Obama vows vast 'war on terror'

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists. The senator warned Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that, under an Obama presidency, he would have to do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters or risk a US troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid. In clips of a speech released by his campaign, Obama said: "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." His speech comes the week after the former First Lady accused her Democratic rival of being "irresponsible and frankly naive" in agreeing to meet the "world's worst dictators." In a Democratic debate, broadcast on YouTube, Obama said he would be willing to meet leaders of rogue states like Cuba, North Korea and Iran without conditions, which Clinton criticized as irresponsible and naive. He responded by using the same words to describe the New York senator's vote to authorize the Iraq War and called her "Bush-Cheney lite." Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and put them "on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." He said he would send at least two more brigades to Afghanistan and increase non-military aid to the country by $1 billion. He also said he would create a three-year, $5 billion program to share intelligence with allies worldwide in a bid to wipe out terrorist networks from Indonesia to Africa.