It's a simple observation to make, but most of the Gap's militaries are just national police in khaki or green, meaning their primary function is internal order--not external defense.
Even so, most Gap nations' effective police forces are the thinnest of thin blue lines, especially on a local basis. It's the opposite of the U.S., where our cops are bottom heavy in their distribution (no, not a doughnut jibe), meaning the bulk are local, then a thinner bulk at the county level, thinner still at the state trooper level, and then thinnest up at the national level.
So Bing (an old acquaintance from my time at the Center for Naval Analyses) is dead on in pointing out that the Iraqi military logically takes a back seat to the local Iraqi police in any scenario pathway you'd hope to call "successful."
And you don't hear as much about the cops as you do the military, but segueing from the latter to the former is a big deal in any postwar environment--the essence of a return to some normality (as corrupt as such institutions often are inside the Gap). Until cops replace soldiers, the forces of civilian recovery typically do not mobilize in critical mass numbers.
Private-sector capital flows (not public aid) are the Holy Grail of post-whatever recovery. As soon as some foreign capitalists trust your present enough to plant some big factory inside your border, you've got a future. You've been magically transformed from less-developed country to low-cost country.
That's because jobs are the only lasting exit strategy--not uniforms, but jobs.
But capital is a coward, so the cops matter first and foremost.