Residents inspect the damage after what locals say was a possible drone that hit a residential house in the provincial capital of Quetta, Pakistan [File: Naseer Ahmed/Reuters]By Abid HussainPublished On 18 Mar 202618 Mar 2026
Islamabad, Pakistan – On the evening of March 13, drones struck three locations across Pakistan. Two children were wounded in Quetta. Civilians were also injured in Kohat and in Rawalpindi, the garrison city that houses the headquarters of Pakistan’s armed forces and neighbours the capital, Islamabad.
Pakistan’s military said the drones were intercepted before reaching their targets. But President Asif Ali Zardari said Kabul had “crossed a red line by attempting to target our civilians”.
It was not the first such incident. In late February, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said anti-drone systems had brought down small drones over Abbottabad, Swabi and Nowshera in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Another attack was reported in Bannu in the same province, where five men were injured after a quadcopter hit a mosque.
While the Taliban group in Afghanistan claimed to have struck military targets in Rawalpindi and Islamabad in the latest attacks last week, Pakistan’s military dismissed those assertions as propaganda, describing the drones as “rudimentary” and “locally produced”. Al Jazeera reached out to the Pakistani military to seek its views on the latest drone attacks but received no response.
Yet, analysts say, irrespective of how the Taliban’s drones are characterised, these recent incidents point to an increasingly troubling pattern for Pakistan: drones over garrison cities, drones over places of worship, drones over urban centres. The government responded by imposing a nationwide ban on drone flights and briefly restricting airspace over the capital.
“As much as Pakistan is downplaying these drones, the point is not what level of drone they are; the point is that drones are coming, and they are coming to the capital. That is the central danger,” said Abdul Basit, a senior associate fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) in Singapore.
For many in Pakistan’s security circles, the question is no longer whether the drones caused significant damage. It is whether their ability to penetrate deep into the country, at a time when Pakistan has been engaged in an “open war” with Afghanistan for three weeks, reveals holes in its preparedness against a threat that is increasingly emerging as the future of warfare.
The escalation with Afghanistan has not occurred out of the blue, analysts point out. By 2025, Pakistan was experiencing one of its deadliest periods in nearly a decade.
Attacks by armed groups were concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces, and particularly carried out by the Pakistan Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Pakistan insists that the TTP is an ideological ally of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that the latter has given the Pakistan Taliban shelter and support in attacks on Pakistani soil. The Taliban has rejected Pakistani allegations that it is complicit in the TTP attacks against Pakistan.
Even as Islamabad and Kabul traded charges — and engaged in occasional border clashes — the attacks in Pakistan last year surpassed the total for 2024 well before the year ended, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project.
Islamabad repeatedly pressed Kabul, both bilaterally and through partners such as China, to act against the TTP and other armed groups, but Afghan authorities denied harbouring anti-Pakistan armed groups on its soil.
The first serious escalation between the two neighbours came in October 2025, when they engaged in a week of intense border clashes, the worst since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
Mediation efforts by Qatar and Turkiye produced a fragile ceasefire, but core differences remained unresolved. Pakistan continued to demand that Kabul act against the TTP, while the Taliban insisted that it was not to blame for the neighbouring country’s internal security challenges.
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 TTP and ISIL (ISIS).
The Taliban responded with artillery fire across the border, attacking border posts and launching drone attacks into Pakistani territory while Pakistan, relying on its superior air power, continued its aerial campaign.
The fighting has persisted since. 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.
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 acknowledgement 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.
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.
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?”
Some analysts believe that Pakistan’s counter-drone response has been reactive rather than strategic.
“The response has been reactionary and ad hoc,” Waleed said. “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.”
And if the trajectory of the threat continues unchecked, the consequences could extend well beyond border skirmishes.
“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,” said Basit.
The urgency is underscored by what may be coming, Waleed warned.
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 cautioned.
“State militaries, characterised by traditional war doctrines, have been slow to grasp the lessons of drone warfare, especially from the Ukraine war,” he said.
