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Presidential hopeful Barack Hussein Obama is no stranger to Pakistan, we hear. For one trip, Obama shared a dorm with various Pakistanis as an undergraduate at Columbia university in New York and was close friends with at least two Karachi-ites from famous Sindhi families. He went to Pakistan in 1981 with his roommates.

For the second trip, he traveled to Sindh on a hunting expedition and went on shikar in Jacobabad. He was a guest, it is said, of the current caretaker prime minister and the latter claims that he is still in touch with him. Obama came to Pakistan when he was merely a state senator, more than a decade ago and not a full blown senator in the US Senate.

Obama, speaking at a fund-raiser, made an offhand reference to a trip he took to Pakistan while in college.

To counter opponents’ accusations that he lacks experience in foreign policy, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois often cites his ties to relatives in poor villages in Kenya and the years he spent growing up in Indonesia. Now he has added a new personal detail to that résumé: a trip to Pakistan while a college student.

Mr. Obama, the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, made the disclosure Sunday night while speaking to supporters at a fund-raiser in San Francisco. His remarks, in which he poked fun at the utility of traditional foreign policy qualifications like government officials traveling abroad on fact-finding missions, were recorded and were quickly placed on the Web.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/us/politics/10obama.html

Though he had never referred to the trip before, a number of reporters asked Obama’s press team about the trip, and now Team Obama has laid out the facts of the matter:

Was Obama informed by the State Department, or FBI, that the people who intruded into your Passport Files were looking specifically for whether you'd ever been to Pakistan? And that his “self-innoculation” discussion on April 10, 2008, when he said he was more savvy on foreign affairs than McCain or Clinton, was a way of heading off the posse?

He's the king of ‘self-innoculation’. Acknowledge the first Pakistan trip, while ignoring the more recent Pakistan trip.