http://www.newsmax.com/PrintTemplate.aspx/?nodeid=624537Newsmax
NYTimes: Dead Terrorist's Laptop Data Trigger Raids on Militants
Thursday, February 12, 2015 07:17 PM
By: Sean Piccoli
Nighttime raids in the dead of Afghanistan's winter against Taliban and al-Qaida figures have surged since U.S. and Afghan coalition forces killed an al-Qaida leader in October and found a trove of revealing files on his laptop, The New York Times reports.
American military officials told the Times that the computer data kept by Abu Bara al-Kuwaiti, who was killed in October in a joint operation near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, is "possibly as significant" as files taken from Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 when Navy SEALs killed him in a daring raid.
Military officials declined to say exactly how many operations have taken place enabled by the seizure of al-Kuwaiti's laptop, but one told the Times that the pace of the strikes is "unprecedented" for Afghanistan's harsh winter, which typically brings a lull in fighting.
Just since Saturday, a total of 10 individuals deemed threats to joint U.S.-Afghan forces were killed in two separate precision strikes announced by coalition officials, the Times reports.
The dead include Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a former Taliban commander who was freed from Guantánamo Bay and promptly allied himself with the Islamic State, the Times reports.
Overall, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is shrinking, with 9,800 U.S. troops remaining there under an Obama administration plan to have all troops out before 2017 except for embassy detachment.
But the stepped-up pace of strikes and raids by Special Operations forces "reflects the reality in Afghanistan, where fierce fighting in the past year killed record numbers of Afghan soldiers, police officers and civilians," the Times reports.
"It's all in the shadows now," a former Afghan security official said of the fighting, telling the Times, "The official war for the Americans — the part of the war that you could go see — that’s over. It’s only the secret war that’s still going. But it’s going hard."
