Though the White House says it hasn’t confirmed the reports, it appears that a CIA-directed drone missile attack has killed Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban in Pakistan.

If true — as many credible reports from the region suggest — that’s good news indeed.

As presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, Pakistanis are a whole lot safer with Mehsud dead.

Ironically, news of this major victory in the War on Terror comes even as the Obama administration was confirming that the United States is no longer engaged in a “War on Terror.”

John Brennan, head of the White House Office of Homeland Security, disclosed in a speech Thursday that the terms “war on terror,” “global war” and “jihadists” are now off the table, as far as the administration is concerned.

That’s because “terrorism is but a tactic,” and “you can never fully defeat a tactic like terrorism, any more than you can defeat the tactic of war itself.”

All that Obama & Co. are prepared to declare, he said, is that “we are at war with al Qaeda . . . [and] its violent extremist allies.”

That’s all gibberish, of course — but at least it’s better than “overseas contingency operation,” which the Pentagon’s Office of Security Review put forward last March as its preferred term.

What’s important, in any event, is that the CIA apparently is prepared to keep launching drone missiles that manage to bring down the Middle East’s leading jihadists — oops, tacticians.

So, in the long run, it really doesn’t matter what the White House calls such operations.

Better to wage a war on terror without calling it such than the other way around.