President Obama is expected to reshuffle his national security team this week, naming Leon E. Panetta, the director of central intelligence, as defense secretary and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, as director of the C.I.A., administration officials said Wednesday.
The appointments, set in motion by the impending retirement of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, are the most significant realignment yet in Mr. Obama’s war council. They could have far-reaching implications for the American strategy in Afghanistan, as well as for its troubled relations with Pakistan.
General Petraeus is a leading advocate of the ambitious counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which seeks to build up that country’s political and administrative institutions. Mr. Panetta is viewed as favoring a more limited approach, focused on counterterrorism operations. At the C.I.A., he has overseen clandestine drone strikes in Pakistan, which have been a recurring source of tension between the United States and the Pakistani government.
With Mr. Gates expected to step down this summer, the changes in Mr. Obama’s national security team have long been expected. The White House declined to confirm the changes on Wednesday, but officials said Mr. Obama planned to introduce his new lineup on Thursday.
Mr. Panetta’s move to the Pentagon comes at a time when the military’s budget will be on the chopping block. Mr. Obama will rely on Mr. Panetta, a respected Democratic Party player and onetime head of the White House budget office, to find hundreds of billions of dollars that can be cut from the Pentagon budget to meet the president’s pledge to reduce the federal deficit by $4 trillion in the next 12 years.
The military will face more changes at the top. The term of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who, like Mr. Gates, was appointed by President George W. Bush, expires at the end of September. And Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg has said he would leave to take an academic job, removing one of the key players in Mr. Obama’s efforts to manage China’s rise.
But Mr. Gates’s role looms largest. On important issues he has often allied with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — who has said that she, too, intends to leave the government when the current presidential term ends — including persuading Mr. Obama to start the military buildup in Afghanistan in 2009. Together they won many other battles, but they split visibly last month over the military intervention in Libya.
As Mr. Gates’s retirement has drawn near, he has become increasingly outspoken — sometimes uncomfortably so for the White House. He warned bluntly of the risks of imposing a no-flight zone over Libya, a warning that has proven prescient in recent weeks as the fighting between rebels and forces loyal to the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has bogged down into a civil war.
In Mr. Panetta, Mr. Obama is selecting an already confirmed cabinet official with strong ties to both the White House and Capitol Hill. Those ties will be crucial as Mr. Panetta navigates the budget battles with a Republican-controlled House. Mr. Gates had already presented a budget proposal with $78 billion in reductions over five years, but had warned that further cuts would be harmful at a time when the United States in enmeshed in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
In selecting General Petraeus, who at least initially did not have a strong relationship with the White House, the president is retaining a high-profile military officer who has extensive knowledge of intelligence gathering in both Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years. The general’s reputation is so formidable, several administration officials said, that it would have been difficult to rotate him to another senior military post, like commander of the United States European Command.
The president is also likely soon to nominate the veteran diplomat Ryan C. Crocker as the next United States ambassador to Afghanistan, officials said. That move would, at least for a while, reunite Mr. Crocker, a former ambassador to Baghdad, with General Petraeus, with whom he worked closely in Iraq during the Bush administration. Mr. Crocker served briefly in Kabul in 2002, after the United States reopened its embassy there following the fall of the Taliban.
Mr. Crocker will replace Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired general and onetime commander in Afghanistan who had somewhat rocky relations with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. General Eikenberry’s departure completes a turnover of the American diplomatic roster in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it too comes at a sensitive time, as the Pentagon prepares to withdraw some troops starting in July.
The death last December of Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has left a major void in the top ranks of policymakers, several officials said. His successor, Ambassador Marc Grossman, has maintained a much lower profile than Mr. Holbrooke. While Mrs. Clinton has said that the State Department would take a larger role in the region, officials said she has been preoccupied by the upheaval in the Middle East.
Relations between the United States and Pakistan have deteriorated markedly in recent months, in part because of the case of Raymond Davis, an American contractor for the C.I.A. who was detained and charged with murder after he killed two armed man in Lahore in January. Mr. Davis was later released after tense negotiations between the United States and Pakistan. Relatives of the victims were paid “blood money,” though American officials denied that the money came from the United State government.
The episode particularly strained relations between the C.I.A. and the Pakistani government, officials said. Mending that relationship will now fall to General Petraeus, who got to know top Pakistani officials during his stint in Kabul.
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