WASHINGTON – Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said that the US is definitely going to start reducing the number of soldiers it has station in Afghanistan starting next July.

On Sunday, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, said that he would advise President Barack Obama to delay the exit plan.

Mr Gates said to the LA Times that there was no questions the US would start reducing troop numbers next year.

Mr Gates added in another interview that he planned to leave office in 2011.

President Obama set 2011 as a deadline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan back in December.

He simultaneously approved the deployment of an additional 30,000 into the country.

"There is no question in anybody's mind that we are going to begin drawing down troops in July of 2011," the Los Angeles Times quoted Mr Gates as saying.

"With more Afghan forces, we can be on a path to transition in more places around the country," he added.

"The success with the army in particular, I think, bodes well for in fact beginning to have some transitions maybe as early as this spring, but certainly beginning in the summer."

Mr Gates downplayed the idea of rapid troop cuts starting next July.

In another interview with Foreign Police Magazine, Mr Gates said he may be leaving his post sometime next year.

"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," he said.

"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' comments came soon after Gen Petraeus said he would not be bound to a 2011 target date to begin the US troop withdrawal.

Speaking on NBC, Gen Petraeus said he reserved the right to tell President Obama whether the pull-out date was too early.

He was talking after the US forces had their deadliest month, July, since the Afghan conflict started in 2001. 66 American soldiers were killed in July.

Gen Petraeus said that the Afghan mission was a tough one, and it will remain so.

The general took over the command of international forces in Afghanistan last month after his predecessor, Gen Stanley McChrystal was fired after he made controversial remarks about the Obama administration in a Rolling Stone article.

Support for the war in Afghanistan is fading in America as other troop-contributing countries death tolls rise.

Foreign troops killed since the invasion in 2001 has passed 2,000.

The Netherlands stopped its mission in Uruzgan in the southern region of Afghanistan two weeks ago, while Canada is supposed to pull out of Kandahar province next year.

The US and Britain will be left to face the leftover military operations.