Even as October marked the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq this year, with 89 American service members killed in combat so far, Casey said the U.S. military should continue to focus on drawing down American forces in the country. He said, however, that he would not hesitate to ask for more troops if he felt they were necessary.

"We are about 75 percent of the way through a three-step process in building those (Iraqi) forces. It is going to take another 12 to 18 months or so till I believe the Iraqi security forces are completely capable of taking over responsibility for their own security. That's still coupled with some level of support from us," Casey said.

With violence in Iraq at staggering levels, the United States is battling on both the military and political fronts to tame growing chaos in regions where Sunni insurgent violence now is compounded by sectarian killing.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who opened the rare joint news conference with Casey, said the Iraqi government had agreed by the end of the year to develop a timeline for progress. At the same time, he declared, the United States needed to redouble its efforts to succeed in Iraq.

"Iraq leaders have agreed to a timeline for making the hard decisions needed to resolve these issues," the Afghan-born ambassador said. "Iraqi leaders must step up to achieve key political and security milestones on which they've agreed."

Details of the milestones were not spelled out, but Khalizad mention several areas in which progress would be measured, including devising asystem to share the country's oil wealth among all religious and ethnic groups.

Further, he said, the government should transform the committee that was formed to insure that Saddam loyalists held no important national positions into an organization that would seek entice them back to the political process.

That was seen as a bow to the Sunni insurgency, many members of which were driven into the armed conflict with U.S. forces after they were shut out of the political system, army and government bureaucracies on orders of the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremmer.

"We are helping Iraqi leaders complete a national compact. ...Political forces must make difficult decisions in the coming weeks to reach agreements on numbers of outstanding issues on which Iraqis differ," Khalilzad said.

Casey and Khalilzad both castigated Iran and Syria, Iraq's neighbors east and west, for trying to undermine the American effort to stabilize the country, with Casey saying both countries had been "decidedly unhelpful."

Khalilzad said that radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who controls the violent Mahdi Army militia, had agreed through Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to U.S. demands that the government develop a timeline that would include the eradication of militias.

Al-Sadr controls the Mahdi Army, the country's most feared band of armed men, largely drawn from the downtrodden, poor and unemployed in Baghdad's Sadr City, a Shiite slum enclave.

Khalilzad also said the United States was engaging with insurgent leaders, trying to convince them to lay down their weapons and join the political process. He also announced the Americans had sought and received agreement from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan - all largely Sunni Muslim countries - to intercede with the insurgency.

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