President Obama is under pressure to extend US missile strikes against suspected Taleban leaders into the Pakistani city of Quetta under recommendations from national security experts reviewing US policy in the region.

In a development that caused dismay among Pakistani leaders, two reports sent to the President recommended that the CIA step up attacks by pilotless drones in and around Quetta, the densely populated capital of Baluchistan province.

Mr Obama has yet to make a decision but is under pressure to act against the large number of Taleban insurgents in the city, including Mullah Omar, the Taleban leader, and commanders leading the insurgency across the border in Afghanistan.

Until now the strikes have been aimed at only al-Qaeda and Taleban militants sheltering in and around Pakistan’s northwestern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) on the border with Afghanistan. US officials say such attacks have killed several dozen top militants. The attacks have been made with the tacit support of the Pakistan Government and Army but Pakistani officials have repeatedly protested in public.

Yousuf Raza Gilani, the Prime Minister, urged Washington to stop the attacks and provide Pakistan’s Army with “actionable intelligence” so that it could attack the militants on the ground. US drone attacks were uniting people against the military operating in the tribal area. “They are defeating our objective of eliminating terrorism”, he told The Times.

Nawaz Sharif, the opposition leader, has also protested about the attacks and legislators in North West Frontier Province passed a unanimous resolution on Tuesday asking the Government to stop them. “This challenges the independence and sovereignty of Pakistan,” said Munawar Hussain, deputy head of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s biggest religious party. “This is why Americans are hated by Muslims around the globe.”

The CIA has stepped up the strikes on the Fata in the past six months, after growing frustrated with the army’s reluctance to take on militants. The latest of about three dozen such strikes since August killed at least 24 people on Thursday at an alleged militant training camp in the Fata’s Kurram agency, according to Pakistani officials.

US officials are now concerned that militants are moving to Baluchistan to escape the drones and could increase incursions across the Afghan border from there, as well as hijacking supplies for Nato and US troops in Afghanistan. Militants have repeatedly attacked the main supply route, via the Khyber Pass, in the past six months, but have also started to concentrate on the secondary Baluchistan route via the border town of Chaman.

Two men on a motorcycle threw a bomb at a truck in Chaman carrying an excavating machine to Nato troops yesterday. No one was hurt but the machine was damaged.

John Solecki, the American head of the UN refugee agency’s Baluchistan office, was abducted in Quetta on February 2, although Baluch separatists have claimed responsibility for that.

Major-General Saleem Nawaz, the head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Baluchistan, who is dealing with the abduction, denied that were any Taleban in the province.

An investigation by The Times last month discovered that America was using a small airstrip at Shamsi, in Baluchistan, to launch CIA drones.

Ahmed Mukhtar, the Defence Minister, also conceded last month that Pakistan had given the US landing rights for drones. Mr Gilani, however, said that Pakistan had allowed drone flights in 2001 for surveillance and intelligence gathering and insisted: “They are not flying from here any more. I hope the Obama Administration would understand our problems and stop the attacks. We want the US to provide actionable intelligence information so that we can take action against al-Qaeda and militants.”

US officials say they cannot do that for fear that militant sympathisers within the Army or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency would tip off the targets before an attack. The ISI has a long history of sponsoring militants as proxies to fight Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir and to offset Indian influence in Afghanistan.

Opinion is divided over the drones’ effectiveness, with some analysts saying that there is insufficient intelligence to target them accurately.

“There seem to be a lot of al-Qaeda number threes getting killed in Pakistan,” said Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert at the Rand Corporation. “We need to have a review of who these things target and who they kill. If we can’t rely on the Pakistani military to hit a target in the tribal areas when we’re giving them so much money, then what does that say about our relationship? Not a lot.”

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