Any war is inconvenient. I can't see that stopping the US. They bombed Sudan for ..well not much. US could probably just leave Afghanistan, bomb Pakistan, and nuke Afghanistan just to make sure there's no terrorists remaining.
Right and the key is leaving Afghanistan, moving 45,000 troops out of Afghanistan creating a power vacuum that would immediately be filled by locals, throwing away all strategic depth achieved at such a high political cost and for what? Nuking the Afghan countryside? No I don't really see that as a plausible scenario. It accomplishes nothing and loses everything.
Now also factor in China and Russia. One or both would just rush in there and take over. How do you really know that the US is in Afghanistan to fight terrorism. What if the US is in Afghanistan in order to halt and repel the imperial designs of Russia and China?
You do have a point about it not being in the interests of the US to bomb Pakistan though. If that happens the whole region would get sucked into war which would make the US's defence of the TAP pipelines in Afghanistan much more difficult.
I wasn't really thinking about the TAP pipeline, the way I see it the US is using sticks and carrots to blackmail and seduce pakistan into being an ally, knowing full well that pakistan is disgusted about the whole deal but cannot do a thing about it...so THIS pakistan as long as it is obedient is not worth bombing---just yet. Now if pakistan tries to assert some sovereignty and self-interest then yeah...depending on conflicts of interest then it may become worth it to bomb pakistan.
The presence of nukes in pakistan, needless to say, is always a constant reminder of pakistan's sovereignty. It's a double edged sword.
Maqsad, imo, there's no chance of any counter attack even if US troops are there. First off, you'll be genociding hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and Afghanis, at the expense of tens of thousands of US troops which would lead to probably an international nuking of Pakistan. Pakistan just would not nuke any other country, it doesn't make sense.
First of all tactical nukes aimed at US military bases, aircraft carriers and barracks would not be genociding any large numbers of Arabs and Afghans. I dunno much about munitions but missiles carried by PAF fighters in an all out blitz attack could also wipe out command and control structures assuming they manage to get off the ground in the first place. I dunno if the chance of this is 0%, 5% or 50% but once again this is not a first strike option but rather a retaliatory capacity or even a preemptive strike scenario assuming the pak military is operating in a doomsday scenario. And tactical nukes under 2 kilotons I believe are not even classified as WMDs, are they?
Now obviously the pak military would suffer more in retaliation but this theoretical capacity still serves as a technical hitch each time some lunatic in the pentagon has a schizo attack and proposes a sneak attack on pakistan..grenada style.
In the case of a defenceless country like Grenada, Panama, Iraq after sanctions it is a lot easier to persuade planners of success with very few casualties but in a wargaming scenario the US would be forced to factor in tens of thousands potentially dead which does serve as a serious deterrence up to a certain limit of course.
I agree the US does attack and occupy little defenceless places. But it can bomb Pakistan, and has reasons it can put forward. Look at Obama's popularity with the voters even though he said he'd bomb Pakistan. The bombing threat remains.
Of course the bombing threat remains. The threat of bombing pakistan to the stone age is the main reason pakistan was blackmailed into joining the war on terror. "Either you are with us or you are gunna be bombed into the stone age". This big "favor" of letting pakistan continue to play the game while surreptitiously undermining the country by sowing the seeds of civil war has been the unstated post 2001 foreign policy objective for pakistan. The threat has been very effective in ripping pakistan off as a stick which has negated the need for more expensive carrots which could have done the job also.
An example was how Turkey was offered 17 billion dollars to help invade Iraq(but their parliament was too disgusted to accept). Nobody threatened to bomb Turkey to the stone age probably because it would have looked very very shady in the news...but with the massive propagnada divident from the fresh 911 WTC attacks which infuriated the american public and pakistan's backing of the taliban, and by proxy "Al Qaida" supposedly, it was extremely easy to blackmail pakistan and no carrots were needed.
