AABIS and APPS — Afghanistan's US-Built Biometric ID Systems Fall Into Taliban Hands

Between the mid-2000s and 2021, the United States and the Afghan government built a set of biometric systems meant to professionalise Afghanistan's public sector: the Afghan Personnel and Pay System (APPS), introduced in 2016 by the Ministries of Interior and Defense to curb "ghost soldier" payroll fraud in the Afghan National Army and Police; the Afghan Automated Biometric Identification System (AABIS), which by 2012 aimed to enrol 80% of the population; and the e-Tazkira electronic national ID card.
APPS held roughly 500,000 personnel records with at least 40 data fields each (name, family relationships, tribal-elder guarantors, biometrics) after $38 million in US spending through 2019. A figure of 8.1 million AABIS biometric records has circulated (traced to a program manager's public profile and not independently confirmed), and roughly 6.2 million e-Tazkira applications were still in process when the government collapsed.
When the Afghan government fell in August 2021, these systems — along with handheld HIIDE biometric scanners — were left running under Taliban control. Human Rights Watch's March 2022 investigation examined six government biometric and payroll systems and found the Taliban had gained access to sensitive personal and biometric data, including of Afghans who had worked with coalition forces, documenting indications the data may already have been used to locate people.
The case is included here as a cautionary one: a public-sector AI/biometric investment that appears to have delivered some of its intended administrative benefit before 2021 became, once governance and exit planning failed, a serious ongoing protection risk for the population it was built to serve — no destruction, transfer-of-control, or safeguarding plan was in place when the government it served ceased to exist.

Read the full analysis: https://theintercept.com/2021/08/17/afghanistan-taliban-military-biometrics/