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The only people I know who don't occasionally question their decision to pursue this degree are those whose parents footed the entire bill. 
I think the other issue is that if you haven't lived in DC, a lot of these post-IR master's jobs sound a lot more glamorous than they are. For example, World Bank jobs are being discussed in another thread. I remember thinking that sounded so prestigious before starting at SAIS. Now I have a zillion friends who work there, and with one exception they're cycling through a series of short-term contracts with no benefits, complaining about the instability of temporary positions, the frustrations of bureaucracy, and how they're not sure whether their work is having any impact. The World Bank is basically a depository for non-American SAIS grads who can't get work sponsorship in the private sector, and most of my friends working there know it and slightly resent it. 

I'm from the US and don't work for the World Bank, so this is not personal bitterness. I'm just repeating what friends have said after a beer or three.
Perhaps I've gotten a bit carried away, but I think it doesn't hurt to counter the narrative a lot of these schools push that signing away your life to Navient is no big deal because you're going to be changing the future of the world with your prestigious and deeply meaningful multilateral job. I came out of SAIS with a relatively low level of debt and on the whole think it was worth it - I would not have my current job or salary without it. But I don't think I'd feel the same if i had 120k in debt, and could never in good faith tell someone to pay sticker unless he/she's independently wealthy.

I managed to graduate from SAIS with well below 100k debt, through a combination of scholarships, some meager savings, working part-time, and a little bit of help from my parents (flights home for holidays, money for a random medical bill I incurred, etc.). Guess what - it still sucks knowing that I'll be making a ~$500/month payment for the next 8.5 years of my life, even though I have a solid salary on the higher end of what someone can expect a year or two out of SAIS. That's about 6k/year I could be putting into a retirement account or using to save up for a down payment.
I have some friends who took on 6-figure debt loads, and it's a gigantic weight on their shoulders that will have major ramifications on their lives for decades to come. Think - living with roommates into your mid-30s, racking up credit card debt because you're short on cash when having to make that $900 payment each month (which basically just covers interest), having to make salary the #1 consideration in the job hunt (which sucks when you're getting a degree that qualifies you for some awesome but lower-paid jobs at non-profits and advocacy organizations), not being able to fly to friends' weddings or take vacations, etc.
Very few people emerge with no debt whatsoever, but if your only option is 100k+ in debt, I would unequivocally recommend walking away and working to make your application stronger for the next season. Quite frankly, a lot of these degrees accept way too many people as tuition fillers (yes, even at SAIS) and some of the people with 6-figure debt also have poorer career outcomes because they were the weaker candidates to begin with. This is not universal, but I've definitely noticed the correlation between people complaining about 150k in student debt and those who have pretty irrelevant jobs that probably pay less than $50k/yr (which isn't easy to live on in DC with no debt whatsoever).  

I only knew one person who did general IR, but she was very focused on finance (and may have done a specialization or two in that arena), so I think she wanted more flexibility in her courses in order to be able to really go deep on fin classes. To most people, I would strongly recommend a concentration, because as you suggest, I do think it helps with access to resources (even just in terms of faculty support, not to mention funding/research opportunities/study trips).
Strat is definitely one of SAIS's strongest concentrations, and has a LOT of funding and trips. One potential downside is that you could get lost in the crowd as you'll have so many other people in your cohort. 
AFP is up there as well in terms of SAIS concentrations, but a little smaller and my friends who did that seemed to form pretty close bonds with the professors, some of whom are quite impressive.
Of my friends who did strat, many are now doing jobs in defense-related fields (contractors, consulting, federal agencies, etc.), whereas my AFP classmates are doing more broader federal policy and diplomacy jobs. 
 
 

We MA students had to take one quant class (like stats, econometrics, or corporate finance) and then four foundational econ classes (micro, macro, monetary theory, international trade theory). SAIS definitely attracts some people who are really interested in quant, but if you're not, that shouldn't scare you off. I have plenty of friends that addressed those classes as something to get through on their way to take classes on Chinese domestic politics, gender dynamics in the developing world, US Congress and foreign policy, European imperialism, etc. 

