KABUL, Afghanistan — His police chief in Nangarhar Province needed more heavy weapons. His police chief in Paktia Province needed more radios. And Brig. Gen. Khoshal Sadat needed the two men to stop reading directly from their PowerPoint slides as they rattled off the security situation in their districts during their video conference.

General Sadat, the 35-year-old deputy minister of security in Afghanistan, is the highest-ranking police official in the country. And if the high-tech briefings he instituted after taking the job in February seem to take a page right out of the American military’s playbook, there’s a good reason: He is a leader among the first generation of homegrown Afghan generals to emerge from the American training program here after the 2001 invasion.

He has risen at a dire time for the Afghan police forces, which have been taking devastating casualties during insurgent offensives and, perhaps more troubling in the long term, have never shaken the reputation for corruption and abuse that has made the Taliban seem like a more attractive alternative to many Afghans.

General Sadat will be under heavy scrutiny in his new post, both to see whether he can turn the police forces around and whether he falls prey to the culture of nepotism and corruption that runs deep in the Afghan government.