Special Ops Stepping Up Efforts to Find Bin Laden: After five days of swift battlefield success that put about half of Afghanistan in the hands of the opposition, the United States is zeroing in on the leadership of Afghanistan's retreating Taliban militia and its allies in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday. Rumsfeld disclosed that small numbers of U.S. Special Operations troops are now active around the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and elsewhere in south-central Afghanistan. But he said the troops were not acting as liaisons with anti-Taliban rebels -- as U.S. Special Forces have done with considerable success in the north -- but were acting "independently" as part of a stepped-up effort to hunt down Taliban leaders and their militant allies.