Clearly US foreign policy is still dictated to Barak by anonymous hawks. While I don't agree with them, I do understand their logic. Pakistan is already lost to the West. Even a military dictator sympathetic to the West (Musharraf) could not halt the Islamic fundamentalists eventually taking absolute power there and getting their fingers on Pakistan's red button. If the US now attacks Pakistan then they will clearly strengthen support for the fundamentalists and hasten their ascent to power.

While Pakistan does have a nuclear capacity, it does not as yet have the ability to strike America or Israel. The obvious next target for the Islamic extremists would be their old enemy. A nuclear attack on a large Indian city would cause such devastation and worldwide revulsion that the US could then, with military and diplomatic impunity, launch nuclear attacks on both Pakistan and Iran and in so doing hope once and for all to annihilate the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Afterall, the "Shock and Awe" policy has its origins in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.