My 40 billion figure is after discounting those factors you mentioned (tax collection, privatization, etc).
I don't care if no one bought it. Who has to "buy" it? American government only, no other country is relevant to those figures. And of course US won't buy those figures - it can easily afford to do that with the government we have. If the Americans think we haven't lost 68 billion, well how much do they think have we lost? You can't just say that we haven't lost 68 billion and not give your own reasonable estimate. My reasonable estimate is 40 billion.
No we reached to the figure of $40 Billion after getting rid of all claimed losses between 2001 and 2008, which added up to some $28 Billion because, according to the article in the OP, Pakistan's economy(export, fdi, industrial output) grew at a decent pace between uptil 2008, implying that the WOT didn't affect the Pakistani economy, and even you agreed on that.
Out of the remaining $40 Billion(between 2008-2011), when you get rid of the factors (tax collection, privatization, etc) equalling 40% of the total estimate, you are left with a figure of $24 Billion. So the most generous estimate would be a loss of ~ 25 Billion, mind you this figure is based on the wishful thinking that Pakistan's economy would have continued growing at the same pre WOT pace, irrespective of the global economic downturn.
Look, all this talk that you guys and the OP is doing is just technicalities of how much the figures overestimated. The fact that gets not mentioned or ignored is that we DID lose ~40 billion.
In logical terms, what I am saying is, just because the losses may have been overestimated by the government, that doesn't mean we didn't have any significant losses.
Thats not a fact. In logical terms yes Pakistan did incur some loss, but you have also received $20 Billion in aid( I would like to see some source for your claim that half of it went towards reimbursing the services provided to ISAF) , and just recently $2.2 Billion as part of the Kerry Lugar bill. That along with the military equipment that Pakistan received pretty much evens out any monetary loss that Pakistan incurred.
The only significant loss for Pakistan is the loss of innocent life.