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Barack Obama may have banned the Bush-era term "war on terror," but the scope of the conflict hasn't diminished. In fact, with covert and mostly deniable violence, the current President has vastly escalated the war against Islamic extremists, far beyond the obvious 30,000 extra troops sent to Afghanistan.

In Pakistan and in Yemen, and perhaps even more quietly elsewhere - in the failed state of Somalia, for example - small cadres of special operations soldiers and near-silent unmanned aircraft capable of assassinations in the middle of the night have taken the fight against Islamic extremists to new levels and new places.

Air strikes in Pakistan are on pace to reach 150 this year, triple last year's total, while at the same time top U.S. generals have all but banned warplanes from bombing targets in Afghanistan because of the risk of civilian casualties and resulting fury among ordinary Afghans.

No such limit seems to curb drone strikes in Pakistan.

The killing yesterday of three U.S. soldiers in a remote and mostly lawless part of Pakistan where Islamic militants roam and Osama bin Laden is presumed hiding, lifted - if only partially - the dark veil of secrecy that shrouds American covert operations in Pakistan.

Officially, the three were killed by a remote-controlled bomb while visiting a U.S-funded aid project at a girls' school. It was the first known deaths of U.S. soldiers in Pakistan's border region. Three children and a Pakistani soldier were also killed in that attack, for which the Pakistani Taliban took credit.

But Pakistan's already fevered and ardently anti-America rumour mill quickly spewed out half a dozen conflicting accounts; including that the soldiers were in civilian clothes, and that they were masquerading as media. "The level of deranged conspiracy theories floating around the country was already at an all-time high," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a specialist in the region and counterinsurgencies at the Brookings Institution.

U.S. diplomats said the dead soldiers were "trainers." Whatever the truth, their deaths will cast a swirl of publicity - at least briefly - on the major escalation of American intervention in Pakistan.

"There's a big increase in engagement, not just military but aid as well, but with very little visible presence because it is all so controversial," Ms. Felbab-Brown said. Least visible, most controversial and vastly ramped-up are the drone strikes as the silently circling Predators, flown by CIA operatives sometimes half-a-world away, unleash death in the form of missiles on remote compounds, targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

It's impossible to know just how many strikes there are because only some become known. But the known numbers have skyrocketed as documented by Bill Roggio, whose Long War Journal blog and website provides the most comprehensive data on Predator strikes in Pakistan as well as other aspects of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.

In recent weeks - in retaliation for the killing of CIA agents by a Jordanian suicide bomber, Mr. Roggio speculates - there has been a dramatic upsurge in drone strikes, the most recent of which included more than a dozen missiles that killed several dozen people.

Some strikes are evidently successful, such as the Aug. 5 assassination last year of Baitullah Mehsud, then leader of the Taliban in Pakistan. Video footage of Mr. Mehsud being blown to pieces as he lay on a cot on his roof while getting an intravenous drip for his diabetes have made the rounds among senior Pakistani ministers.

In public they condemn " these drone attacks," while behind closed doors they "not only understand and acquiesce but in many cases privately support the drone attacks," says Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a close political ally of Mr. Obama's who recently returned from Pakistan.

Mr. Levin wants drone attacks used more widely. There is evidence that drones have been deployed over Yemen.

In some ways, unmanned drones offer the same killing punch - at least against people - that warplanes can provide, with the ability to remain in the air longer - up to 48 hours. More important, politically: When they crash or get shot down, there is no pressing need to mount a risky, high-profile rescue operation and no danger of a pilot being held hostage or paraded for propaganda purposes.

Killing militants - and Mr. Roggio can document a steady series of successful assassinations - is a useful tactic, he says. "The greater problem is a lack of overall strategy."

While he doubts the death of three U.S. soldiers - in a country where the United States supposedly has no combat troops - will cause a stir among opponents of the war in Washington, he expects there will be no fundamental change in Mr. Obama's version of the "war on terror."

Nor does Ms. Felbab-Brown. "I'm sure the deaths were deeply disturbing in the White House and critics will claim it's more escalation," she said. "Managing the visibility of the U.S. presence is a huge challenge."

The stakes are huge. Nuclear-armed and politically unstable, Pakistan represents the worst nightmare scenario if it were to collapse or be taken over by Islamic extremists.

For the Obama administration, the toughest precision strike - in Pakistan, as in Yemen, and elsewhere - is to kill militants faster than their martyrdom recruits jihadists, while shoring up governments without seeming to turn them into puppets.

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Death from above

Since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the number of U.S. drone-aircraft attacks on military targets in Pakistan has grown.

2004 / 1

2005 / 1

2006 / 3

2007 / 5

2008 / 36

2009 / 53

2010 (to date) / 12

If strikes continue at the same rate, the number could reach more than 100 by the end of 2010.

CIVILIAN V. TALIBAN /AL-QAEDA DEATHS

2006 / 20 / 122

2007 / 0 / 73

2008 / 31 / 268

2009 / 43 / 463

2010 (to date) / 0 / 108

TRISH McALLISTER / THE GLOBE AND MAIL // SOURCE: LONGWARJOURNAL.ORG