“I draw the line at war crimes,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, meaning that no one who has committed war crimes could join the force. “Local commanders can and will draw a more stringent line if they believe it is necessary. They understand the dynamics of their area better than I do. We reconcile at the end of any war. If we are able to buy time from the bottom up, that is a start. That will help us buy time for the government of Iraq to continue to mature. As those pockets of security get larger and larger, and we stitch them together, that buys time.” It was hoped that under the program Shiites, too, would eventually be recruited, but so far there had been little interest.

The fact that the patience of American politicians was running out had at least concentrated Sunni minds. For many Sunnis, the American troops were the most reliable protectors they had, and the Americans were looking less like long-term occupiers with each passing day. The development of new Sunni security forces was a way to blunt any Al Qaeda and Shiite militia countersurge when the Americans eventually pulled back.

That was the vision, and the relative success of recruiting efforts among the Sunnis had been the most favorable, if unexpected, development since the surge began. Executing the policy, however, has been extremely tricky. In effect, the American command has been moving on two parallel and possibly conflicting tracks. One represented a decentralization of power, as the American military organized Sunnis into local security forces. The second track was to centralize power in the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and to strengthen national institutions like the largely Shiite Iraqi Army.

The key to squaring the circle is to establish a link between the new Sunni forces in the field and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s risk-averse government. At first, the American effort to work with the tribes in Iraq’s Anbar Province was not much of an issue; Iraqi officials were happy to see them take on Al Qaeda militants and did not seem overly concerned about the role of the tribes in a remote western region that had no valuable resources and few Shiites. But the closer the strategy came to Baghdad, the more anxious the Iraqi government seemed to be about new Sunni groups, and the process has sometimes been a matter of two steps forward, one step back. In Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province north of Baghdad, where I spent much of June, more than a thousand Sunni locals, including former insurgents, had joined the “Baquba Guardians.” They have not hesitated to challenge Al Qaeda, which, while just one of many insurgent organizations, has been linked to spectacular car bombs and other suicide attacks that have fanned sectarian tensions in Baghdad.

But the project ran into resistance from local Iraqi officials after some Guardians tried to take the next step and join the police. Capt. Ben Richards, the commander of Bronco Troop, First Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, who was the first American officer to organize Sunnis in Baquba, told me that the Shiite provincial police chief had used ammunition as a means of political control. When the province received a large quantity of ammunition from the Interior Ministry, the police chief distributed 40,000 rounds to the predominantly Shiite police force in the nearby town of Khalis. Much of it is believed to have found its way to the Shiite Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr. Richards said the Sunni police in eastern Baquba had received nothing.

To oversee the engagement process, the Maliki government recently established a nine-member committee for national reconciliation. The panel is headed by Safa al-Sheik, the deputy national security adviser and a former Air Force engineer during Hussein’s rule; it includes Bassima al-Jaidri, a Maliki aide with a reputation for sectarianism, along with security and intelligence officials. When I met with Safa in his office in Hussein’s old Military Industrialization Ministry, he insisted that the reconciliation panel had made progress in the month it had been in existence. American officials say it has approved 1,738 of the 2,400 Sunnis who had been put forward to serve as policemen in the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad. Still, Safa acknowledged that many Iraqis are worried that the Americans might be inadvertently establishing new Sunni militias that would rise up against the authorities in Baghdad.

Newton, the British officer who was a leader of the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, had the job of bringing the Iraqi government along. “We don’t dress it up,” he told me. “Insurgent groups fear that if they cooperate, they will be targeted by the government of Iraq, and the government fears that the insurgent groups will turn on them after Al Qaeda has been dealt with. So that is the risk. We are not minimizing it. The best way to deal with that risk is to hook these groups close to you. By doing that, you bring them under a degree of control. You have the opportunity to learn how they work, which amounts to an insurance policy of future reasonable behavior.