THE IDEAL DIVISION OF RESPONSIBILITIES...:

In reality, even as its warplanes have struck the Taliban in other parts of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been quietly helping the Taliban to weaken the Islamic State in its Konar stronghold and keep more of the country from falling into the hands of the group, which -- unlike the Taliban -- the United States views as an international terrorist organization with aspirations to strike America and Europe. Remarkably, it can do so without needing to communicate with the Taliban, by observing battle conditions and listening in on the group. Two members of the JSOC task force and another defense official described the assistance to me this year in interviews for a book about the war in Konar, all of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk about it. (The U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan declined to comment for this story.)

 Afghan elders in the Korengal Valley listen during a meeting with American and Afghan military officials in 2008. Most of the elders have strong family ties to local Taliban fighters. (John Moore/Getty Images)

With the Taliban fighting the Islamic State in Konar, a peace deal was always going to require at least tacit U.S.-Taliban cooperation against their mutual foe. In March, days after U.S. diplomats and Taliban representatives inked a withdrawal deal in Doha, Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for Afghanistan and the Middle East, told the House Armed Services Committee that the Taliban had received "very limited support from us." He declined to elaborate, and the form that support took has not been publicly revealed.

But inside JSOC, the team working on this mission is jokingly known as the "Taliban Air Force," one task force member told me. As negotiators closed in on their deal in Doha, officers repurposed tools honed against the Taliban: Reaper drones and an intelligence complex with nearly two decades of practice spying on Afghan guerrillas. Unwilling to communicate directly with Taliban commanders, the task force worked to divine where and how its old foes needed help by listening to their communications.

By using such signals intelligence, members of the task force told me, they could tell when and where in the mountains the Taliban was preparing thrusts against the Islamic State, then plan airstrikes where they would be most useful. Taliban units on the ground appeared willing to take the help, waiting to assault Islamic State positions until they heard and saw the explosions of bombs and Hellfires. "It's easy to capture the Taliban's communications -- a lot of it is just push-to-talk radio comms," meaning walkie-talkies that anyone can listen in on, SAID Bill Ostlund, a retired Army colonel who led the JSOC task force in Afghanistan earlier in the war. "Why directly coordinate with them when you can do it that way?"

The Konar operations may offer a glimpse of what lies ahead for the United States in Afghanistan: the outsourcing of what has long been a core U.S. military mission -- fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda -- to the uneasily coordinated forces of the Afghan government and the Taliban, with U.S. counterterrorism forces in some cases helping both.

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