While Gates did not directly confirm the reports, he is telling senators that "most governments lie to each other," sometimes they arrest people, and sometimes they spy on us. He says it's the "real world we deal with."

Gates was responding to sharp questions from Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy during a Capitol Hill hearing.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the U.S. is struggling to rebuild its badly broken relationship with Pakistan.

A Western official in Pakistan has confirmed that five Pakistanis were arrested by Pakistan's top intelligence service.

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Gates made a splash with a scathing speech last week in Brussels, home of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in which he said the 62-year-old alliance faces a "dim, if not dismal" future. He was not disowning NATO but warning that a years-long fraying of trans-Atlantic ties could eventually break the bond.

"I am worried," he said in an Associated Press interview in his Pentagon office on Monday.

Throughout the Cold War, beginning with NATO's founding in 1949 as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and its East European allies, a military and political partnership with Western Europe was fundamental to U.S. defense policy.

But in the 20 years since the demise of the Soviet Union the security landscape has been reshaped. And for a growing number of Americans, NATO is an obscure relic of a bygone era.

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In his final policy speech as Pentagon chief, Gates questioned the viability of NATO, saying its members' penny-pinching and lack of political will could hasten the end of U.S. support. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 as a U.S.-led bulwark against Soviet aggression, but in the post-Cold War era it has struggled to find a purpose.

"Future U.S. political leaders - those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me - may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost," he told a European think tank on the final day of an 11-day overseas journey.

Gates has made no secret of his frustration with NATO bureaucracy and the huge restrictions many European governments placed on their military participation in the Afghanistan war. He ruffled NATO feathers early in his tenure with a direct challenge to contribute more front-line troops that yielded few contributions.

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Gates was speaking Thursday after NATO's Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was confident U.S. troop withdrawals due to start in July will not affect security in the war-torn country.

Earlier, Germany urged Washington not to pull too many of its 100,000 troops out of Afghanistan next month, saying a major reduction in American forces could risk NATO's strategy in the 10-year conflict.

The Obama administration has not yet released details of the planned reduction in its troop numbers in Afghanistan.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

BRUSSELS (AP) -- NATO's chief says he is confident U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan due to start in July will not affect security in the war-torn country.

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Whether to negotiate an extended U.S. military presence is up to the Iraqis, he said, adding that he thought an extension might make sense.

"We are willing to have a presence beyond (2011), but we've got a lot of commitments," he said, not only in Afghanistan and Libya but also in Japan, where he said 19 U.S. Navy ships and about 18,000 U.S. military personnel are assisting in earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor relief efforts.

"So if folks here are going to want us to have a presence, we're going to need to get on with it pretty quickly in terms of our planning," he added. "I think there is interest in having a continuing presence. The politics are such that we'll just have to wait and see because the initiative ultimately has to come from the Iraqis."

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Almost three weeks in, Operation Odyssey Dawn has no doubt delivered on that promise -- it has a blockbuster $100-million-per-week budget, a comic-book-grade villain in Col. Moammar Gadhafi and the modern media's obedient transcription of U.S. government pronouncements.

What war proponents did not bank on, however, was this latest exercise in "shock and awe" also unmasking unspoken and uncomfortable realities at the twilight of American empire. Here are just a few:

-- America Suffers from a Bad Case of Selective Deficit Disorder: Dick Cheney once said "deficits don't matter," and that attitude defines our increasingly acute case of Selective Deficit Disorder -- i.e., the disease whereby politicians express concern about deficits only when it justifies cutting non-military expenditures. Just weeks ago, both political parties were calling America "broke" and competing to show who was more concerned about reining in spending. Most of these same deficit hawks, though, seem unconcerned about all that cash being spent on million-dollar cruise missiles in North Africa.

