The Afghan Taliban's growing investment in drone technology is a direct response to their lack of a conventional air force, and Pakistan's defence establishment — built around fighter jets, tanks and artillery — is struggling to keep pace, Umair Jamal of the Diplomat Risk Intelligence consultancy argued in a Central Asia-Caucasus Institute analysis published on July 28.

The build-out matters beyond Afghanistan's borders because cheap, dual-use drone technology is proving almost impossible to contain once it spreads: it is already showing up in the hands of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), and Russia's own push to build a formal partnership with Kabul gives it a stake in the fallout. Pakistan's conventional defences are struggling to respond, fuelling a wider proliferation risk for the region, including Central Asia.

From propaganda tool to weapon

Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have faced a lack of a functional air force and heavy international sanctions, turning to drones as a cost-effective substitute for surveillance in the new asymmetrical wars. According to ACLED data, the Taliban first used drones militarily in February this year, with at least 12 recorded cross-border strikes into Pakistan, some reaching deep into Pakistani territory — platforms that Jamal says began as propaganda tools before evolving into weapons.

The Taliban are also building domestic production capacity, with front companies such as Dinit Technology reportedly offering contracts to engineers and robotics experts, and recruitment drives targeting university drone projects. The Daily Mail has reported the group is using a former UK Special Air Service base in Logar province as its main test site, sourcing GPS modules, motors, flight-control systems and sensors from black markets and smuggling networks in the absence of any formal state supplier relationship. The low tech and back engineered approach to building drones has already been pioneered by Iran after the US imposed sanctions on the country several decade ago.

Facing similar isolation, Iranian engineers turned Western sanctions into an innovation engine, reverse-engineering commercial parts into the cheap, mass-producible Shahed-136 — a process IntelliNews dubbed the "bazarification of war", where cost-effective, workshop-built drones now outcompete billion-dollar conventional systems. The Taliban's black-market parts sourcing and university recruitment drives suggest the same playbook — cheap mass production defeating sophistication — is now spreading to a second sanctioned, isolated actor.

The TTP has already taken the same path

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) formally announced its own dedicated "Air Force" unit in December 2025, reflecting an operational reality already under way: Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations data recorded more than 400 quadcopter and drone-related militant incidents in late 2025 alone. Commercial, suicide and quadcopter drones costing as little as $200-$1,000 per unit let the TTP run saturation attacks that overwhelm Pakistan's conventional electronic jamming and physical defences, which were built to intercept far more expensive, higher-value threats.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police say commercial drones are now routinely used to surveil security convoys and guide suicide attacks, forcing a shift toward dedicated counter-drone units, a new drone-training school in Nowshera, and delivery of 76 AI-powered surveillance drones. Provincial police say they foiled 341 TTP drone attacks in the six months to July using this modernised approach.

Pakistan's defence doctrine and procurement have historically prioritised fighter jets, tanks and artillery, leaving a structural gap against low-cost, asymmetric drone threats. That lag has left Islamabad reliant on ad hoc measures and international partnerships for electronic warfare, radar and drone-jamming capability tailored to the current threat — a mismatch that mirrors, on a smaller scale, the drone-versus-air-defence dynamic already reshaping Russia's war in Ukraine, where cheap drones have repeatedly proved effective against better-resourced conventional forces.

A regional proliferation risk, including for Central Asia

The core difficulty, Jamal argues, is that cheap, dual-use drone technology is far easier to acquire and modify than advanced weapons systems, and international export-control regimes have limited ability to stop components moving through commercial black-market channels. If the Taliban's programme keeps advancing, expertise and parts could spread further to militant factions operating from Afghan soil, complicating counter-terrorism efforts well beyond the Pakistan border.

That risk lands directly on Russia's own regional interests: Moscow signed a military-technical cooperation agreement with the Taliban government in May, explicitly citing concern over Afghanistan's porous borders with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and the risk of groups such as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) exploiting them. A more heavily armed, drone-capable Taliban cuts both ways for Moscow's calculus: a useful partner against ISKP, but also a less predictable neighbour to Central Asian states Russia considers its own strategic backyard.