“It’s all in the shadows now,” said a former Afghan security official who informally advises his former colleagues. “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.”

American and Afghan officials said the intelligence gleaned from the October mission was not the sole factor behind the uptick in raids. Around the same time that Afghan and American intelligence analysts were poring over the seized laptop and files, Afghanistan’s newly elected president, Ashraf Ghani, signed a security agreement with the United States and eased restrictions on night raids by American and Afghan forces that had been put in place by his predecessor, Hamid Karzai. Mr. Karzai had also sought to limit the use of American air power, even to support Afghan forces.

Mr. Karzai’s open antipathy to the United States helped push the Obama administration toward ordering a more rapid drawdown than American military commanders had wanted. And while the timetable for the withdrawal of most American troops by the end of 2016 remains in place, the improving relations under Mr. Ghani pushed the Obama administration to grant American commanders greater latitude in military operations, American and Afghan officials said.

American commanders welcomed the new freedom. Afghan forces were overwhelmed fighting the Taliban in some parts of the country during last year’s fighting season, which typically runs from the spring into the autumn. Many Western officials fear that this year’s fighting season could be even worse for the Afghans without the air power and logistical support from the American-led coalition, and without joint Afghan-American night raids to keep up pressure on insurgent commanders.

Gen. John F. Campbell, the American commander of coalition forces, appears to have interpreted his mandate to directly target Afghan insurgents who pose an immediate threat to coalition troops or are plotting attacks against them. He is not targeting Afghans simply for being part of the insurgency. But one criterion used to determine whether an individual is a danger to the force, an American military official said, is whether the person has in the past been associated with attacks or attempted attacks on American forces — a large group, given that the United States was at war with the Taliban for more than a decade.

Since the start of the year, the rationale of protecting American forces has been readily used by the coalition to justify operations, including in two instances in the past week.

On Saturday, coalition officials announced that a “precision strike resulted in the death of two individuals threatening the force” in the Achin district of eastern Afghanistan.