Robert Gates was fond of saying: “Never miss a good chance to shut up.” His reputation as a consummate professional, a discreet adviser and a reluctant hero had earned him respect that very few US Secretaries of Defence managed. When President Obama, after winning the 2008 US election, decided to keep Gates as his Secretary of Defence, it was not a tactical move only to maintain continuity in dealing with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Gates’ expertise informed Obama’s decision. Gates, though, came with Bush wars baggage into Obama’s team. Though Bates had sympathy for the soldiers sacrificing their lives for the wrong reasons, he seldom condemned the interventions and wanted the wars to continue to some logical end, something that Obama was not convinced of. Obama openly showed his disdain for the wars that had gone awry. Robert Gates’ book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, has not revealed anything new. Gates says that Obama had never owned the wars and did not have the conviction to see them through to the end. He criticises the President for leaning too much on the advice of his vice president, Joe Biden, who according to Gates had always told the president to be wary of his commanders. The policy of surge that initially had been at the heart of the AfPak policy, took almost one year to wind down. This time lag is suggestive of Obama’s reluctance to increase troop size in Afghanistan because he wanted to shut down that theatre too. Though he was more in favour of the Afghan and opposed to the Iraq war, still Obama wanted closure of both these wars as soon as possible. Obama’s desire to disengage from these wars also emanated from the economic crisis of 2008 that had weakened the US economy and its allies in Europe and other parts of the world. There was a general perception in the US, and particularly amongst the Democrats that the US’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had sapped the country’s economic strength, delivering a hard blow to its ability to finance its own domestic needs. General Petraeus, the architect of the surge in both the wars, was only granted 30,000 extra troops by Obama, and that too for a limited timeframe. This reluctance and the subsequent decision to pull the US out of Iraq might have left a bad taste in Gates’ mouth. *