19-year-old Obama had visited India

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 traveling 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.