Barack Hussein Obama flexed American muscle a couple of days ago concerning Pakistan.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

“Let me make this clear,” Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Only a single word is necessary at this point: disaster.  The incomparable Ralph Peters puts some flesh on the skeleton called disaster.

Here’s why he’s nuts:

* Pakistan is a nuclear power on the brink of internal collapse. Do we really want to drive it over the edge and see loose nukes in the hands of a radicalized military faction - or terrorists?

* The mountain ranges where the terrorists are holed up are vast. The terrain is some of the toughest in the world. An invasion would suck in hundreds of thousands of troops. And a long occupation would be required.

* Even those tribesmen who don’t support the Taliban or al Qaeda are proud and xenophobic to extremes - they’d rally against us. And all of the senator’s bloggers couldn’t stop them.

* The Pakistani military would fight us. Right now, they’re cooperating, at least to some degree - but they’d fight any invader.

* President Pervez Musharraf’s government would fall - probably overthrown by Islamic nationalists in the military and security services. Welcome to your Islamofascist nuclear power, senator.

* We’d also have to occupy a big corridor through Baluchistan, Pakistan’s vast southwest, since we’d lose our current overflight rights and hush-hush transit privileges on the ground.

An army at war needs a lot of fuel, ammunition, food, water, Band-Aids, replacements, etc. (not the sort of things armchair strategists bother about). Afghanistan is landlocked and surrounded by unfriendly states. Pakistan has been helping us keep our troops supplied. And you couldn’t sustain Operation Obama by air. The senator hasn’t even looked at a map.

* Along with giving away the game in Iraq, an invasion of Pakistan would create a terrorist-recruiting double whammy: The Middle East would mobilize against us - and what could we expect after we invaded a friendly Islamic state?

* Our troops are tired and their gear’s worn out. (Obama wouldn’t know, and he doesn’t care.) They’re fighting on in Iraq because they see progress and they have a sense of duty. But does the senator, who clearly doesn’t know any soldiers and Marines, expect them to surrender Iraq - then plunge into Pakistan without a collapse in morale?

* Even setting aside the nuke issue, what would President Obama do when Pakistan, an Islamic nation of 170 million, broke into bits? Would we also occupy Karachi, Lahore and other megacities, after they turned into urban jungles where the terrorist became the king of beasts?

Go after al Qaeda? You bet. Anywhere, anytime. But we’ve got to do it in a way that makes military sense. A general staff recruited from MoveOn.org isn’t going to enhance our security.

The world would be a safer place if we could reverse time to ensure that Abdul Qadeer Khan didn’t exist, but this isn’t possible.  With a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear India, a radical Islamist part of the population in Pakistan, and a moderately secular and pro-West Musharraf in a tenuous perch as President, this region of the world is a flash point.  It must be handled with soft velvet gloves on an iron fist.  It presents perhaps the most complicated knot of problems any American President will ever face.

While I am no fan of Dick Armitage, the world was safer when, upon nuclear sabre rattling and threats of war over Kashmir several years ago between Pakistan and India (among other disagreements), he took assignment from the President and let both countries know just exactly how the chest butting was going to end.  And then it ended without so much as a whimper or whisper.

Agreements to cooperate and send special forces and Marines (along with Pakistani forces) on targeted raids of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, directed and precise air power, robust kinetic and nonkinetic operations in Afghanistan, intelligence gathering, financial pressure, largesse, and intense and close friendship between administrations – these are the things of victory in this region.  Land invasion is not.  Neither is chest butting.

In further news, we learn that Obama has no plan for the exercise of nuclear power, or he does, or perhaps he doesn’t.  U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday he would not use nuclear weapons “in any circumstance” to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, drawing criticism from Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democratic rivals.  “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” Obama said, with a pause, “involving civilians.” Then he quickly added, “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

So he would send U.S. troops into a land where they are likely to take one hundred thousand casualties and inflict a million, and he has no plan if Pakistan invokes the nukes?

One word: disaster.