Earlier this year, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, who oversees the training of the Afghan security forces, spoke to me about the difficulties of creating an army in a country where only one in four adults is literate. “What percentage of police recruits can read?” Formica asked when we met at his headquarters in Kabul. “When I was down in Helmand, where the Brits were training police officers, they said not only could none of them read but they didn’t understand what a classroom was. How can you train officers if they can’t write arrest reports?”

Perhaps McChrystal’s most intriguing idea is his belief that he can persuade large numbers of Taliban to change sides. Coaxing insurgents back into the fold was, after all, one key to pulling Iraq back from the brink of apocalypse. Beginning in late 2006, tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen, many of them former insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and to come onto the payroll, usually as policemen. Almost overnight, the Iraqi insurgency was reduced to Al Qaeda fanatics and a handful of others who could be targeted by McChrystal’s commandos in JSOC. This shaky — very shaky — arrangement is still keeping what peace there is in Iraq today.

McChrystal says he intends to begin a similar effort in Afghanistan. The idea, he said, would not be to try to flip the Taliban’s leaders — that’s not likely — but rather its foot soldiers. The premise of the program, McChrystal says, is that most of the Taliban’s fighters are not especially committed ideologically and could be brought into society with promises of jobs and protection. “I’d like to go pretty high up,” McChrystal said, referring to the Taliban’s hierarchy. “It could be people who are commanders with significant numbers of troops. I think they can be given the opportunity to come in.”

The effort, McChrystal said, is based on his own reading of the Taliban and of Pashtun culture: most of the people fighting the United States, he argued, are motivated by local and personal grievances. They want more of a voice in local governance, for instance, or they want jobs. “Historically, the Pashtuns are very practical people,” McChrystal told me. “Pashtun culture adjudicates disagreements in a way that mitigates blood feuds. The Pashtun people go out of their way not to do things that cause permanent feuds. They have always been willing to change positions, change sides. I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven; I think they are practically driven. I’m not sure they wouldn’t flip to our side.”

To help him achieve this, McChrystal recruited his old friend Graeme Lamb, who played a similar role in Iraq. The trick in Iraq, Lamb said, was timing: by late 2006, many Iraqis, even the insurgents, had grown tired of fighting. “What we did in Iraq in mid-2006 — had we tried to do it in mid-2004, it would have crashed and burned,” Lamb told me. “Because at the end of the day, people hadn’t exercised their revenge. They hadn’t stood at the edge of the abyss and looked into it.”

Lamb said the time may have arrived for something similar in Afghanistan, if only because everyone is exhausted by so much war. “Now is a good time,” he said, “because people are very serious on all sides.”

The reconciliation plan might end up bringing into the fold some disreputable characters, but neither Lamb nor McChrystal has much of a problem with that. “In my view,” McChrystal said of the insurgents, “their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior. They can enter the political process if they want to.”