THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Without any fanfare the CIA has gone 5 months without busting a Hellfire missile in anybody's ass in Pakistan. Does this mean the end of the strikes as we know it?

Earlier this year, January marked the first month since December 2011 where no missiles were launched from American unmanned vehicles at targets in Pakistan. That month has now turned into five, marking the longest period without strikes since the peak of the campaign to target leaders of Al Qaeda hiding in Pakistan’s western territory in 2010. Prior to this, according to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism (BIJ), the most recent gap in strikes was 42 days which “coincided with Pakistan’s general election, in which drones were a major campaigning point, and also with the run-up to President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University, in which he announced new policy guidelines around covert lethal actions.”

While U.S. officials would not confirm to the Associated Press directly that the drone strike program has ended, they gave several reasons as to why the slowdown is occurring. “Many of the senior al-Qaida figures in Pakistan have been killed,” the AP cited American officials as telling them. “Those who remain are much harder to target because they are avoiding mobile phones and traveling with children, benefiting from stricter targeting rules designed to prevent civilian casualties.”

Those new rules — which raised the standards for conducting a drone strike but remain classified — were put into place last year amid heavy criticism of the targeted killing campaign, of which drone strikes are just one part. The result has been a sharp decline in the number of confirmed civilian casualties from drone strikes, though the exact numbers remain uncertain. According to the BIJ, which tracks drone strikes, since 2004 there have been 383 CIA drone strikes into Pakistan. Of those, 332 have been under the Obama administration.

Preparations for U.S. combat troops to withdraw from Afghanistan also appears to be slowing the frequency of drone strikes into neighboring Pakistan. With only 9,800 troops planned to remain after this year, the need to launch “force protection” strikes against gathering militants plotting attacks is also falling. The CIA, which runs the program in Pakistan, is also accelerating its own withdrawal from Afghanistan according to reports. This in turn is spurred on by the closure of bases throughout Afghanistan as the military withdraws — and from which the armed drones are launched and maintained.

No more targets, eh? At least not up Pakistan way. We are still raining Hellfire on coloreds, mostly in Yemen and Somalia. We can't go cold turkey on a fun program like that.