With an eye on Afghanistan and the next US presidential election, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said on Monday that he hoped to leave next year as it will become apparent by then if the war strategy is working.
Gates, 66, the sole Republican holdover in US President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, said it would be easiest to “get a good candidate” to replace him before the pressures of the 2012 election.
“I just think this is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of a presidential election. So I think sometime in 2011 sounds pretty good,” Gates told Foreign Policy magazine.
Gates, a former CIA director with a 40-year career in government, has long hinted he wanted to leave.
Obama asked the Republican heavyweight to stay in office to offer continuity as the young Democratic president moved quickly both to end the Iraq war and to intensify the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan.
“I think that by next year I’ll be in a position where — you know, we’re going to know whether the strategy is working in Afghanistan,” Gates said.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell played down the interview, noting that every time Gates “seriously considered hanging it up for good, he ultimately has decided to keep serving.”
“This is not Secretary Gates announcing his retirement. This is the secretary musing about when it would make sense for him to finally bow out,” Morrell said.
The US is pouring some 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, part of the “surge” that will swell US numbers to 100,000 in the coming weeks.
Obama, announcing the strategy last year, said the US would start pulling out troops next July, sending a signal both to a wary US public and to an overly dependent Afghan leadership that the US commitment was not open ended.
That timeline has been strongly criticized by some who believe it would boost the Taliban’s resolve by sending out the message that the US is not in the fight for the long-term.
“The July 2011 deadline was a hard hurdle for me to get over because I’d fought against deadlines with respect to Iraq consistently,” Gates said. “But I became persuaded that something like that was needed to get the attention of the Afghan government, that they had to take ownership of this thing.”
In a televised interview on Sunday, General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, left open the option of recommending a delay in the withdrawal of troops if warranted by conditions on the ground.
However, public support for the near nine-year war has slumped to an all-time low and the US death toll hit a monthly high of 66 last month.
A growing number of Democrats have called for an exit strategy, saying the war is hurting rather than helping US interests.
Speculation has been rife for months on Gates’s successor.
Some pundits believe Obama may tap US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who dealt closely with military issues as a senator, to be the first female defense chief. Clinton has been coy about her plans but said she does not want to serve as the chief US diplomat if Obama is elected to a second term.
Gates’ timeline “makes sense from his perspective” as defense secretaries can lose their shine by staying too long after major decisions, said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
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