Gates: U.S. won't abandon Afghanistan

MELBOURNE, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Taliban leaders are wrong if they think the U.S.-led coalition will leave Afghanistan next July, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday in Melbourne.

President Obama has said U.S. troops would begin pulling out of Afghanistan beginning July 2011, depending on conditions there, and start the transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans.

Gates said, "They're [Taliban leaders] going to be very surprised come August, September, October and November when most American forces are still there and still coming after them," the Defense Department reported.

Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are in Melbourne for the Australia-United States Ministerial Consultation summit.

The transition of security responsibilities will be a years-long process, Gates said, noting that NATO leaders will discuss the matter during the military alliance's summit meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, later in November.

"One of the agenda items for the Lisbon summit is to embrace [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai's goal of completing the transfer of security responsibility to Afghanistan by 2014," Gates said. "So I think that's the kind of time frame we're looking at."

Even after the transition is complete, there still will be a U.S. and coalition presence in Afghanistan, Gates said.

"We're going to remain a partner of Afghanistan even after our troops are gone," he said. "We walked away from Afghanistan in 1988, and we saw the consequences of that in 2001."

Gates also said during a discussion with reporters the United States is seeing signs that sanctions against Iran are beginning to have an impact.

"Without getting into details, we see evidence that the sanctions are biting more deeply than the Iranians anticipated they would," Gates said. "And that the actions individual countries have taken, on top of the U.N. Security Council resolution, have had considerable effect in terms of aggravating Iran's trade and financial operations."

Gates repeated President Obama's statement that "all options are on the table" to get Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program. He expressed confidence that the political and economic approach now being taken shows promise.

He also said U.S. and Australian ministers would be discussing China and "additional ways in which we can engage China and work with China."