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Under withering congressional probing and criticism of an ill-defined mission to aid a rebel force that officials know little about, Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen sketched out a largely limited role for the U.S. military going forward, with Gates saying some other country could train the rebels trying to oust strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

"My view would be, if there is going to be that kind of assistance to the opposition, there are plenty of sources for it other than the United States," said Gates. "Somebody else should do that."

Asked by one lawmaker whether the U.S. involvement might inevitably mean "boots on the ground" in Libya, Gates replied, "Not as long as I am in this job."

The U.S. turned over control of the military operation to NATO Thursday, just hours before Gates and Mullen told Congress that future U.S. participation will be limited and will not involve an active role in airstrikes as time goes on.

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When men first made war in the air, the imagery that accompanied them was of knights jousting in the sky. Just check out movies like Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best Picture in 1927 (or any Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy takes on the Red Baron in a literal "dogfight"). As late as 1986, five years after two American F-14s shot down two Soviet jets flown by Libyan pilots over the Mediterranean's Gulf of Sidra, it was still possible to make the movie Top Gun. In it, Tom Cruise played "Maverick," a U.S. Naval aviator triumphantly involved in a similar incident. (He shoots down three MiGs.)

Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline. In Vietnam, the U.S. had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting the south, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that U.S. patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes.

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The men walking down the street looked ordinary enough. Ordinary, at least, for these days of tumult and protest in the Middle East. They wore sneakers and jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. Some waved the national flag. Many held their hands up high. Some flashed peace signs. A number were chanting, "Peaceful, peaceful."

Up ahead, video footage shows, armored personnel carriers sat in the street waiting. In a deadly raid the previous day, security forces had cleared pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain's capital, Manama. This evening, the men were headed back to make their voices heard.

The unmistakable crack-crack-crack of gunfire then erupted, and most of the men scattered. Most, but not all. Video footage shows three who never made it off the blacktop. One in an aqua shirt and dark track pants was unmistakably shot in the head. In the time it takes for the camera to pan from his body to the armored vehicles and back, he's visibly lost a large amount of blood.

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PETRAEUS: "Welcome back, sir, flying a little bigger plane than normal ... You gonna launch some attacks on Libya or something?"

GATES:"Yeah [laughter]. Exactly."

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Talking about secretaries of defense...

Oh, we weren't?

Well, let's. After all, they're in the news.

Take former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who, on leaving government service -- and I hope you don't mind if I mangle a quote from General Douglas MacArthur here -- refused to die, or even fade away. Instead, he penned Known and Unknown, a memoir almost as big as his ego and almost as long -- 832 pages -- as the occupation of Iraq, which promptly hit the bestseller lists (making the American reader a Known Unknown).

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Kucinich, who is a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter Friday to Gates asking for a visit with Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning is being held in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. He has not been convicted of any crimes. 

Kucinich says he is concerned about reports of Manning's treatment while in custody. David Coombs, Manning's lawyer, has filed a complaint with the Quantico commander about the conditions Manning is being held under, which he says are overly harsh and punitive. The Pentagon has denied these conditions. 

To read more about the allegations that Manning is living in cruel and inhumane treatment, even constituting torture, check out Glenn Greenwald's Dec. piece, "The inhuman conditions of Bradley Manning's detention."

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Sen. McCain doesn't want gay people to be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. He doesn't want this mostly because Barack Obama does want this, but that is not a very "honorable" reason, so McCain has been making up various new new reasons to oppose the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" for months now, developing new justifications each time his "concerns" are addressed.

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Of course, the idea of polling the troops before deciding whether to end a discriminatory policy is slightly at odds with the ideal of civilian leadership of the armed forces, as Gates also pointed out in a section of his statement today that will probably be ignored in favor of endless discussion of poll survey results:

As was made clear at the time, and is worth repeating today, this outreach was not a matter of taking a poll of the military to determine whether the law should be changed. The very idea of asking the force to, in effect, vote on such a matter is antithetical to our system of government and would have been without precedent in the long history of our civilian-led military. The President of the United States, the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, made his position on this matter clear -- a position I support. Our job, as the civilian and military leadership of the Department of Defense, was to determine how best to prepare for such a change should the Congress change the law.

