It's a long way from the steamy jungles of the Laotian border, but when you've got a quasi-guerrilla unit on your side, sometimes it's best to just go totally Old School.
We did some missions with a couple operators from the Afghan National Defense Service -- their equivalent of the CIA -- during our embed, and I saw one of the officers wearing new-school Tiger Stripe cammies and thought it was a one-off.
Well, it looks as if it might be part of the issued gear of this shadowy force, based on some shots I found on the ISAF web site. You don't have to be a photosimulation engineer to recognize that this pattern might not exactly be the most optimal for the NDS's operational environment. The new versions of the Tiger vary widely, but this one is clearly way too dark for anything other than the deepest, most shadowy jungle battlefields.
But there is, of course, the "cool" factor in all this. Tigers look mean (except, of course, the Air Force version) and even with the myriad camo patterns floating around Afghan security forces, these are very different from their counterparts. And besides, trading on a little bit of the Vietnam MACV-SOG mystique might play well even in the most remote qalats.
