NEW YORK, May 6: The new American strategy for wiping out enemy fighters in the most lawless area of Afghanistan calls for continuous counter-insurgency operations on both sides of the border with Pakistan that could last beyond this summer, says The New York Times on Monday.

The operations, including day-and-night raids and methodical sweeps, are far less reliant on airstrikes or on the friendly Afghans than the plan in the earlier stages of the war.

Instead, they are being carried out by rapidly-moving and highly-trained allied soldiers with the intensive intelligence-gathering elements, the paper says. Their mission is to hunt relatively small numbers of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have dispersed to avoid detection.

In some ways, it is more like what the United States Army tried to do in the middle of the Vietnam War than it is like the last seven months in Afghanistan.

The action also carries considerable risks: of suffering the American casualties; of mistakenly attacking the wrong people; of being misled by faulty intelligence and of inflaming local hostility to foreigners on the Afghan soil.

“ The goal here is to apply unrelenting pressure, so wherever they turn, they never can find any breathing space,” a senior defence official told the newspaper.

The NYT quoting senior officials says that after seven months “ the war’s new phase features a new level of cooperation with Pakistan.”

In just the last few weeks, a handfuls of the American military intelligence and communications specialists have joined Pakistani forces who had been searching for the war fugitives in the mountainous tribal border areas traditionally outside the control of the government in Islamabad.

The assistance of American Special Forces may help squads of elite troops drawn from Pakistan’s Frontier Corps to move quickly to block the mountain passes chosen by the enemy fighters fleeing from the coalition forces in Afghanistan, the American officials told the paper.

Another official told the paper that small numbers of American Special Operations forces are conducting cross-border reconnaissance missions into Pakistan, ready to strike Al Qaeda fighters if they are found.