A little-noticed announcement from the White House last week named Thomas Schweich to the new job: coordinator for counter-narcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan.

The announcement said that Schweich, who currently oversees part of the Afghan drug portfolio as the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the State Department, would be granted the personal rank of ambassador in the new post.

White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore told United Press International that the ambassador rank was a technical appointment "necessary for him to hold negotiations with foreign countries" in the new post and was not Senate confirmable.

She referred further calls to the State Department, where several officials did not respond to numerous phone and e-mail requests for information and comment over a two-day period.

Last month senior Republicans on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, led by the ranking member, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asking for the appointment of "a high-level coordinator of overall Afghan narco-terrorism policy."

The bluntly worded letter said inter-agency rivalry and U.S. policy failures in Afghanistan risked allowing it to slide back into chaos.

"The open and public dispute with our British allies on opium eradiation methods, along with the many different and often conflicting views of NATO, our Department of Defense, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and other U.S. agencies on how best to handle the narcotics challenge does not bode well for success," the letter said.

Disputes have run the gamut of policy issues, from how to deal with local drug kingpins who might be allies of the U.S. or Afghan military, to what priority to give to efforts at eradicating the opium poppy, as opposed to taking down the smuggling networks that distribute it.

The letter said U.S. efforts against narco-terrorism in Afghanistan should be modeled on those in Columbia, "utiliz(ing) all U.S. agencies, assets and assistance."

The appointment of Schweich, who began his State Department career under his mentor John Danforth when the latter was ambassador to the United Nations, appeared to be an effort to respond to concerns in Congress and elsewhere about poor policy and operational coordination in Afghanistan.

But some congressional Republicans are unsatisfied with the new appointment.

"You're putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop," said one senior House GOP staffer.

"We wanted a cross-agency coordinator ... someone at the top of the government, at the level of the White House ... to really knock heads together."

"All this has done is put another player on the field," said the staffer.

Regardless of the individual, the staffer said, appointing a State Department official to the post would create the impression that the person was simply going to "carry water for the institutional agenda of the State Department."

"This post will have no ability to bring the other agencies to the table. It's not the coordinator we want or need," concluded the staffer.

Prior to his appointment to the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, Schweich was chief of staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations under Ambassador Danforth. Schweich, a partner in Missouri law firm Bryan Cave, LLP, had earlier served Danforth as chief of staff when he was appointed special counsel to investigate the Justice Department's handling of the siege of the Branch Dravidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Schweich received his bachelor's degree from Yale University and his J.D. from Harvard University.

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