There's a difference between geo-politics and street fight. Even in a street fight, you measure the size and heart of your opponent before taking a decision. Their is no military parity between US and Pak, but US knows and we know that for the last 37 years we have been fighting covert wars with opponents much bigger than our size and we managed to match it despite contrary expectations. You expect Pakistan to give a knee-jerk reaction? Well if we had too, we could have done that after Black Water was caught red-handed, or after Ray-Davis episode or after Abbotabad or at least after Salala but we did not. Even at that time observers like yourself quipped with similar phrases like 'taking it like a good boy' but time proved quite the opposite. We cleared Fata at the time of our own choice, not on American demand. Zarb e Azb and Radd ul Fasaad, is an effort to clear internal foreign assets, again we are doing it at the time of our own choosing. Border Management, which we have been asking the Yanks and Afghans for over a decade and which they were strongly opposed to, we are doing it now. It doesn't make us taking it like a good boy sir, we are returning the favor in kind but only on our terms. If US is yelling at us in 2018 after 16 years of futile effort, we must have done something right, don't you think?
Speaking of leverage, there is no worst-case scenario yet, and all kind of leverage exists before that. US knows about the limits of its leverage with Russia, China, Pakistan and a hostile Iran around it in Afghanistan. We had taken US embargoes in our stride before in a uni-polar world and we can still take it now when the world is almost multi-polar. We don't have to shut the routes now, Yanks have to do a lot before that for example, ending the non-NATO ally status for Pakistan, Economic sanctions, declaring Pakistan a terrorist state or sanctioning ISI, freezing our worldwide assets and bank accounts so on and so forth and we'll see how far they can go.. so you were wrong because eventually it will be us, who will call the American bluff. I believe US won't go that far (despite many Indians wanting them too) , it's plain lunacy if they take things to that level, they are testing waters to see how far they can go with their leverage before deciding to call it quits. In the meanwhile, we'll quietly keep doing what we have been doing and the Yanks can't do s*** about it.
Just to give you some food for thought before I conclude, Yanks have lost a lot of clout and credibility post Crimea and Syria, still if that doesn't ring you any bell, nothing will.
