Democratic Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama had visited India and Pakistan as a 19-year-old college student, his campaign revealed
ISLAMABAD: Democratic Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama had visited India and Pakistan as a 19-year-old college student, his campaign revealed as the African American Senator attempted to counter criticism from his rival that he lacked foreign policy experience.
With bitter foe Hillary Clinton citing her meetings with over 80 world leaders and her travels, Obama, 46, for the first time publicly disclosed that he has many Pakistani friends and lived in Pakistan for three weeks in 1981 as a part of a college trip, the Dawn daily reported.
Obama spent "about three weeks" there, his press secretary Bill Burton said, staying in Karachi with the family of a college friend Mohammed Hasan Chandoo but also travelling to Hyderabad, in India.
"I travelled to Pakistan when I was in college I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," Obama, who has endorsed direct military attacks on Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, told his audience at a fundraiser in San Francisco.
"Foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain," Obama said.
According to his campaign staff, he visited Pakistan on the way back from Indonesia, where his mother and half-sister, Maya Senators-Ng, were living.
Republican John McCain has already sealed his nomination for the November presidential election while Clinton and Obama are locked in a bitter battle for the Democratic nomination.
"Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world," Obama, who has Kenyan antecedents, said. "This I know. When Senator Clinton brags 'I've met leaders from eighty countries' I know what those trips are like! I've been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing.
"You do that in eighty countries," Obama said, "You don't know those eighty countries," he said before citing his visit to Indonesia, Africa and Pakistan
In "Dreams from My Father," which won a Grammy for the Best Spoken Word Album two years ago, Obama talks of having a Pakistani room-mate when he moved to New York, a man he calls Sadik who "had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York's high-turnover, illegal immigrant work force, waiting on tables."
In Karachi, he stayed with the family of a college friend, Muhammad Hasan Chandoo who is now a self-employed financial consultant, living in Armonk in Westchester County, New York.
When contacted, Chandoo said that he would not comment about his relations with his "friend".
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