Damn, sounds like that author had an axe to grind. I have plenty of criticisms of policy programs and I thought the article brought up some interesting points, like the trend of policy students preferring the private sector, and the perhaps too-cozy relationship between HKS and some powerful people (I witnessed this to a degree at SAIS). But the tone was really over-the-top, and some of the logical leaps were a bit specious.
The article argued that HKS has somehow lost its way, but it never really defined what this superior prior era was, other than suggesting there might have been fewer econ courses back then - which is not a good thing, IMHO.  
It's not an indictment of HKS that a few of its students later went on to do bad things. The author specifically mentioned Donald Heathfield, the Russian spy - well he fooled the US government into giving him citizenship while posing as a native-born Canadian who mysteriously happened to have a slight slavic accident (and the citizenship process involves in-person interviews, for the record), and Harvard revoked his degree after the arrest. Mentioning Heathfield twice as some kind of black mark against HKS just seems like mudslinging. 
I'm also not sure how the traditional MPP program having a 20% acceptance rate versus the law school's 16% somehow means that HKS has "abandoned America." The one-year mid-career program that the author speculates may have an acceptance rate closer to 50% probably is a prestige vehicle/cash cow, but that's true of a lot of similar one-year professional programs (see: the executive MBA). Not great, but not damning evidence that HKS has lost its way, in my view.
I think the article actually missed an opportunity to delve into how HKS and other policy programs have changed over time without all the cheap shots. The degree's price tag could have been discussed in more depth, as @MaxwellAlum mentioned, as well as the slow, arduous federal hiring process. Those two things combined are what drove me to the private sector - I have friends who got Presidential Management Fellowships who still weren't placed in full-time fed roles a year after graduation because of bureaucracy and security clearance BS.
It could have also discussed the proliferation of government contractors in greater depth - many of my friends work in the "private sector" but spend all their time on government contracts. In the case of development contractors, they're often making less money than they would be if they were working directly for USAID, so the decision to go private is hardly one motivated by greed. 
And unless I missed it, I didn't see comparisons of enrollment figures between now and 20, 30, 40 years ago. I would bet that HKS has expanded pretty rapidly since then, and this I could see as a real criticism of the school, as well as other policy programs. By the end of my time at SAIS, I felt that the bottom 10-20% of the class could have easily been cut without any negative effects on classroom discussion (in some cases, there might have been an improvement), and watching many people struggle to find employment after we graduated only underscored that belief. Even at a relatively elite master's program, there was still a fair amount of dead weight, but the school probably needed those students' tuition dollars, which often come via loans. I think it's ethically dubious to take advantage of young people's idealism in this way. These schools admit so many students who will spend the rest of their lives drowning in debt for degrees that get then mid-5-figure salaries in one of the highest cost of living cities in the country. 
 
 

I graduated from a top IR program in 2015, and before that was an anxiety-ridden gradcafe poster under another handle (trying to retain a little anonymity here). 
Scrolling through these anxious posts on a lazy Saturday morning, I want to assure that it's not as hard to get into these programs as many gradcafe posters seem to think.
I had a solid GRE, mediocre GPA, decent but not exceptional work experience. I worked hard on my essays and two of my professional recommendation letter writers definitely liked me a lot (although I never saw their letters), but I was a number of years out of undergrad and the academic reference I got was from a professor in a totally unrelated field who probably barely remembered who I was. I had never had a proper IR job, had never lived in DC. It was a mixed application. But it got me into Johns Hopkins SAIS with a hefty scholarship, and a number of other top programs most of which gave me money.
This is not Yale Law. You don't need a 3.96 GPA from an elite undergrad and a 98th percentile GRE/LSAT. One of my good friends at SAIS once casually referenced being happy about having cracked the 50th percentile on the math portion of the GRE. I have a number of friends that came from no-name undergrads (and of course some from Princeton, Vanderbilt, Middlebury, Boston College, Brown, etc.). 
If you're looking for $$$, then you probably want to pump up your GRE scores and write the best letters you possibly can. 
ETA: Most gradcafe-ers are probably some of the top applicants to these schools. That's why when results season comes around, you'll see lots of posts like "I can't believe I got into X school with Y dollars!" 

Taking a course sounds like a great idea if you're trying to get into grad school. I did something similar for what I thought was a middling GPA. And the fact that you're a few years removed, did very well on the GRE and have pretty great work experience puts you in a good position. 
You're still going to have to explain that 2.41 GPA at some point, though. Was there some kind of family or mental health crisis? Did your grades improve throughout your years there? Were you just really immature and partying all the time? There should be a section in each application for "additional information," so you should think about how you're going to frame it so that they don't think that this is something that's going to happen again.
But my bigger question is this - why are you trying to get into grad school right now if you're just starting a GS-11 position? That's about the max level you can get straight out of a master's degree, and I know a few people who started at GS-9 after SAIS. You might find you need the master's eventually to advance, but if this is the kind of field you're hoping to go into, I don't think it would be worth it to quit your HUD position less than a year in to go to a full-time master's. Something part-time at night would be more reasonable, although again you will want to be super-certain that the degree is vital for you to move up because these programs are very expensive.

