In April, 2008, after the story became public, candidate Obama told a San Francisco crowd that during his college years he took a trip to Pakistan. This came as a surprise to reporters, and the candidate’s two autobiographies, Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006), made no mention of any trip to Pakistan. What the college student did there is not exactly clear, and some in the region found it disturbing. “Why did he keep mum on his visit to Pakistan till this question was raised?” wondered India’s former counterterrorist chief Bahukutumbi Raman. “Has he disclosed...