During the Obama campaign press secretary Bill Burton released information about Obama's visit to Pakistan for “about three weeks” in 1981. He had traveled with a college friend whose family lived in Karachi; he had also visited Hyderabad in India, Burton said.
The visit raises questions about why and how an American college student would have visited Pakistan at that time since American citzens were not allowed in the country. Besides, people would like to know why he was there at such a momentous time.
The 1981 visit took place after Obama left Occidental College in Los Angeles to transfer to Columbia University in New York that same year.
Obama stayed in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Muhammed Hasan Chandoo. Now a financial consultant in Armonk, N.Y., and an Obama fundraiser, Chandoo has declined to comment regarding any details. However, he did confirmed that he was Obama’s “friend” and former “roommate.”
According to published reports in Pakistan, Obama in 1981 also stayed at the home of a prominent politician, Ahmad Mian Soomro, in an upscale Karachi suburb, and went on a traditional partridge hunting trip north of Karachi. Soomro’s son, Muhammad Mian Soomro, is a senior politician who served as acting president before the appointment of President Asif Ali Zardari.
Ahmad Mian Soomro died in 1999, and attempts to reach his son for comment were unsuccessful.
An AP story mentioned several of Obama’s Pakistani college friends, as well as an Indian friend, Vinai Thummalapally from Hyderabad, India.
The Times of India, citing Thummalapally, said Obama’s staff got it wrong – Obama had not visited Hyderabad in India but Hyderabad in Pakistan.
Obama may have visited Pakistan again later, when his mother, Ann Dunham, held a microfinance job there in the mid-1980s.
A Lahore-based Urdu newspaper, Daily Waqt, reported that Dunham worked as a consultant for a Pakistan Agricultural Development Bank program that ran from 1987 to 1992.
The project was in Gujranwala, the paper said, but Dunham stayed at a hotel in nearby Lahore, where Obama reportedly visited her. Dunham died in Hawaii in 1995.
Southwestern Asia was a risky place for a Westerner to visit in 1981, although it is unclear whether travel to Pakistan was actually restricted. The U.S. government at the time advised against visits to Afghanistan and had recently lifted a ban on travel to Iran.
Two years earlier, the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan; the Islamic revolution toppled the Shah in Iran; a frenzied mob attacked the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, setting it on fire and killing a U.S. Marine and two Pakistanis; and military ruler Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq hanged former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – Benazir Bhutto’s father – whose government he had ousted in a 1977 coup.
Pakistan in 1981 was under martial law, with opposition politicians incarcerated, judges sacked, media censorship enforced and anti-government strikes underway.
The year Obama visited was also a particularly dangerous one for Americans. During a hijacking that March of a Pakistan passenger liner, three Americans onboard were singled out and threatened with death.
Pakistan in 1981 also was awash with Afghan refugees who had fled their homeland after the Soviet invasion – two million by the end of that year. In Karachi Afghan arrivals added to simmering sectarian and inter-ethnic tensions that was to blight Pakistan ’s largest city during the 1980s and 1990s.
The U.S. in 1981 stepped up funding, via Pakistan , to Afghans fighting the Soviet forces. Thousands of Arab and other foreign mujahideen flocked to Pakistan and Afghanistan to join the war.
In the early 1980s, a Palestinian ideologue named Abdullah Azzam was coordinating the jihad from Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border. Azzam, who also taught at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, visited America numerous times during the 1980s, urging support for the war in Afghanistan .
Described as a charismatic orator, he told fanciful tales of Islamic warriors not being harmed by Soviet tanks and bullets, and slain martyrs whose corpses did not decay.
Azzam’s Peshawar center was known as the Afghan Bureau. His deputy and financier was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam is regarded by many scholars as having laid the ideological groundwork for modern-day jihad. After his assassination in a 1989 bomb blast, bin Laden took over the bureau and developed what would become al-Qaeda.
Was the idealistic 19- or 20-year-old Obama inquiring about the Afghanistan jihad?
If you are not an American, security is a higher priority for seasoned security analyst Bahukutumbi Raman, a former Indian counterterrorism chief and the director of India ’s Institute for Topical Studies.
Raman said that naturally felt troubled that Obama had not disclosed the Pakistan visit earlier.
“Why did he keep mum on his visit to Pakistan till this question was raised?” asked “Has he disclosed all the details regarding his Pakistan visit? Was it as innocuous as made out by him – to respond to the invitation of a Pakistani friend or was there something more to it?”
Raman continued,
“I could not help thinking of dozens of things. Of the Afghan jihad against communism. Of the fascination of many Afro-Americans for the jihad. Of the visits of a stream of Afro-Americans to Pakistan to feel the greatness of the jihad. Of their fascination for Abdullah Azzam …”
Raman concluded that when "one has a feeling that one has not been told the whole story, but only a part of it.”
Raman summarized his view:
“It is the right of the Americans to decide who should be their president. It is my right to worry about the implications of their decision for the rest of the world, including India.”C
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