Taking a course sounds like a great idea if you're trying to get into grad school. I did something similar for what I thought was a middling GPA. And the fact that you're a few years removed, did very well on the GRE and have pretty great work experience puts you in a good position. 
You're still going to have to explain that 2.41 GPA at some point, though. Was there some kind of family or mental health crisis? Did your grades improve throughout your years there? Were you just really immature and partying all the time? There should be a section in each application for "additional information," so you should think about how you're going to frame it so that they don't think that this is something that's going to happen again.
But my bigger question is this - why are you trying to get into grad school right now if you're just starting a GS-11 position? That's about the max level you can get straight out of a master's degree, and I know a few people who started at GS-9 after SAIS. You might find you need the master's eventually to advance, but if this is the kind of field you're hoping to go into, I don't think it would be worth it to quit your HUD position less than a year in to go to a full-time master's. Something part-time at night would be more reasonable, although again you will want to be super-certain that the degree is vital for you to move up because these programs are very expensive.

Based on what you wrote, don't get a JD or PhD. A MPP might be worth it down the road if it's at a top school at a low cost. Start by working. You seem like a thoughtful person, so you're going to have to trust me when I say that you have zero idea what you're going to want to do for a career until you've tried it. With a HYPS (Stanford really should be in that grouping) undergrad degree, you should be able to corral enough connections to get a relevant (or at least partially relevant) starting job. Work for 2-4  years, potentially switching jobs if a better opportunity becomes available. Understand what it means to do the same thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year for multiple years. This will give you some idea of what type of job skills/areas you might enjoy. You cannot understand this until you've been forced to do the same thing for at least 1-2 years; it's not at all like undergrad. If your career goals remain the same, re-evaluate at that point whether a MPP is worth it (hopefully you'll have garnered good enough work experience to make WWS or Yale or high scholarship at SAIS/SIPA/Fletcher/etc.) If your career goals change, re-evaluate what options might be worth it while acknowledging that PhDs and JDs are bad choices for foreign policy careers.

Don't get an MPA to work on the Hill, unless you have money to burn and just want the education.
Have you looked at the backgrounds of people who are currently in positions you might want? I deal with a lot of Congressional staffers for work. Those in the 22-35 range typically have no more than a bachelor's degree. If they have an advanced degree, it's usually a JD. And no matter what, the salary is pretty terrible. 

Unless you can get a full ride, don't go. You may think you know what you want, but even the best internships do not adequately prepare you for what it's like to have a full-time office job where you're doing the same thing for years on end.
It sounds like you'd be in a great position to get a job with a non-profit or local government agency after you graduate. Do this for a year or three and you'll have a much better idea of whether that kind of career suits you. You'll also have a stronger application and a better shot at getting $$$. You don't to plunge yourself 50k or - god for bid - 100k+ into debt only to discover that you really don't like the career path you chose at age 21.
 

Absolutely do try to get more funding. If you do it in a non-insulting manner, the absolute worst thing they will do is say, "Sorry, we think you're an excellent candidate for our program but unfortunately we do not have extra funding available at this time." I'd recommend through email because the decision isn't going to be made in the moment and will need to be discussed, and an email can be more easily sent to a group of people than a hastily-scribbled note. I haven't asked around for success stories for MPP/MPA/MA IR programs, but requesting more funding is a time-honored tradition for law school that includes many success stories.
There are plenty of templates out there, so choose whichever one feels best to you (or you can make your own). One example from "The Art of Applying":
Send the letter via email to whomever you received the financial aid package from.
Subject: Funding decision appeal letter from recently admitted candidate
Dear _______________,
Thank you for the generous offer of admission and the fellowship aid in amount of $x.
[Insert school name you are writing to here] is my top choice for graduate school, and I would love to join the incoming class. However, before I am able to commit to joining the class, I wanted to let you know about the other offers I received and request that you consider increasing my fellowship aid.
My current financial aid package includes grant aid of $x and a stipend of $x.
I also received the following offers for fall entry:
Johns Hopkins SAIS: $x per semester + $x stipend
Columbia SIPA: $x per semester + $x stipend
[List the rest of the schools in descending order of generosity of award or in descending order of prestige. You may just want to focus on the most prestigious schools or the ones that gave you the most money]
I request that [insert school name] match the offer made by [insert name of most generous school that is in the same general league of prestige] to grant aid of $x and a stipend of $x.
Once again, I would like to emphasize how grateful I am to be offered a place in the incoming class. As I am committed to a career in public service after graduation, my financial aid package is a crucial factor in my decision making process.
I have attached scanned PDF copies of my award letters from the aforementioned schools. [Make sure you actually attach the award letters.]
Please let me know if I can provide any additional information to aid you in making your decision.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Olive H. Kayess

