Ralph Peters is correct to credit President Barack Obama for authorizing a stepped-up and productive campaign of eliminating terrorists in Pakistan via drone attacks: Terrorizing terrorists.

On Tuesday, an up-the-ante wave of attacks fired 18 missiles from Unmanned Aerial Systems. (UAS is our term of the week for drones.) The strike hit a terrorist stronghold, killing another dozen or more militants.

It’s an expensive way to kill raggedy-butt bad guys — but a great deal cheaper than farcical terrorist trials or the occupation of countries that haven’t reached the outhouse level of technology.

Best of all, our increased use of drone attacks terrorizes the terrorists: They can’t know if any hiding place, anywhere, is safe.

As every air traveler knows, security requirements slow things down. The uncertainty posed by UAS vigilance impedes terrorist actions — and raises suspicions of informers in their ranks. (Few things are more heartwarming than Islamists executing each other.)

To his credit, Obama authorized a much wider employment of these weapons than did the Bush administration. Partly, this is due to improved intelligence capabilities and, in part, to improved UAS availability and technology. But, in the end, the president personally green-lighted intensified attacks.

Let’s give the guy credit when he gets one right.

This is ironic, of-course, in the light of the fact that the Obama administration has been so eager to turn aspects of the war against al-Qaeda into a law enforcement matter, reading the underpants bomber his Miranda rights, and contemplating spending upwards of a billion dollars to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cronies a civil trial in the media capital of the world. If you’re a captured terrorist and mass killer, no expense or effort will be spared in ensuring your excellent treatment and in the careful protection of your rights, and those rights will be the same, apparently, as those of an American citizen accused of a common crime. If, on the other hand, you’re still roaming free in some locale like Waziristan, then apparently you only have to stick your head out of the window of your house and missiles will come screaming down, obliterating you, your poker buddies, any wives and children present, and possibly some adjacent sheep. I’m not saying that this latter approach is wrong; these are people who are making war on the United States, and would gladly kill hundreds of thousands of American civilians if they could. Taken together, however, this is just an example of the strange disconnect that exists in how the U.S. government is classifying and dealing with this enemy. You could call it incoherence. But at least the enemy in the wilds of Pakistan has some serious things to worry about …

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