The Associated Press, citing statistics from the New America Foundation, reports that "the United States has drastically scaled back the number of drone attacks against militants in Pakistan." Specifically, the CIA is limiting strikes "to high-value targets and dropping the practice of so-called "signature strikes", and has only conducted 16 drone strikes in Pakistan so far in 2013, compared to 122 in all of 2010, 73 in 2011, and 48 in 2012.
The anonymous officials the AP spoke to say this drop is because the CIA was "feeling the drone program may be under threat from public scrutiny" and "as a concession to the Pakistani army." But they also say that the reduced tempo is the result of "concern that civilian casualties were breeding more militants."
If this reduction stems from a sense that we are creating more terrorists than we are killing through drone strikes, however, this suggests the drop in attacks results more from a strategic calculation than in response to external criticism, as the AP's headline suggests. If criticism from Congress or Pakistan alone were the cause of the drop, then how would one explain the consistent drop since 2010?
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