Apply broadly and apply for scholarships/fellowships. IMO it doesn't really matter which have a reputation for being generous or stingy, but which ones actually give ME the money. If you don't get what you need, you can always try again the next year.

Okay, so I currently work at a top 10 law firm as a paralegal, and I'm also considering a dual degree and I can hopefully give you some insight. First and foremost, I highly recommend NOT signing up for a JD unless you know what you are getting into and you know it's what you want. I've spent 3 years here because I took that long in weighing my options between law school and an MA. It's not a decision to make on a whim. I've seen so many of my friends end up miserable because they didn't think it through carefully. In that same vein, getting a dual degree is really inadvisable unless you have a very clear idea what you would use it for. 
But on the subject of dual degrees - you say it's not an option for you because the schools offered by your program are weak programs. What about an ad hoc? For example, SAIS has official partnerships with Stanford and UVA, but they've also assured me that doing an ad hoc is possible, if the other school agrees, and a number of institutions in the top 14 have confirmed for me that they allow ad hocs (though I have no idea if this policy varies by school, etc).
Jumping back to law- the general consensus here that a JD locks you in to a certain kind of career does have a lot of truth to it. It's a profession, so that shouldn't be too, too surprising. I do think having a dual degree could help overcome that a bit, but if doing international human rights law is the only way you'd be happy as a lawyer, it's a risky proposition. Could you be happy working in big law? If you go to law school and have loans, you will have to work in big law, assuming you go to a prestigious enough program to get into a big law firm (genuinely not trying to be condescending- when I asked my firm's recruiter about her thoughts on the JD, her response was 'we have a list of 15 schools we recruit from and throw the rest in the trash unless you know someone'). I see a lot of associates work here for three years and then bail, because they're putting in their sweat equity to pay off the loans. 
That's not to say that there aren't really interesting aspects of big law. I work in the International Arbitration group, and I love it. It's amazing. Even if it's not what I'd want to do forever, I could see myself being happy with it. And even if the big law hours here are grueling, I absolutely love the type of person that's drawn to this field, and really enjoy working with them. So a dual degree is something I'm considering closely. If big law is a job you think you will hate: run. Literally last November a dude in DC jumped off the roof of his law firm's building. If you do not like the people or the work, it will be hell. All this being said, you are just out of undergrad, and it seems like you're really over-planning things right now (why are you already stressing about supporting a family?). What you're interested in is pretty likely to change. I only graduated 3 years ago, and my interests have strayed from where they were originally. 
(Also, on the subject of admission 'hooks': your admission to law school is 90% LSAT and undergrad GPA - LSAC does NOT factor in graduate GPA - and from what I've seen, soft factors aren't really useful unless they're tied in some way to the legal field).

Decide what you want to do. The JD is not a flexible degree, despite what people like to say about it. It locks you into being a lawyer. Even attorneys doing "policy work" are limited to a finite set of tasks like writing legislation (snore), writing regulations (snore), or serving as counsel (less of a snore, depending on the dept/agency/person you're counseling). When you go to TLS (top-law-schools.com), you will get the same answer.
The MPP won't help you make bank, but you will actually learn to analyze and craft public policy. Leave the writing of actual legislation to the chumps. If you want to be at the forefront of making or implementing public policy, save the money and go for the MPP.
Uh...not really. Hooks don't count for much in JD admissions. If your numbers are a match for Gtown (the lowest of the T14), no hooks are going to bump you up to HLS. A "bump" in this case would move you up to Penn/Mich or maybe Columbia. But Columbia focuses on biglaw (80% of 2Ls are summering) and that is definitely not what you want.
 
