ROBERT GATES, US defence secretary, intends to leave office next year, a move that would leave a big gap in President Barack Obama’s national security team.
The 66-year-old told Foreign Policy magazine in an interview published yesterday that he planned to retire before attention turned to the next presidential election in 2012.
“It seems like somewhere there in 2011 is a logical opportunity to sign off,” said Mr Gates. “This is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of an election year.”
Geoff Morrell, Mr Gates’s spokesman, said that the defence secretary had not announced that he was stepping down. “This is somebody who has been a failure at retirement, musing about when it would make sense to try again.”
Eric Edelman, who served under Mr Gates as under-secretary of defence for policy during the George W Bush administration, said Mr Gates would be extremely difficult to replace.
“He has been one of the most successful and powerful secretaries of defence ever,” he added. “He produced huge political benefit for Mr Obama, because he has been a very valuable human shield for the administration.”
Mr Gates’s retirement would create a conundrum for the president, who has forged a close working relationship with the Republican Pentagon chief.
Mr Gates has provided continuity and credibility in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and championed spending cuts within the defence department bureaucracy.
“By next year, I’ll be in a position where . . . we’re going to know whether the strategy is working in Afghanistan,” Mr Gates said.
By this December, the date of a forthcoming policy review, he believed General David Petraeus, the new commander in Afghanistan, “will be able to demonstrate that it is the right strategy”.
The defence secretary also noted he had initially resisted Mr Obama’s goal to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, in the wake of a 30,000-strong surge authorised last December.
“The July 2011 deadline was a hard hurdle for me to get over because I’d fought against deadlines with respect to Iraq consistently,” he 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.” The 2011 date remains a topic of debate, with General Petraeus stressing at the weekend that he did not intend to oversee a “graceful exit” and that it was premature to discuss “what we may or may not be able to transition”. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)