On March 2, a suspected U.S. drone strike inside Pakistan killed two Taliban militants in the country's tribal region — the first drone attack in the country since Donald Trump became president.
The strike ended a nine-month pause in the CIA's long-running drone war in Pakistan, raising expectations that the Trump administration will increase the targeted killings of militants in the Pakistani tribal areas. But with the administration focused on defeating the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, few expect a large expansion in the Pakistan drone campaign, let alone a return to 2010 when the U.S. carried out a record 122 drone strikes in Pakistan.
Instead, many experts see a more modest escalation even as strikes elsewhere pick up more dramatically.
"I'd expect the campaign to be escalated at some point and probably get back to somewhere at the levels of the middle to the height of the Obama administration," said Bill Roggio, editor of the at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.
A Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. military was not responsible for the March 2 strike in Pakistan. The CIA declined to comment.
Until the Obama administration began releasing information about drone strikes last year as it handed over the program to the Pentagon, the campaign in Pakistan was shrouded in secrecy. But investigations carried out by the New America Foundation, the London-based Center for Investigative Journalism and others documented a massive escalation in Pakistan strikes.
Under former President George W. Bush, the U.S. carried out 48 strikes to kill "high-value targets" among al-Qaida and the Taliban, the New America Foundation reported. President Barack Obama's administration, however, made the use of drones a centerpiece of its anti-terror strategy as it drew down U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. New America Foundation data indicate the U.S. carried out at least 354 drone strikes in Pakistan under Obama, killing as many as 2,700 militants.
The last known Pakistan drone strike during the Obama administration came last May when a missile killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour in Balochistan province. By then, drone strikes had declined sharply from their 2010 peak, and no others were reported until March 2.
Several explanations have been offered for the pause. For one, the strike on Mullah Mansour crossed a Pakistani red line on drone attacks outside the country's tribal areas, drawing the ire of Islamabad, which had long privately endorsed U.S. drone strikes while publicly condemning them, said Brian Williams, author of and a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Also, with the rise of IS in 2014, the U.S. began shifting its focus — and drone assets — to Iraq and Syria. In addition, there was a dwindling list of militant targets in Pakistan as drone strikes decimated their ranks and a Pakistani Army offensive pushed the remainder into neighboring Afghanistan.
"It was the result of success," Williams said. "The drones were very successful in degrading and destroying al-Qaida Central."
While Obama approved seven times as many drone strikes as his predecessor, he also put in place stringent limits on their use. Among those measures there was a centralized White House approval system for drone strikes, which required "near certainty" on the part of military commanders that a strike would not cause large numbers of civilian casualties.
Now, as the Trump administration ramps up counter-terrorism efforts, it has sought to reverse some of those rules, making it easier for the military and the CIA to conduct drone strikes. The reported earlier this month that the Trump administration has restored the CIA's authority to use drones while the reported that Trump has approved the Pentagon's request to declare parts of Yemen "areas of active hostilities."
The result has been a spike in reported airstrikes, by both drones and manned aircraft. In one five-day period starting in late February, the U.S. carried out 40 strikes against al-Qaida targets in Yemen, according to the Pentagon, which did not indicate how many were by drones. And in Iraq, the U.S. is investigating reports that a series of airstrikes on March 17 killed more than 100 civilians in western Mosul's Old City.