In the brief but pitched military clash between Pakistan and India last month, the skies swarmed with waves of cutting-edge drones, signaling a shift from traditional border skirmishes to high-tech showdowns.
But for years, a far more covert and deadly drone campaign has been playing out within Pakistan’s own borders.
As the country’s internal security deteriorates amid rising Islamist militancy and a bloody separatist insurgency, Pakistani officials have increasingly turned to drones to monitor and strike militants, especially those operating in remote areas near Afghanistan.
The Pakistani government has not officially acknowledged the role of drones in its counterinsurgency playbook, in part because the issue is politically sensitive.
For years, the U.S. government conducted drone strikes inside Pakistan that targeted Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated groups but also killed significant numbers of civilians. While Pakistan heavily criticized the Americans over the attacks, it has now adopted their tactic.
And as with the U.S. strikes, civilian deaths have been repeatedly reported during Pakistan’s current campaign. Although Pakistani security officials have privately insisted that drone operations have become significantly more effective and precise, the collateral damage reported in some attacks risks radicalizing more Pakistanis against the government.
Last month, a weeklong protest was organized in North Waziristan, in the country’s northwest, after four children were killed in a strike on a home. Residents placed the victims’ bodies on a main road to demand justice. Officials blamed the Pakistani Taliban for the attack, but the political opposition condemned it as a consequence of what it called the government’s flawed security strategy.
Pakistani security officials have begun to reveal more information about drone strikes to journalists and to online supporters in an effort to rebut criticism and deflect the militants’ propaganda efforts.
A recent presentation to a group of academics and reporters featured drone video showing armed men trying to breach a barbed-wire perimeter under the cover of night. The footage, taken using thermal and low-light imaging, concludes with what appeared to be a precision strike. Officials asserted that the video, recorded in late 2024, showed Pakistani Taliban militants crossing the border from Afghanistan to launch attacks inside Pakistan.
Other videos that appear to show drone strikes targeting militants have circulated on social media, many of them posted by pro-military accounts. Though their authenticity remains unverified, drone activity has been reported by residents in the areas where the footage was recorded.
One video is said to show a drone strike targeting Taliban-affiliated militants in a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, which borders Afghanistan in northwestern Pakistan. Another video shows quadcopters — small four-rotor drones — providing real-time intelligence to ground troops during a raid in a bordering district.
The government has backed this digital campaign in an attempt to counter militant groups as they have frequently claimed to have carried out drone strikes on military personnel and pro-government militias. Such claims remain unverified because of the lack of independent access to Pakistan’s conflict zones.
The Pakistani government faces one of the most severe militant threats in the world. A global terrorism index published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international think tank, ranks Pakistan as the country second most affected by terrorism, after Burkina Faso in Africa.
The index lists the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or T.T.P., and the Baloch Liberation Army, a Pakistani separatist group, among the 10 deadliest terrorist organizations globally.
Both militant groups have indirectly acknowledged the impact of Pakistan’s drone warfare.
Last month, the T.T.P. said that two of its fighters had been injured in a drone strike; the group then executed a civilian it accused of spying for the military. The T.T.P. claimed that the person had used his mobile phone to guide the drone.
In late April, the group said that three militants had been killed in a drone attack on its hide-out in the Mianwali district of Punjab Province. Days earlier, five militants were reported killed in drone strikes in a district bordering Afghanistan during a clash with security forces.
The Baloch Liberation Army recently announced that it had killed a man in Panjgur, a district of Balochistan Province bordering Iran, accusing him of assisting the military in drone operations. The group’s affiliated media accounts claimed that intelligence provided by the person had resulted in the deaths of at least 40 militants in drone strikes.
Pakistan is among a handful of countries that have used drones against militants within their own borders, including Iraq, Nigeria and Turkey. Transparency is often limited, and governments can find themselves on uncertain legal and ethical ground as they target their own citizens in some cases.
In Pakistan, civilian deaths have left residents grasping for answers.
Late last month, at least 20 people were injured in a suspected drone strike on a crowd watching a volleyball match in Lower South Waziristan, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bordering Afghanistan.
“We were watching the match with great enthusiasm when strikes came from the sky,” said an eyewitness, Haroon Gul. “It caused chaos and injuries.”
The local authorities said it was unclear who had carried out the attack. The region has long been dominated by Pakistani Taliban factions, which have also increasingly used low-cost, commercially available quadcopter drones for attacks on security forces, said Iftikhar Firdous, founder of The Khorasan Diary, which tracks regional security issues.
The strike on a home in neighboring North Waziristan that killed four children happened less than two weeks before the volleyball attack.
“The family was having breakfast when the drone appeared,” said Qari Shahidullah, a relative. “It hovered above the house before dropping the bomb.”
In March, a drone strike in Mardan, another district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, killed 10 people. The central government said the dead were militants. But the provincial government said they were innocent shepherds and paid $17,000 to each of their families.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent watchdog, has urged a transparent investigation into the reports of civilian deaths and has called on the government to prioritize the protection of civilians.
The ambiguity surrounding civilian deaths has not only eroded public trust but also intensified tensions between the military-backed government and the political party led by Imran Khan, the jailed former prime minister. Last month, lawmakers from his party, which holds power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, claimed they had been blocked from raising concerns in Parliament about the government’s drone policy. They took to the streets in protest.
“Drone attacks do not distinguish between innocent civilians and terrorists,” Meena Khan Afridi, a government minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said at a rally in Peshawar, the provincial capital. “We will not allow them to continue.”
Pakistan’s former tribal region along the Afghan border was once the focal point of a prolonged U.S. drone campaign aimed at eliminating terrorist leaders. The first known U.S. strike took place on June 18, 2004, and killed Nek Muhammad, a prominent Taliban commander.
According to the New America Foundation, the George W. Bush administration authorized 48 drone strikes inside Pakistan. Under President Barack Obama, the number surged to 353. The final recorded U.S. drone strike of his term, on May 21, 2016, killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the chief of the Afghan Taliban.
President Trump ordered 13 strikes in Pakistan during his first year in office. No strikes have been documented since mid-2018.
After more than two decades of drone strikes on militant groups, residents of Pakistan’s border regions remain deeply skeptical about their effectiveness and say that the underlying causes of militancy remain unaddressed.
“Drones have come and gone — first the Americans, now our own government and the militants,” said Gul Zameen Dawar, a shopkeeper in North Waziristan. “But what has really changed? The militants are still here, and so is the fear and insecurity.”
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