Advice: go to MPP school and see where you are after the first summer. There is no need to plan now. You will likely find this thread hilarious after a year when you realize that if you 1) don't want biglaw, 2) are considering only for income purposes, and 3) you don't actually want to do what typical lawyers do, then the JD could be a million dollar mistake (counting opportunity costs)

The best way to evaluate the aggregate of factors that determines employment is to see where the grads of each school end up. The school that sends the highest proportion of its grads into the types of jobs you would want is the probably the best for you, all things equal. If that state school places well into the jobs you want, I doubt it would be worth an extra $100K to go to Georgetown.

My GPA wasn't much better than yours, and my work experience was decent but less international than yours. I rocked the GREs and ended up at SAIS with a significant scholarship. These programs aren't as competitive as you think.
Also, for what it's worth, Peace Corps gives you a huge advantage because you get preferential hiring for the federal government. This significantly boosts your chances of prestigious employment post-grad school, which admissions committee members know and see as a major asset.

Do well on the GRE and you'll be fine 

I strongly recommend working for at least a few years before attending grad school, even if you are confident that you know what you would like to do. Work experience will increase your likelihood of receiving funding, and working in your preferred field will let you gain out-of-the-classroom experience that admissions committees want to bring to the classroom. 
Even if you are admitted to your preferred school now, work experience will help you after graduation. Students who go straight to Masters programs often lack experience in things like interpersonal communication, office etiquette, how to run a meeting, and personal time management/task tracking that employers value (even after you are hired). I don't mean to imply that you don't have these skills or that you can't learn these things in school or internships, but I believe that these skills are much stronger in people who have at least a year of full-time work experience, and will substantially help you land and succeed in a job and succeed in your field after you graduate. 

Unless you can get a full ride, don't go. You may think you know what you want, but even the best internships do not adequately prepare you for what it's like to have a full-time office job where you're doing the same thing for years on end.
It sounds like you'd be in a great position to get a job with a non-profit or local government agency after you graduate. Do this for a year or three and you'll have a much better idea of whether that kind of career suits you. You'll also have a stronger application and a better shot at getting $$$. You don't to plunge yourself 50k or - god for bid - 100k+ into debt only to discover that you really don't like the career path you chose at age 21.
 

Damn, sounds like that author had an axe to grind. I have plenty of criticisms of policy programs and I thought the article brought up some interesting points, like the trend of policy students preferring the private sector, and the perhaps too-cozy relationship between HKS and some powerful people (I witnessed this to a degree at SAIS). But the tone was really over-the-top, and some of the logical leaps were a bit specious.
The article argued that HKS has somehow lost its way, but it never really defined what this superior prior era was, other than suggesting there might have been fewer econ courses back then - which is not a good thing, IMHO.  
It's not an indictment of HKS that a few of its students later went on to do bad things. The author specifically mentioned Donald Heathfield, the Russian spy - well he fooled the US government into giving him citizenship while posing as a native-born Canadian who mysteriously happened to have a slight slavic accident (and the citizenship process involves in-person interviews, for the record), and Harvard revoked his degree after the arrest. Mentioning Heathfield twice as some kind of black mark against HKS just seems like mudslinging. 
I'm also not sure how the traditional MPP program having a 20% acceptance rate versus the law school's 16% somehow means that HKS has "abandoned America." The one-year mid-career program that the author speculates may have an acceptance rate closer to 50% probably is a prestige vehicle/cash cow, but that's true of a lot of similar one-year professional programs (see: the executive MBA). Not great, but not damning evidence that HKS has lost its way, in my view.
I think the article actually missed an opportunity to delve into how HKS and other policy programs have changed over time without all the cheap shots. The degree's price tag could have been discussed in more depth, as @MaxwellAlum mentioned, as well as the slow, arduous federal hiring process. Those two things combined are what drove me to the private sector - I have friends who got Presidential Management Fellowships who still weren't placed in full-time fed roles a year after graduation because of bureaucracy and security clearance BS.
It could have also discussed the proliferation of government contractors in greater depth - many of my friends work in the "private sector" but spend all their time on government contracts. In the case of development contractors, they're often making less money than they would be if they were working directly for USAID, so the decision to go private is hardly one motivated by greed. 
And unless I missed it, I didn't see comparisons of enrollment figures between now and 20, 30, 40 years ago. I would bet that HKS has expanded pretty rapidly since then, and this I could see as a real criticism of the school, as well as other policy programs. By the end of my time at SAIS, I felt that the bottom 10-20% of the class could have easily been cut without any negative effects on classroom discussion (in some cases, there might have been an improvement), and watching many people struggle to find employment after we graduated only underscored that belief. Even at a relatively elite master's program, there was still a fair amount of dead weight, but the school probably needed those students' tuition dollars, which often come via loans. I think it's ethically dubious to take advantage of young people's idealism in this way. These schools admit so many students who will spend the rest of their lives drowning in debt for degrees that get then mid-5-figure salaries in one of the highest cost of living cities in the country. 
 
