Sher Mohammad Karimi

Sher Mohammad Karimi

Lt. Gen. Shir Mohammad Karimi is the ethnic Tajik Chief of Army Staff in the Military of Afghanistan. He returned to his special-operations roots at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in February 2010. Previously, he served as the Chief of Operations for the Afghan Ministry of Defense.

Karimi attended the United States Army Special Warfare School, the forerunner of today’s JFK Special Warfare Center and School, in 1973 as a student in the Special Forces Qualification Course. The Special Warfare School was only one of a number of international military schools Karimi attended. Following his graduation from the Military Academy in Kabul, he attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, United Kingdom, and was its first Afghan graduate. After training in Great Britain, he came to the United States, where he completed Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces training and attended the Army Command and General Staff College. In India, he attended the intelligence-officer training and the National Defense College.

Following his foreign-military training in the 1970s, Karimi returned to Afghanistan to serve in what became a communist-dominated Afghan army. After the coup of 1978 and the Soviet invasion in 1979, he was imprisoned for having a Western education. After enduring 15 months of torture and captivity in a 6-foot-by-6-foot cell with four other men, sharing a single blanket in winter, Karimi, by then severely crippled, was released. Despite the ordeal and his physical condition, Karimi was not discharged from service and was denied retirement pay. After two years of recuperation, during which time he worked with the communist military, Karimi elected to assist the mujahedeen in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. When the Taliban seized power, Karimi and his family fled to Pakistan. Though granted asylum in the U.S. through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shortly before 9/11, Karimi chose to remain in Pakistan to await the outcome of the American effort to topple the Taliban regime. That proved to be a wise decision.

Faced with a dearth of experienced professional officers to lead conventional brigades and divisions, the Afghan government realized the necessity of restoring Soviet-trained former officers to command positions.

Those with the formal military training, experience and leadership skills necessary to command brigades and divisions were rare commodities. Karimi was recalled to active service in 2003 as the ANA G3, where his expertise was put to the test in increasing the Afghan Army from 100,000 to 172,000 by the fall of 2011 as part of the U.S.-led coalition exit strategy.

The need to balance Afghanistan’s two major ethnic groups was another reason for Karimi’s recall. Karimi, like Lieutenant General Mohammad Akram, who headed the communist Afghan Army’s southern regional command in the early 1990s, is from the Tanaie tribe of ethnic Pashtuns in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency. The ANA chief of staff, General Bismullah Khan Mohammadi, a former aide to the late mujahedeen leader Ahmad Shah Masood, is Tajik. The presence of members of both groups in the senior ranks helps reduce perceptions that the ANA is dominated by Tajiks, whose militias overthrew the Taliban with American assistance in 2001 and currently dominate the ANA officer corps.

Fluent in Pashtu, Dari and English, the highly respected, well-educated Karimi advocates national unity. In early 2006, he “raised the flag” about resurgent al-Qaeda and Taliban threats in Afghanistan, citing specific examples of increased terrorism and drug-trafficking. American SOF in-country faced the realities of that phenomenon, but it was two years before the U.S. and NATO shifted priorities back to Afghanistan from Iraq. Late in 2006, Karimi implored Pakistan to post more troops along the porous border to reduce al-Qaeda and Taliban infiltration and to strengthen cross-border counterterrorism operations with the Afghan military.

Progress toward that end was finally achieved on March 29, 2009, when the Tripartite Commission, composed of military officers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and coalition forces in Kabul, met to break ground for the construction of the Khyber Border Coordination Center on the border of the Nangarhar Province. It was the first of six tripartite coordination centers planned along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The commander of the Pakistani XI Corps, Lieutenant General Masood Aslam, commented: “Both of our countries have suffered the maximum for the last eight years … and we … have been the victims of all types of all terrorism for over 30 years.” Karimi joined him and Major General David Rodriguez, commander of Regional Command East in Afghanistan, in planting three small trees to symbolize the long-term partnership of Afghans, Pakistanis and international forces.

The lessons in foreign internal defense and development that Karimi learned at Fort Bragg nearly 40 years ago have stuck with him: “Since 2003 and 2004 we have been shouting loudly that fighting alone will not bring peace. We need to bring about reconstruction for the people … while rebuilding and creating a sound administration, so that security measures can move parallel to reconstruction. We need to win the people’s hearts and minds, because as one of our proverbs goes, ‘You cannot build communities by force.’ ”

While Karimi was able to share that sage advice with the troops at Fort Bragg, he was also able to regain some of his documents that were destroyed while he was imprisoned. Lieutenant General John Mulholland, commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, presented Karimi with new diplomas from Ranger School and the Special Forces Qualification Course, as well as a Yarborough Knife, enabling the general to put some missing pieces of his past back together.