Reply #22: It's more that Pakistan is lucky that we are their ally, than the other way around.

[BzaDem]

After all, Afghanistan was harboring Bin Laden, and they weren't our ally. It took us only one month to go to war with them.

What we did isn't "just" solely because we said so. It is just based on objective factual predicates (that Bin Laden was a declared combatant against the United States, that Bin Laden led an organization that has declared war on the United States, that the organization is currently planning attacks against the United States, and that therefore our entry into Pakistan was justified in self defense.)

Now ultimately, it is going to be our country that judges these factual predicates when deciding where to deploy our military (rather than some international court judge). So in that respect and in that respect alone, you could see it as "because we said so." (You say "the world doesn't work that way," but I think as an empirical/historical matter it certainly does work that way, regardless of your or my opinion on the matter.) But what we said (about the factual predicates) also has the advantage of being truthful, so our actions weren't "just" solely because we said so. They were just because they were based on truthful factual predicates.