Identity Dominance: The U.S. Military’s Biometric War in Afghanistan

Mohammad Zahid was not the target of a joint military operation that came through his village in Khost Province in late February 2012. However, that day the twenty-two year old man who claimed to be a student was arrested and eventually convicted in an Afghan court because his fingerprints reportedly matched those found on an improvised explosive device (IED) cache that had been discovered the previous year.

Zahid was one of more than a hundred military-age males that were scanned that day by the joint coalition forces and Afghan National Army operation. As part of its effort to combat insurgent forces interspersed within an indigenous population, the use of biometrics has become a central component of the U.S. war effort. Having expanded heavily since its introduction during the war in Iraq, biometric identification and tracking of individuals has become a core mission in Afghanistan with initiatives sponsored by the U.S. and Afghan governments seeking to obtain the biometric identifiers of nearly everyone in the country.