I agree with most of your postulations but question this one:
Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
...4. We could absorb a strategic disaster like launching a completely unrelated invasion of a traditional enemy's territory in the name of retaliation and national security. What happens internal to India if they try a similar gambit? What credibility do we have to talk them down from such a policy given our own recent actions?
Three points.

A 'stategic disaster' is in the eye of the beholder -- I haven't seen one since the Brothers Kennedy decided to boost the US economy by sending me to Laos a long time ago.

Not at all a completely unrelated invasion, rather a very poorly publicly justified effort. It was a response to a large number of ME provocations, attacks and probes against US interests worldwide from 1979-2001 and it was sorely needed and long overdue; something needed to be done and do recall that Afghanistan is not in the ME. It may have been poorly planned (and whose fault is that?) and executed (same question?) but something was needed. While most of the west did not and does not understand that, the ME (and most of Asia) understood it for what it was; you will have noted that European hearth objections were heartfelt and different from the pro-forma mumbles out of the ME and Asia. The major problem with the action in Iraq as a totality and the rest of the world was an incredibly poor job of stating the rationale. The major problem with total effectiveness of the overdue response to probes from the ME was in the execution. That happens...

Back to the actual thread and point at hand. To answer your question quoted, no one including the Indians knows what would happen internally; and our credibility in the world has not been great since I started paying attention in 1947 or so. It has fluctuated over the years but it has never been adequate to jawbone other nations into doing much they they didn't want to do (unless we bribed them, that works -- sometimes). Been that way for years and I see no change in that.

Nor am I at all certain why we should be excessively concerned with 'talking them down' from a policy they are probably not going to adopt. In the unlikely event they adopt such a policy, it will be (as is too often true here) more a result of domestic politics than anything else -- and that milieu is a little too opaque for most of us to sort -- and I'm pretty sure that pressure would trump anything we tried.