused on India, and the US was not yet looking for military partners in the region^5,6.

Dennis Kux's history of the relationship, written by a former State Department South Asia specialist, describes this mismatch of expectations as a recurring theme: periods of close partnership in which American strategic needs and Pakistani needs coincided, separated by periods of disappointment when they did not⁶.

Legacy

Diplomatic relations have never been broken since 1947, through wars, sanctions and changes of government in both countries. The pattern set in the first months - Pakistani requests for large-scale support, American caution, and a search on both sides for common ground - would recur many times. Recollections of the first American diplomats in Karachi, gathered by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, give a sense of how improvised the early embassy was⁷.