Internal extremists, terror groups are Pak's real 'existential' threat: Petraeus

Pakistan's real "existential threat" is not India but
Petraeus, during an interactive session at the Indian Consulate here on Tuesday following his address on the topic of the Indo-Pacific, said Prime Minister Khan is facing a daunting challenge in his country where the economy is "very distorted" and the "realities of the situation are really quiet difficult."
He, however, expressed hope that President Donald Trump's special adviser to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad "can produce magic here and can produce an agreement that would allow us to draw down further, still achieve our objectives and ensure that our Afghan partners are taken care of as well."

"But yet I think it is a very very challenging situation," he said, recalling that the US was not able to get a negotiated agreement at a time when he commanded 150,000 coalition forces and "when we had the momentum on the battlefield... so it is a little difficult to see why the Taliban would agree to much more than our departure."
"You also have the Haqqani group. I am not at all confident that they are reconcilable , if some of the elements of the Taliban are. By the way, not all of them would necessarily agree to a peace agreement."

Further, the challenge has always been putting pressure on an enemy whose senior leaders are "beyond our reach in sanctuaries either in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or in Balochistan."
"This is not the fight of a decade or a few years. You can defeat this enemy but you have to keep your eye on it. If you take your eyes off, what happens is that al-Qaeda in Iraq rises back up into the Islamic State, goes into Syria and takes advantage of the Syrian civil war and roars back into Iraq with an army."