Obama threats undercut Pakistan gov't: official

White House hopeful Barack Obama's threats of U.S. military action against extremist sanctuaries in Pakistan are undermining Islamabad's new government, a top Pakistani official warned.

"Candidate Obama gave these statements, I come out openly and say such statements undermine support, don't do it," North West Frontier Province (NWFP) governor Owais Ghani told AFP in an interview late Saturday at his official residence in Peshawar.

Ghani said any incursion into Pakistan's mountainous northwestern tribal belt bordering Afghanistan would spark "disastrous" consequences for the whole world.

Obama was in Kabul on Sunday, days after vowing to shift the U.S. focus on Iraq to al-Qaeda militants based in Pakistan who are launching a growing number of attacks on US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

A spate of U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan on al-Qaeda and Taliban hideouts in the tribal areas had also inflamed public sentiment against Islamabad's role in the U.S.-led "war on terror," said Ghani, who oversees anti-militancy policies in NWFP and the adjoining Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

The strikes added to the economic and political woes facing the government that beat allies of U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf in elections in February.

"I think they are being shortsighted and they are being unrealistic," said Ghani, a key Musharraf lieutenant, referring to Obama and other U.S. officials.

"What the allies and the world must understand is that no government, whether political or military, can remain involved in this global war on terrorism unless the majority of public sentiment backs it," he said.

"These strikes are undermining that, but even the statements are, too."

Pakistan's government, led by the party of slain former premier Benazir Bhutto, has been under international pressure since launching peace negotiations with Taliban commanders in March.

U.S. President George W. Bush said Tuesday he would discuss the cross-border movement of extremists with Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in Washington this month.

Ghani, who took a hard line against separatist rebels in his last job as governor of southwestern Baluchistan province, said the best solution remained Pakistan's long-standing proposal to fence the border.

The root causes of the insurgency lay in Afghanistan's political situation, heroin production and in the continuing presence of foreign troops, Ghani said, adding, however, that an Iraq-style "surge" in Afghanistan could work.