Tensions have flared between the U.S. and Pakistan, as two top officials traded accusations of doing too little to combat Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The tart exchange between Douglas E. Lute, President Barack Obama’s top adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan and Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S. — 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 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 pot-shots,” said Ms. Rehman. She said that on 52 occasions in the last eight months, Pakistan had provided to U.S. 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 havens in Pakistan, often with the complicity of ISI directorate.
But in the past several months, Pakistani officials have started accusing the U.S. 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 soldiers, beheading some of them, said the military.
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 into Afghanistan.
Pakistani Taliban fighters fled into Afghanistan starting in summer 2009 after a major assault by the Pakistani military on the Swat Valley in north-western Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
Many have taken refuge in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan provinces, areas where they have strengthened their presence as U.S. forces have withdrawn. Pakistani officials say 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,” said Ms. Rehman, 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. — New York Times News Service
