Saturday, May 21, 2016. Balochistan, Pakistan. Akhtar Mansour, head of the Afghan Taliban, finished his lunch at a roadside cafe, and was en route to the provincial capital of Quetta when his white Toyota Corolla was reduced to a smoldering mass of twisted metal by two Hellfire missiles, fired by a U.S. military Reaper drone.
Biometric belonging in Pakistan
Around the word, centralized biometric identification systems are being presented as one-stop solutions to many of our problems.
According to governments and the organizations behind them, they provide safety and social security to millions. To critics, they are overarching, inflexible and reflect what people in power believe society should look like, not what it actually is.
In this collection of pieces, Coda Story’s inaugural Bruno fellow, Alizeh Kohari takes a deep dive into the benefits and pitfalls of Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority.
Mansour was killed in an instant, his death now a footnote to America’s 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan. But he was survived by a shiny piece of mint green plastic, retrieved from the car’s charred remains: an identity card issued by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) that identified him as Muhammad Wali, a Pakistani citizen.
For Pakistan’s government, the discovery that the leader of the Afghan Taliban had acquired this supposedly secure and unforgeable form of identification was a source of great embarrassment. In response, a nationwide identity “reverification” campaign was launched to root out foreigners posing as citizens, forcing 180 million people to prove that they were, in fact, Pakistani.
