Credit: NY Times.

ASPEN, Colo. — Tensions flared between the United States and Pakistanon 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.”

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