The US military launched 506 strikes from unmanned aircraft in Afghanistan last year, according to Pentagon data, a 72 percent increase from 2011 and a sign that American commanders may begin to rely more heavily on remote-controlled air power to kill Taliban insurgents as they reduce the number of troops on the ground.
Though drone strikes represented a fraction of all US air attacks in Afghanistan last year, their use is on the rise even as American troops have pulled back from ground and air operations and pushed Afghan soldiers and police into the lead.
In 2011, drone strikes accounted for 5 percent of US air attacks in Afghanistan; in 2012, the figure rose to 12 percent.
Military spokesmen in Kabul and at the Pentagon declined to explain the increase. But officers familiar with the operation said it was due in part to the growing number of armed Reaper and Predator drones in Afghanistan and better availability of live video feeds beamed directly to troops on the ground.
The increase has coincided with a shift by the Obama administration toward a new strategy in Afghanistan that relies on a smaller military footprint to go after the Taliban and remaining al Qaeda fighters.
The use of armed drones is likely to accelerate as most of the 66,000 US troops in the country are due to withdraw by the end of 2014. The remotely piloted long-range aircraft, which kill targets with virtually no risk to American lives, carry an unmistakable attraction for military commanders.
“With fewer troops, and even with fewer manned aircraft flying overhead, it’s harder to get traditional support in combat missions,” Joshua Foust, a Washington-based analyst who has advised the US military in Afghanistan, told Los Angeles Times.
“Drones provide a good way to do that without importing a bunch of pilots and the support infrastructure they’d need to remain based there.”
After Marine Gen John R Allen, the former coalition commander, issued an order limiting airstrikes in populated areas last year, US and NATO forces reduced civilian casualties in air attacks by 42 percent in 2012, according to United Nations figures.
But after an airstrike this month that reportedly killed 10 civilians in addition to four Taliban leaders, Afghan President Hamid Karzai banned his forces from requesting coalition airstrikes in residential areas, a decree that also would apply to drones.
Defenders of drones say they are more accurate and less prone to causing civilian casualties than manned aircraft, because they can watch a potential target longer and often use smaller munitions.
When civilians are inadvertently killed, it is sometimes because they are close to a location where an airstrike is carried out, one US officer said. But there also are instances when troops on the ground mistakenly called for an airstrike against a target where only civilians were present.
Last year, five coalition drone strikes killed 16 civilians and injured three, according to the UN mission in Afghanistan, which documented just one such incident in 2011. It wasn’t immediately clear whether those were strikes from US drones, Britain’s Royal Air Force also flies armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan, although the vast majority of the coalition’s unmanned aircraft belong to the US.
