Most certainly, we do work in parallel.
For example, in Kandahar province there's a fledgling army being built. We communicate at various levels, from a Joint Task Force Afghanistan level to their senior military official level, all the way down the chain at lower levels. We do this together to conduct operations.
Now, the Afghans don't need to ask us to do operations in their area, but we have commenced now. There are certain occasions when activities are going on that we may not necessarily want to talk about, but in the main, I would say in the majority of cases there is good interaction between the two of us and both chains of command are very aware of what's going on.