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The Hill, yesterday:

Secretary Gates: On deficit, Defense Department is 'not the problem'

Defense Secretary Robert Gates took a swipe on Tuesday at the proposal from the co-chairmen of President Obama's deficit commission to slash the Pentagon budget by $100 billion.

Gates said that such drastic cuts could devastate the military's force structure without any big impact on the nation's red ink.

"The truth of the matter is when it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem," Gates said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday. "I think in terms of the specifics they came up with, that is math not strategy."

Inter-Press Service, May 28, 2010:

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U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, both acknowledged a tough fight ahead but added they thought Karzai's target was attainable.

"One of the agenda items of the Lisbon summit is to embrace President Karzai's goal of completing the transfer of security responsibility to Afghanistan by 2014," Gates told reporters during a visit to Australia.

...

Mullen acknowledged "we're clearly not there" yet.

"But as a target at this point that makes sense," Mullen told reporters during a visit to Australia.

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A day after a judge in California ordered the Pentagon to cease enforcement of its policy barring gays from openly serving in the military, Gates told reporters that the question of whether to repeal the law should be decided by Congress, and done only after the Pentagon completes its study on the issue.

"I feel strongly this is an action that needs to be taken by the Congress and that it is an action that requires careful preparation, and a lot of training," said Gates. "It has enormous consequences for our troops."

The defense secretary said that besides the changes in training, regulations will need revisions and changes may be necessary to benefits and Defense Department buildings.

The battle in the courts over gays in the military may be far from over. The Justice Department is considering whether to appeal the court ruling and its first response may well be another trip to the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips in Riverside, Calif., to seek a stay, or temporary freeze, of her ruling. If Phillips turns down the request, the Justice Department would likely turn to the federal appeals court in California.

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Before attending a Baghdad ceremony marking the formal end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq, the Pentagon chief met with troops at Camp Ramadi. Asked whether the U.S. was still at war in Iraq, Gates answered succinctly, "I would say we are not."

Fewer than 50,000 U.S. troops are still in Iraq, down from more than 165,000 at the height of the fighting. Although the remaining troops' main role is to help train Iraqi forces over the next year, they are threatened by violent foes. And several thousand U.S. special operations forces will continue to hunt al-Qaida and other terrorist fighters.

Asked whether the 7 1/2-year war was worthwhile, Gates said that will depend in part on whether Iraq emerges as a democratic anchor in the Middle East.

That judgment "really requires a historian's perspective," Gates said.

"I believe our men and women in uniform believe we have accomplished something that makes the sacrifice, the bloodshed, not to have been in vain," he said. "How it all weighs in the balance remains to be seen."

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates, sort of contradicting Petraeus, said we're definitely leaving:

Gates told the Los Angeles Times in Monday's edition "there is no question in anybody's mind that we are going to begin drawing down troops in July of 2011."

Either there is a question in David Petraeus' mind, or this will be a really slow drawing down. (It will be a really slow drawing down.)

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"Nobody thinks that Afghanistan is going to be a model Jeffersonian democracy," President Barack Obama said in a television interview that aired Sunday.

"What we're looking to do is difficult -- very difficult -- but it's a fairly modest goal, which is: Don't allow terrorists to operate from this region. Don't allow them to create big training camps and to plan attacks against the U.S. homeland with impunity," Obama said in an interview broadcast by CBS' "Sunday Morning."

July was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in the nearly nine-year war, with 66 troops killed. Military officials predict the toll will be even higher for several months to come, as U.S., NATO and Afghan forces intensify fighting in Taliban-controlled areas.

The troop surge Obama ordered last year was meant to make that expanded fight possible, but it also guaranteed higher combat deaths and a renewed focus on whether a war that remains a stalemate is still worth fighting.

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