A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujaheed, interviewed by cellphone, said that there had been no Taliban activity in the area and that all the victims were civilians. A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, Maj. Michael Johnson, said that “as of right now we have no indication of any civilian casualties.” The operation in Laghman Province was ongoing, Major Johnson said, and, “If there’s any indication at all of civilian casualties, we will investigate it.”

In the other encounter, in eastern Khost Province, 42 insurgents were killed at about 2 a.m. on Saturday when they were spotted trying to cross the border from Pakistan, said Maj. Stephen Platt, a NATO spokesman at Forward Operating Base Salerno.

The Khost provincial police chief, Gen. Abdul Hakim Isahqzai, put the insurgent death toll even higher, with at least 82 killed in a NATO airstrike and reports that the final toll may reach 200. A But a NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, said there were no airstrikes by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, in that area. He had no information on who might have carried out such a strike.

There were no complaints of civilian casualties in that encounter, in the Mogholgai region of the Gurboz district, where airstrikes have also been carried out by other United States government agencies, including those by C.I.A. drones. General Isahqzai also said that the police had arrested a major Taliban commander, Mollawi Salim, from Logar Province, at a checkpoint in Khost, and handed him over to American soldiers at the Salerno operating base for detention. The police general said that Mr. Salim was a well-known figure who was responsible for arranging suicide bombings.

The ISAF reported on Saturday the earlier arrests and killings of four other insurgent commanders in three different provinces, Khost, Paktika and Helmand, part of the military’s ongoing campaign to focus on midlevel leaders.