"The truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having," Nehru declared, triumphal about the moth-eaten Muslim state that had emerged from the partition of Punjab and Bengal. A year later, he conceded: "Perhaps we acted wrongly. . . . The consequences of that partition have been so terrible that one is inclined to think that anything else would have been preferable. . . . Ultimately, I have no doubt that India and Pakistan will come close together. . . . some kind of federal link . . . There is no other way to peace. The alternative is . . . war." But as he spoke, the two new states were already at war for possession of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority principality with a Hindu Maharaja. It was the first in a series of hostilities that have endured for 60 years. 

For Jinnah to get even a moth-eaten Pakistan was, as a leading imperial historian put it, "an amazing triumph, the outcome not of some ineluctable historic logic, but of the determination of a single individual". It is sobering to consider what might have happened if Mountbatten, instead of bringing forward the date, had delayed it by a few months. Jinnah was already in the final stages of tuberculosis and died just 13 months after partition.

The state he left behind was born to fail, and most Congress leaders expected that this malformed offspring would soon return, tail between its legs, to Mother India. It had virtually no industry, and the markets for its agricultural produce were left behind in India: although it produced three-quarters of the world's jute, the processing plants were all in India. The predominantly Hindu entrepreneurial classes had fled with their capital and expertise. The ruling elite of the Muslim League were mostly refugees from India and soon at odds with the predominantly Punjabi population they governed. The Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan had little in common with the western half, a thousand miles away.

Little wonder that Pakistan fell prey to a series of corrupt and repressive military and civilian regimes, and that its eastern wing, after another bloody war and an estimated three million casualties, broke away in 1971 to become Bangladesh. After the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became the base for militant Islamists fighting the Russians, which further weakened its civil society and radicalised a younger generation already incensed by India's occupation of Muslim Kashmir.  

The counterfactual story would have been far more positive. A united Indian Dominion based on the Cabinet Mission Plan would have had its tensions; but over time the glue of shared power would have held the Congress and the Muslim League together, at least on issues of external security. India, without Nehru's pro-Soviet brand of non-alignment, would probably have allied with the West and, like the Raj, would have seen Afghanistan as a vital buffer state from which the Russians must be excluded. Under Indian protection, Afghanistan would have remained a benevolent, Westernising monarchy with little scope for al-Qaeda or the Taliban.