Certainly not when he speaks with such pragmatism even if from the narrowly shaped perspective of a professional soldier whose career has been spent looking at the Indian Army.
Have you ever met him? Then how can you be so sure he has a...what was it? Yeah a "narrowly shaped perspective" and that his career is only "looking at the Indian Army". Now that is awfully presumptuous to say the very least…pretty much like if I were to say the that General Petraeus and the entire military US hierarchy have “narrowly shaped perspectives” and are incapable of fighting a war against an unbroken conventional military force because they spent their “whole careers looking at Vietnam or Iraq”. Now those words would reek of uneducated egotistical disgust, probably by someone who is used to looking down on others, eh? The word ‘arrogant’ certainly springs to mind for one.
OTOH, if you really want to play into the hands of the Indians, keep the bulk of your forces in the Punjab facing them. You get weaker by the day without a shot fired on that front. Since you're worried about paying salaries to your army, I'd use them where there's a shooting war while you can rather than sit on a border that will never see a bullet fired in anger. Employed? Yes. Gainfully? No.
Hmm, yeah. You seem to be forgetting the Soviets in the Cold War greatly outnumbered your forces and your allies in Europe, and the North Koreans still do with your boys sitting in South Korea…and hardly any shots were/are fired on those fronts for decades on end. But they didn’t just cut and run, drop everything and find an ‘easy’ war, now did they? They had obligations to the peoples of Europe and S. Korea and they stayed until the threat subsided. Because you see free nations had a little something called martial and moral defiance. So I would have asked you to apply these peculiar standards to your own country first but that would be unfair because this lame logic only holds relevance in your head, not in your country. All I can say is; don’t expect us all fall for your pettily improvised morals because you are having a tough time in Afghanistan.
And FYI, our boys in Punjab are not sitting on the border, they are at their peace time deployments in garrison and cities etc, also you might not know this but Punjab is where the vast bulk of Pakistan’s population is and its natural that that’s who the bulk of our soldiery protects. And as to your brilliant revelation; no Pakistan is not having trouble paying soldier salaries (actually salaries just went up recently), we are not Zimbabwe but I suppose common sense holds little sway over pathetically stereotypical minds. On the other hand, we don’t spend a bloody trillion dollars on defense like you do either, and we have financial constraints no doubt about it which is exactly why it is quite understandable if we are reluctant to commit to vast and costly deployments away from our primary threats, particularly when it’s going to come down to little or nothing due to near complete lack of REAL commitment on the other side.
The US and its NATO allies on the other hand have no such bloody excuse. The US WoT budget alone is 100s of times greater than ours, but how many troops has the US deployed to ‘protect’ the Afghan people? Barely 1/4th the number of the boots we have on the ground. As a result they are hunkered down by a weak, largely unpopular insurgency and ending up having to bomb the very bloody villages they are supposed to be protecting from afar.
Makes sense to me. Just imagine, maybe you could actually DO something about S. Waziristan instead of demanding patience while most of your army sits in Punjab facing an Indian Army with a massive case of the giggles.
I appreciate your concerns about Indian giggles, but we are more concerned about them trying anything stupid as opposed to giggling. Particularly since India has been fighting small to large scale insurrections for decades herself and still is, suffering many casualties along the way…so we’re not all that offended to be honest.
Unattributed innuendo about C.I.A. seeing bogey-men everywhere and your opinions of Iraq are hardly conclusive nor advance the discussion. Just my opinion, of course but I hope that you'll avoid more of this henceforth. Save Iraq for another time as I fully disagree with you and would be happy to go toe-to-toe anytime- but not here.
Very good, I suppose this is the part we completely forget about your slurs aimed at our troops in Punjab, about how wrongly they are ‘committed’ and how useless they are…?
Well if you can talk about how our financially constrained 500,000 man military is useless against terrorists then we can talk about how your 500,000 man Army, 90,000 Marine Core and greatest Air Force and Navy in the world are wasting their time, sitting on their hands everywhere from Japan to the US homeland while innocent Afghans and Pakistanis are dying. This line of argument would certainly apply in accordance with your logic.
you're welcome to continue coloring your discourse with this expressive verbage and self-righteous insinuations but please help me to separate our lap-dogs in Kabul from those in Islamabad and New Delhi, won't you? We have so many scattered about and they all appear and speak the same- usually with an arm extended while demanding more money. It's often hard to know one from the other...or really care, I suppose.
AM is the one with ‘self righteous insinuations’ is he now? Let’s not forget that it is US/NATO who are the ones propping a regime of corrupt war/drug lords in Afghanistan…many of whom are known human-rights criminals AND all of them have territorial designs and ambitions against Pakistan. Neither has the US tried to negate these concerns by demanding or even suggesting that the Afghan regime accept the sovereignty of Pakistan’s borders nor have they tried to stop the poppy cultivation that is pumping drugs and rebel money into Pakistan on a daily basis. And that’s not even taking into account unwarranted Indian involvement. Despite this you treat us as if we are the ones disrespecting your national security concerns? As if some how you have the right to lord over us because you are so much more efficient and free from any blame? Like you so characteristically put it, I suppose in your view “lap-dogs” are meant to be treated this way eh? Now that sort of thing is called 'monstrous arrogance' around here.
This world is all about inter-dependability, and almost ALL Pakistanis think that US is undependable, selfish AND self-righteous. The only reason you are here is because you need Pakistan, probably more than Pakistan needs you. And as far as Pakistan is concerned, you owe us every dollar of that aid…not because we have been your loyal allies from the start of the Cold War, not because we always helped you advance your foreign policy, not because we helped you defeat the USSR, not because you dropped and Afghanistan like a new born giraffe at the first sign of victory against the USSR (you have paid for that already), not because you couldn’t conduct a proper invasion of a broken country like Afghanistan in 2001 and let the bulk of these criminals escape into Pakistani tribal borders which everyone KNEW have been unguarded for centuries, but because if you don’t have an ally in Pakistan your War on Terror will go to hell.
(And don’t even think about bloody trying to threaten us with invasion, the US is in no position militarily, politically or economically even if it wasn’t for our nuclear weapons)
Sheesh!? And you call us arrogant?
Yup. We do.
And you call us arrogant?
Pakistan already has more troops there than the US and NATO comb and the number will continue to remain higher even after the planned surge. Our security paradigm could not have been oversimplified 
. But it could be simplified provided you get the Indians to solve the disputes with us,( list of which keeps increasing, the recent one being stoppage of water flow ) followed by a non aggression pact. We keep our troops there because we can't afford to let our guard down since quite frankly our vulnerable borders there may be exploited by Indians either unilaterally or on your signal for gaining a leverage when necessary in having your way ( possibility does exist no matter however far fetched and remote it may seem ) and did the Indians not eye this opportunity in 2002. Why don't you tell or suggest the Indians to pull their forces from the borders first. Pakistan will gladly follow the suit, after all, u dont expect us to be the agressors particularly under existing conditions... do u ????? 
Another Armchair analyst with no real understanding of Pakistan's internal dynamics. Just for us Pakis here "Humaray fauj ke Jawan paisey ya tail pe nahi, kaddu or roti pe chaltey hain"...
