While the Whitehouse, Pentagon and Intelligence community fling feces at one another in attempt to not be the one who ends up going down in the history books holding the bag for Afghanistan, there are some awful revelations coming out about problems you likely didn’t even think of yet.
As reported by the Intercept, our biometric devices known as HIIDE, which stands for Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, were snagged up by the Taliban during their recent offensive.
If you’re not familiar, the US invested a lot of effort into categorizing and tracking as many Afghan citizens as possible over a decade plus. We collected tens of thousands of individual’s biometric data to include fingerprints, iris scans and biographical information. Whether it was personnel who worked on the bases or just some rando getting tagged like cattle in a village somewhere, Coalition Forces put a lot of effort into tracking and collecting as many people across the country as possible.
I’m not sure why this sensitive equipment was left behind and not accounted for, but I guess we can just add that to the list of equipment we left in a bow tied care package for the Taliban to get back on their feet.
If our plan was to make it easier for the Taliban to kill anyone associated with Coalition Forces in the last twenty years, then we’re doing a terrific job of executing. These should make for some pretty solid officer evaluation comments for some lucky boy or girl.
