Viceroy Khalilzad?

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this:

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.

Mr. Khalilzad, an American citizen who was born in Afghanistan, had considered challenging Mr. Karzai for the presidency in elections scheduled for this summer.

But Mr. Khalilzad missed the May 8 filing deadline, and the American and Afghan officials say that he has been talking with Mr. Karzai for several weeks about taking on a job that the two have described as the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.

Such an alliance would benefit Mr. Karzai by co-opting a potential rival. For its part, the White House has made no secret of its growing disenchantment with Mr. Karzai, and some Afghanistan experts said that enlisting Mr. Khalilzad would have the virtue of bringing a strong, competent leader into an increasingly dysfunctional Afghan government.

The position would allow Mr. Khalilzad to serve as “a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn’t be responsible to a parliamentary system,” a senior Obama administration official said. Taking the unelected position would also allow Mr. Khalilzad to keep his American citizenship.

Administration officials insisted that the United States was not behind the idea of enlisting Mr. Khalilzad to serve in the Afghan government, and they gave no further details on what his duties might be.

Steve Clemons is "intrigued and cautiously optimistic." Count me as a little more incredulous. I can see the utility in appointing a competent and experienced policy hand to clean the Afghan house, but this only furthers the notion that the United States is a heavy-handed occupier in the region. If the Obama administration is comfortable with this, and has no trouble dropping the purple-fingered pretense, then I suppose this could work.

Perhaps this is one of several first steps toward defining 'success' down in Afghanistan, but it's a little disappointing nonetheless. It's clear that President Bush failed, as CFR President Richard Haass puts it, to properly "resource the rhetoric" in Afghanistan. Still, it's difficult not to feel a little disappointed in where we have gone in such short time.

I also have some trouble digesting the West's 'disenchantment' with Hamid Karzai. The Afghan President has taken heat for his regime's alleged corruption, as well as his inability to stifle the country's drug trafficking.

Yes, it certainly is good that Western democracies are immune to such problems.

UPDATE

Josh Foust minces fewer words:

Zalmay Khalilzad is an absolute snake, totally untrustworthy, and poisonous to President Obama’s otherwise good intentions for Afghanistan.