Bismillah Khan Mohammadi - Interior Minister

Interior Minister

In June 2010, Bismillah Khan was transferred from his position as Army Chief of Staff to the post of Interior Minister by President Hamid Karzai.As Interior Minister, Mohammadi has loudly deplored ethnic fractiousness within the Afghan security forces, and has called on Afghanistan's ethinic groups to come together in the interest of the country and Islam. By stressing national unity and Islamic ethics in the Afghan National Police, he may be able to get officers of different identities to work together, discourage them from pilfering supplies, and convince them to prevent their men from robbing and beating civilians, as he was at times able to do in the Afghan National Army.

Mohammadi is committed to base police leadership appointments upon merit. The challenging tasks to prevent politics, ethnicity, tribalism, cronyism, and nepotism from influencing appointments will take perseverance and patience by Mohammadi. When Mohammadi was the army chief of staff, he was able to achieve substantial improvements in the army’s capabilities by championing meritocracy. With the police, he will need to redouble his efforts, for Karzai and other political figures have intruded into appointments more often with the police than the army. Mohammadi’s ties to the army also make him uniquely qualified to increase cooperation between the police and the army in the field. Such cooperation is essential, above all because most police units are not adequately prepared to deal with sizable groups of armed insurgents on their own.

One advantage for appointing Mohammadi as the Minister of Interior is the hope of mending the rifts within the Afghan National Army that opened or widened as a result of the U.S. government’s plan to begin withdrawing forces in July 2011. Expecting the eruption of a civil war after the American withdrawal, officers have been gravitating towards ethnic groupings and powerful generals, with Mohammadi and the Pashtu Defense Minister Wardak at the head of the two largest cliques. The departure of Mohammadi from the Ministry of Defense leaves no one who can rival Wardak in stature, which could mean a weakening of centrifugal forces.

One of Mohammadi's strategies is to push greater authority down to local police commanders. When Mohammadi was the Chief of Staff of the Afghan National Army, he enforced the decentralization process within an institution heavily influenced by senior officers who had been trained in the centralized model. A decentralized command requires a wide range to regulate due to the fact that some commanders lack the abilities and must be identified for help or removal. Upper-­echelon commanders must get out of their headquarters and visit the field commanders, a practice alien to some senior Afghan officers. Fortunately, Mohammadi as well known for circulating the battlefield as an army commander, and has already implemented his regular process of making unannounced inspection trips to police stations at all hours of the day and night. Mohammadi undoubtedly will expect other senior commanders to do the same.

As the Minister of the Interior, Mohammadi stressed the need to curb the corruption that has corroded the government and the people’s trust in it. Mohammadi has already begun taking some of the actions essential to the reduction of corruption. He is, for example, keeping tabs on the movements of Ministry of Interior officials, and has fired several police chiefs for corruption.