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”.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listIt 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 …
