ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN):

New United States (US) President Barack Obama has given his clearest indication yet that the fight against terrorism will be at the top of his agenda, with an early military strike.

Seventeen people were killed Friday evening in two US missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal region, Pakistani government and military officials reported.

They were the first such strikes since President Obama took office last Tuesday.

Both hits were near the Afghan border, said local political official Nasim Dawar.

The Pakistani military sources asked not to be named because they are not authorised to release such information.

Coalition forces

The first strike, which killed 10 people, occurred in a village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan, the officials said. Seven people died in the second hit near Wana, the major town in South Waziristan, 17 miles (27 kilometres) from Afghanistan, they said.

A US military statement said coalition forces killed 15 armed militants and arrested another Friday in eastern Afghanistan in an operation aimed at disrupting a suspected Taliban network.

But the Pakistan military's top spokesman called the attacks, "counterproductive".

"It helps us in no way conducting our operations," Major General Athar Abbas told the CNN. "We are trying to wean away the tribe at large from the militant component of the tribe. But it diminishes the line which divides the militant component and the tribe at large."

Public opinion

Abbas said, "We face much more difficulty as a result of drone strikes, and we have conveyed our position on that to the United States."

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, interviewed on CNN's The Situation Room, repeated that public opinion in his country is strongly against the strikes on Pakistan territory.

"As far as this issue of the new president, President Obama, having taken over and this continuing ... I've always been saying that policies don't change with personalities.

"Policies have national interests, and policies depend on an environment."