They're chasing the minnows and ignoring the toads. Even if we recover 100% of the wealth, I doubt it'd be more than $5-10 billion. The issue isn't the amount stolen, but the amount it took to steal that money.
So, when you're covering up theft, you're probably using shady lawyers, accounting firms, etc. These folks take a cut. Then you're also bribing a lot of people to keep their mouths shut or to give blind support (staple of the PPP).
And then there's the economic cost of poorly negotiated investment deals, e.g., the damage Toyota et. al did to Pakistan by shoving imports down our market, or CPEC's weird ROI guarantees, etc. Finally, when the crap does hit the fan, we're talking to creditors and the IMF, thereby losing even more money.
Basically, the $5-10 billion in direct theft can cause $50-100 billion in various economic damages, but you can't pin most of those costs on the direct theft. Moreover, a lot of the economic problems have as much to do with leaders being total crap at their jobs, which, sadly, isn't illegal.
The solution is to look much deeper than just a bunch of corrupt personalities. We have to map out dependencies, so to speak, about how action X or Y (e.g., NRO) came to be. What legal or political mechanisms made such things possible, and what can we do to prevent those issues from ever occurring again.
