Biometrics making it harder for corrupt officials in Afghanistan

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In 2017, under pressure from foreign aid donors, the Afghan Army completed the distribution of ID cards using biometric data to everyone in the Afghan Army. It took longer to get the national police to accept biometric ID but by early 2019 that was accomplished. As a result, the number of personnel in the security forces fell to 272,000, the lowest since 2015. That was not a problem because that was a more accurate number than ever before. The new ID cards eliminated 10,000 soldiers who did not exist and 25,000 police. Foreign aid donors, mainly the U.S., had paid for those “ghosts” and their commanders took their pay. The police were the worst and one thing that got the police to accept the new ID cards was the exposure of police corruption. The Interior Ministry fired two of their police commanders after some of their subordinates posted a video where police provided details of how their commanders stole supplies including food. After the videos appeared the commanders forced the police who made it post another one denying the accusations. But the public uproar had already prompted an investigation that verified the theft allegations.

This use of biometric data in government ID has been available in Afghanistan for over a decade but corrupt politicians and military commanders understood the impact of the biometric approach and until 2015 prevented full implementation. In 2015 a newly elected government allowed these biometric ID efforts to proceed. While a lot less corrupt and more accommodating than the previous Karzai government, the current Afghan government is still finds its bureaucracy paralyzed by the often conflicting demands by politicians representing a wide number of tribal, ethnic, religious and personal interests. It’s like herding cats, but cats with automatic weapons and very short tempers. The cats are also clever and adaptive. Unable to block or delay full implementation of the biometric system in the security forces, most offenders wisely shed their ghost soldiers before their troops received the cards. As a result, only a few thousand ghost soldiers were actually discovered and 80 percent of them were not the result of corruption as there is still incompetence and administrative failures at work. Meanwhile, there remains a lot of theft and bad behavior in the security forces that are the result of the traditional tolerance for corruption or bribes and intimidation by drug gangs. The ID cards only solved part of the problem. For the rest of the military budget, the Americans provided more financial controls, as part of their “advisory” role and at the very least there was a more accurate accounting of who had what.

Despite that continued corruption, the United States had built a large and growing library of data on actual and suspected terrorists and supporters as well as the Afghan population in general. This gave the anti-corruption forces (both local and foreign) a powerful tool. This was all the result of some major technical innovations that made it easier to gather and use biometric (fingerprints, iris, facial recognition, DNA) identification. After 2003 the U.S. developed tools that enabled combat troops to use biometrics on the battlefield. The main tool was initially called SEEK (Secure Electronic Enrolment Kit). This is a portable electronic toolkit that collects biometrics from people anywhere and at any time. This included fingerprint scans, eye (iris) scans, and digital photos of suspects and later DNA samples. All this ended up in a master database, which eventually contained data on millions of terrorists, suspected terrorists, their supporters, and other "persons of interest." Troops in the field can carry part of that database with them in their SEEK kits, so that wanted people can quickly be identified and captured. This is what the American commandos did on the 2011 Osama bin Laden raid. While DNA tests are the best form of ID, if you have fingerprints, iris scans, and a photo you are nearly as certain. Even just fingerprints and the face scan/photo is pretty convincing. But often all you have is DNA and that’s where the portable DNA analyzers come in. These began arriving after 2011 but the basic SEEK level biometrics is still the main tool.
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It has been hard to find many honest officials in Afghanistan, but there is some progress with this system.  It also makes it harder for the Taliban to infitrate.