Obama adviser, Sherry Rehman trade barbs

NEW YORK: 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 New York Times reported.

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," Sherry, 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," Sherry 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, 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."

"We're feeling a little bit of blowback from Isaf redeployments along the border," she said, referring to the Nato command in Afghanistan.

Sherry 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. Lute said the countries shared the vital interests of defeating Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan.

But the bonhomie did not last long. Pakistan's ambassador 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.