 

I graduated from a top IR program in 2015, and before that was an anxiety-ridden gradcafe poster under another handle (trying to retain a little anonymity here). 
Scrolling through these anxious posts on a lazy Saturday morning, I want to assure that it's not as hard to get into these programs as many gradcafe posters seem to think.
I had a solid GRE, mediocre GPA, decent but not exceptional work experience. I worked hard on my essays and two of my professional recommendation letter writers definitely liked me a lot (although I never saw their letters), but I was a number of years out of undergrad and the academic reference I got was from a professor in a totally unrelated field who probably barely remembered who I was. I had never had a proper IR job, had never lived in DC. It was a mixed application. But it got me into Johns Hopkins SAIS with a hefty scholarship, and a number of other top programs most of which gave me money.
This is not Yale Law. You don't need a 3.96 GPA from an elite undergrad and a 98th percentile GRE/LSAT. One of my good friends at SAIS once casually referenced being happy about having cracked the 50th percentile on the math portion of the GRE. I have a number of friends that came from no-name undergrads (and of course some from Princeton, Vanderbilt, Middlebury, Boston College, Brown, etc.). 
If you're looking for $$$, then you probably want to pump up your GRE scores and write the best letters you possibly can. 
ETA: Most gradcafe-ers are probably some of the top applicants to these schools. That's why when results season comes around, you'll see lots of posts like "I can't believe I got into X school with Y dollars!" 

A lot of topics have been covered here, and I'll add one more to consider.
I think you're vastly overestimating the prestige of Cornell CIPA's program. Yes, Cornell is a well-known school generally speaking. But in US policy circles, CIPA is a decidedly second tier program in an oversaturated field. At the risk of causing offense, that's probably why they gave such a hefty scholarship to a candidate with one year of work experience, a below-average GPA, and an unspectacular GRE score. 
If you were just trying to get a US brand name school on you resume to go back to Pakistan, it might work out (lots of Chinese students do something similar at various non-elite programs). Or if you were already working in the US and needed a master's just to check a box for a very specific career goal, it could be worth it. But given your stated goals (finding a job that will allow you to stay in the US long-term) and your lack of practical experience, I think you should proceed very cautiously. 
There won't be that many US employers who are going to be thirsty enough for CIPA grads that they're willing to sponsor you for an H1b visa, unless you have a really unique skillset (usually something quanty). That leaves you with international multilaterals where you can get a diplomatic visa, but those organizations tend to recruit from schools like Harvard, SAIS, SIPA, etc. and/or are extremely hard to break into even for people with elite degrees and incredible work experience (I'm thinking of the UN here). 
And finally, it's a major uphill battle to get into any US doctorate program with policy or IR master's, as @ExponentialDecay suggests. This transition would only be made harder by coming from a lower-ranked program.  
 

A lot of topics have been covered here, and I'll add one more to consider.
I think you're vastly overestimating the prestige of Cornell CIPA's program. Yes, Cornell is a well-known school generally speaking. But in US policy circles, CIPA is a decidedly second tier program in an oversaturated field. At the risk of causing offense, that's probably why they gave such a hefty scholarship to a candidate with one year of work experience, a below-average GPA, and an unspectacular GRE score. 
If you were just trying to get a US brand name school on you resume to go back to Pakistan, it might work out (lots of Chinese students do something similar at various non-elite programs). Or if you were already working in the US and needed a master's just to check a box for a very specific career goal, it could be worth it. But given your stated goals (finding a job that will allow you to stay in the US long-term) and your lack of practical experience, I think you should proceed very cautiously. 
There won't be that many US employers who are going to be thirsty enough for CIPA grads that they're willing to sponsor you for an H1b visa, unless you have a really unique skillset (usually something quanty). That leaves you with international multilaterals where you can get a diplomatic visa, but those organizations tend to recruit from schools like Harvard, SAIS, SIPA, etc. and/or are extremely hard to break into even for people with elite degrees and incredible work experience (I'm thinking of the UN here). 
And finally, it's a major uphill battle to get into any US doctorate program with policy or IR master's, as @ExponentialDecay suggests. This transition would only be made harder by coming from a lower-ranked program.