U.S. And Pakistan Tense Talk in Conference

Tensions flared between the United States and Pakistan on Friday, as two top officials traded accusations of doing too little to combat Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tart exchange between the officials, Douglas E. Lute, President Obama’s top adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, took place during a conference in this bucolic mountain setting. Under questioning from Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” Ms. Rehman, speaking on videoconference from Washington, said that Pakistani Taliban fighters, who have taken refuge in two remote provinces in eastern Afghanistan, were increasingly carrying out rocket attacks and cross-border raids against Pakistan. “These are critical masses of people that come in; this is not just potshots,” Ms. Rehman said. She said that on 52 different occasions in the last eight months Pakistan had provided to American and NATO commanders in Afghanistan the locations from which the militants were attacking, to no avail. Immediately, Mr. Lute, a retired three-star Army general and deputy national security adviser who rarely speaks in public, fired back. “There’s no comparison of the Pakistani Taliban’s relatively recent, small-in-scale presence inside Afghanistan to the decades-long experience and relationship between elements of the Pakistani government and the Afghan Taliban,” he said. “To compare these is simply unfair.” Pakistani officials have long faced criticism from Americans and Afghans for what they say is their failure to stop militant assaults originating from safe havens in Pakistan, often with the complicity of Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. But in the past several months, Pakistani officials have started accusing American and allied officials of the same problem coming from Afghanistan. Just last month, Afghan-based Taliban militants crossed into Pakistan to kill at least 13 Pakistani soldiers, beheading some of them, the military said. A senior Pakistani military official said at the time that more than 100 Taliban militants armed with heavy weapons had crossed the border in the attack. After the raid, the militants retreated back into Afghanistan. Pakistani Taliban fighters fled into Afghanistan starting in the summer of 2009 after a major assault by the Pakistani military on the Swat Valley in northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Many have taken refuge in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, areas where they have strengthened their presence as American forces have withdrawn. Pakistani officials say that two senior Taliban commanders — Maulana Fazlullah from Swat and Faqir Muhammad from Bajaur — are taking refuge there while their fighters plan attacks in Pakistan. “We’re feeling a little bit of blowback from ISAF redeployments along the border,” Ms. Rehman said, referring to the NATO command in Afghanistan. The barbed exchange came during a wide-ranging 90-minute panel discussion in the Aspen Security Forum at the Aspen Institute here. The New York Times is a media sponsor of the four-day conference. At the beginning of the session, it seemed that Mr. Lute and Ms. Rehman were intent on building upon the recently agreed deal to reopen NATO supply lines into Afghanistan. Ms. Rehman said that the two countries had experienced “an extraordinarily difficult period” after an American airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost near the Afghan border last November, but that they were still staunch allies. Mr. Lute said the countries shared the vital interests of defeating Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan. But the bonhomie did not last long. Ms. Rehman also criticized the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone strikes in Pakistan, saying they had reached the point of “diminishing returns” while also whipping up anti-American sentiment in the country. “This adds to the pool of recruits we’re fighting against,” she said.