Afghan President Hamid Karzai has approved a long-awaited reshuffle in the defense ministry, viewed as a crucial step toward disarming powerful warlords and building a viable national army, Afghan officials said.
Karzai sacked the army chief of staff, General Mohammed Asef Delawar, and appointed General Bismillah Khan as his successor, presidential spokesman Jawid Luddin said on Saturday.
To make the ministry more ethnically diverse, Karzai also named General Abdul Rahim Wardak, a Pashtun, to be first deputy.
Defense reforms have stalled several times, mainly because of resistance from Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim -- a powerful ethnic Tajik who replaced slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massood as the commander of anti-Taliban forces.
Fahim became defense minister after the Taliban fell, and still wields enormous power, especially in the north where he has a large private army.
Fahim will keep his position under Karzai's defense reforms. However, the reshuffle was widely seen as an effort to weaken his position by removing several of his top allies in the ministry.
Karzai also appointed three new deputy defense ministers -- a Hazara named Baz Mohammed Jawhari; Mohammed Humayoon Fawzi, an Uzbek; and Gulzarak Zadran, a Pashtun.
The move comes just before Karzai is to visit the US, Canada and Britain.
Earlier Saturday, Canadian General Andrew Leslie, the deputy commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping force, said he was disappointed that warlords had failed to move some of their fighters and heavy weapons out of Kabul, in violation of a 2001 Western-brokered deal.
"I don't understand why they [militias] would want to have tanks in Kabul ... you don't use tanks to arrest criminals," he said.
NATO took charge of the 5,500-strong International Security Assistance Force last month in its first military mission outside Europe or North America.
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