You clearly missed the point I made.
Forget low tier fighters like Nek M and Abdullah Mehsud. I was not talking about them. Abdullah was released from Gitmo and given a prosthetic leg by the CIA before he launched a full scale rebellion.
Due to the presence of senior AQ leadership on Pakistani soil, staying neutral was no longer an option. US would've chased AQ right into our territory despite our neutrality.
Regarding AQ on Pakistani soil, we had to choose from three options:
1- We take them out ourselves
2- Let the US take them out
3- Stop the US from taking them out.
After Tora Bora; AQ leaders crossed the border and went inside Pakistan. Pak army requested airlift from the US so that it could quickly seal off the borders but the request was denied. Thus, the deployment took a long time; not that it would've helped in totally shutting the border because that was not possible at all.
And, we would've observed Mr Khan taking a U-turn on this as well had he been running the country at that time.
Politicians say a lot of things. They have big mouths and small brains.
Imran Khan can say anything he wants and then take U-turns at will. I doubt our state policy would've been any different had Imran, Nawaz or Benazir been in power at that time.
Mistakes were made in the implementation of that policy, no doubt about that. We could've preserved our interests by not putting all our eggs in the American basket; But the basic policy would have been the same. Personally, no one in Pakistan (except the self proclaimed liberals) supported the US invasion and no one liked our state become America's lackey in the region; but personal feelings had little to do with any of it. We want to believe that neutrality would have been a better course of action; in reality, however, neutrality was not even an option. It is easy to delude ourselves into believing that both parties in the conflict would have honored our neutral status. Our position was not similar to that of Switzerland in WW2 but to Belgium.
Brother your whole argument does not make any sense.
Your whole premise is based off of many assumptions, the biggest being that US would have entered a nuclear armed state that remained neutral, all of that for what, to hunt ghosts? Forget about drone strikes, we are talking here about putting soldiers, building bases in Pakistani soil, risking a nuclear strike all for... AQ ghosts?
If that's the case, then my question to you is why haven't they done this already? US has accused Pakistan of being in cahoots with the Taliban, and AQ leadership has pledged allegiance to the Taliban, first to Mullah Omar and later to Mullah Haibatullah, why haven't they entered Pakistani territory already? And besides, you are telling me Pakistan with one of the top 15 Armies in the world, and one of the top intelligence agencies in the world could not have dealt with AQ militants?
Your line of argument is based on many false assumptions, a little bit of history check would prove that. Pakistan barely had security threats from 1979 till 2001 until the advent of 9/11. And that security threat only happened because Bin Laden and many other Mullahs declared Jihad on the state of Pakistan for allying with their enemies, which necessitated the fencing of the border to prevent those angry with that decision from crossing over.
This is simply a criticism of mine, I am not saying whether what Pakistan did was right or wrong, because if I were put in that situation then I probably would have made the same choices as Musharraf and the other generals. However, the biggest criticism I have is that they did not think the decision over and made a very hasty decision. Delaying and using a wait and see approach as well as utilising politicians to lengthen the decision making process would probably have helped Pakistan.
Here I urge that you read this, its written by a Pakistani Academic Khalid Aziz, he explains the reason behind why Insurgency happened in Pakistan, its only 28 pages, even if you can't read it all, I urge if you can to read from pages 5 to 18.
https://waterinfo.net.pk/sites/default/files/knowledge/Genesis of Insurgency in FATA & KPK.pdf