I really hate reminding people of history they should know. During 1982 - 1986 I was working a desk in Middle East, Mediterranean, and North African intelligence for one of the military branches. I won’t be more specific than that.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1978. In 1981 Afghanistan was in chaos and Pakistan was under martial law, being used by various agencies as a leaping off point for incursions into Afghanistan. If you were an American tourist you couldn’t get a visa to enter Pakistan as it was on the U.S. State Department’s no-travel lists a very dangerous place.
Barack Obama traveled to Pakistan via Indonesia. We already know that he had been registered in Indonesian public schools as Lolo Soetoro’s son, as a Muslim, and as an Indonesian. He had to have had an identity card, called a KTP, to have been enrolled. Indonesia at that time was a police state and non-Indonesian children could not be enrolled.
He traveled between Indonesia and Hawaii in 1971 using an Indonesian passport to depart Indonesia and entered Hawaii using a U.S. passport. That is what has been reported by people investigating that period in his childhood.
In 1981 he traveled to Pakistan, with his Pakistani roommate, via Indonesia.
It would have been very easy to update his KTP and Indonesian passport to enter Pakistan, and a great deal of trouble to try to travel on his U.S. passport, especially as he wouldn’t have been granted a visa to enter Pakistan.
At age twenty, was he even thinking that he might one day run for President of the United States?
All the above can be found on Texasdarlin’s blog.
1. Why would Pakistan refuse to grant a visa based on a U.S. travel warning?
2. Since the 1970's, has the US ever actually prohibited travel to any countries besides Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Libya?
3. Has the US ever prohibited travel to a country where we have an embassy?
4. The US did enact sanctions on Pakistan and stop economic aid in 1979 due to nuclear proliferation concerns (Symington amendment) but it is not clear that this included travel restrictions for US citizens. In 1981 this aid cutback was reversed with the granting of a huge U.S. military and economic aid package. Presumably a lot of Americans would have been needed to administer the associated programs.
5. This guy and this guy were able to study at universities in Pakistan in 1981.
6. These people and these people had fellowships to study in Pakistan in 1981.
Barack Obama traveled to Pakistan via Indonesia.
This seems quite possible since he may have been visiting his mother, but who besides Obama and his roommate would really know what route he took to Pakistan?