US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday he would step down in 2011, saying it would be clear by then whether the US surge strategy in Afghanistan was working.
Mr Gates, 66, is the sole Republican holdover in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, offering the Democratic President continuity on national security as he took charge of the White House and two wars last year.
Mr Gates, a former CIA director with a 40-year career in government, has long hinted he wanted to leave. He was tapped by former President George W. Bush in 2006 to replace the controversial Donald Rumsfeld amid a near debacle in Iraq.
“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,” Mr Gates said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.
“We’ll have completed the surge. We’ll have done the assessment in December. And it seems like somewhere there in 2011 is a logical opportunity to hand off.”
Mr Gates said it would be wrong for him to wait until January 2012 to try and hand over the reins as it could be tricky to “get a good candidate” in an election year when the administration might be voted out.
“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.”
White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said Mr Obama was “gratefully thankful” for Mr Gates’s service “but any announcement will come from him”.
“It’s not a surprise to see him discussing his plans to move on,” he told reporters.
A Pentagon spokesman said Mr Gates “is not about to walk out the door” and has no specific date set to retire.
“He wasn’t making any announcement. This is totally consistent with how he’s spoken about his job and his tenure here,” said spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
As a veteran Republican, Mr Gates was seen as providing political cover and expertise as Mr Obama fulfilled pledges to pull US troops from Iraq and refocused on the fight against the Taliban.
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.