30 October USA Today - Hard-Won Turf Easily Lost in Transfer to Iraqis by Rick Jervis.

... Here and across Iraq, the U.S. military has had difficulty sustaining the hard-won gains carved out through its “clear, protect, build” counterinsurgency strategy. In most cases, Iraqi police and troops have been the weak link...

The strategy uses joint U.S.-Iraqi offensives to clear towns or neighborhoods of insurgents and militias. In most cases, Iraqi police and army troops are left behind to provide security. Then, reconstruction projects — the “build” component — are launched quickly to demonstrate quality-of-life improvements in newly secured areas.

In Baghdad, U.S. forces have been using the same strategy in an intense, neighborhood-by-neighborhood security operation since June.

“The plan for Baghdad was clear, protect, build,” Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said last week. “Our ultimate intent is to help the citizens of Baghdad feel safe in their own neighborhoods, and this is not something that's going to happen overnight.”

Success has slipped away in places where the Iraqi security forces that assumed control have been outgunned by armed groups or have been compromised by their ties to militias and political groups, said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank based in Arlington, Va.

“We simply overestimated the capacity of the Iraqi people to defend their democracy,” Thompson said. “If Iraqi security forces can't be counted on, we have no strategy for winning.”...