Defense secretary Robert Gates today said that he would end his professional career next year after making sure that President Barack Obama's plans to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan is moving on the right path. The 66-year-old Gates was appointed the defense secretary on December 18, 2006 by Obama’s predecessor George W Bush.
"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 in an interview with the American magazine Foreign Policy.
"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," Gates added.
Gates noted that he will be come to know where the strategy in Afghanistan is going by 2011. "I think that it would be a mistake to wait until January 2012. First of all, I think we might have trouble getting the kind of person they want if there's a possibility that they might only be in the job for a year," he said.
"You know, who knows what the election situation will look like. But also 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," added the veteran diplomat.
Obama had said in his new Afghan strategy that he would start the withdrawal of American troops from war-torn Afghanistan in July next year.
