Afghan insurgents should be offered amnesties and removal from the coalition’s “wanted" list if they lay down their arms, says the British general charged with coaxing fighters away from their extremist leaders.

“There’s no question about it: amnesty would be part of this initiative,” Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb told The Times. The insurgents might have blood on their hands, but “who doesn’t?” he asked. “We’ve killed people that they would say ‘these were entirely innocent people’.”

The Afghan Government and the coalition should also consider releasing prisoners and detainees who renounced violence, the former special forces commander said in an interview at Nato’s Kabul headquarters.

Drawing on lessons he learnt in Northern Ireland, General Lamb argued that neither side could win the present conflict through force alone: “The idea that we just continue to fight to a bloody end — from my experience of 38 years of soldiering — would be nonsensical,” he said. “We can’t fight our way to success.”

The only way to end the eight-year war was to win over the “vast majority” of insurgents fighting simply because they were being paid by the Taleban, had grievances, or had been brainwashed, he said.

Many were “young men who fight well, for a bad cause”, he said. “Some will have been drawn in because they believe they are doing the right thing.” It would be wrong to use simplistic labels such as “good” or “evil” to describe them, he said. General Lamb, 56, helped to persuade Sunni insurgents to break with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a turning point in that war.

Two months ago, his old friend General Stanley McChrystal, the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, lured him out of retirement to attempt something similar in Afghanistan, though he insists his role is merely to advise the Afghan Government.

General Lamb says the Taleban’s hardline Islamic leadership is beyond redemption: “As night follows day, they will contest us, and challenge us. We either incarcerate them or kill them or they leave.”

But he doubts that the hardliners account for more than ten per cent of the insurgency. The rest, he categorises as “upset brothers” or “guns for hire”, and insists that they can be persuaded to switch sides through dialogue and economic inducements.

Some will be angry at Government corruption, or will have lost relatives in coalition airstrikes, or may feel the West has reneged on its promises. Some will have been brainwashed to believe the coalition has come to fight Islam, and genuinely think they are “fighting for a right cause”.

Others will have taken up arms simply because the Taleban pays them $300 to plant a roadside bomb: “If you have no job, no employment and a fairly uncertain future — and you need to feed your family, or want to match your father’s derring-do against the Russians — then you’ll be inclined to take that,” he said. The coalition and Afghan Government needed to “enter a dialogue with people to understand their grievances, their needs, and what they’re upset about”, he said.

They needed to build factories and schools, so they could tell young Afghans: “Here’s a course you can go into, here’s a placeholder for the job we’re going to create.” They needed to challenge Taleban propaganda that said foreign forces had come to destroy Islam. To encourage “reintegration”, the Afghan Government and the coalition would have to consider “amnesty, issues of detention, issues of prisoners, issues of refugees, issues of how these individuals are brought back,” General Lamb said, though he refused to be more specific. Likewise he said, there was “absolutely no question” that insurgents wanted by the coalition could be removed from the list — if they met certain conditions.

It will be a tall order to win over the fighters at a time when President Karzai’s Government is widely reviled; the deteriorating security situation has severely curtailed development work and the Taleban has extended its reach to 80 per cent of Afghanistan, and threatens to kill those who consort with the enemy.

General Lamb is also vague, as yet, about how such a dialogue should be conducted, and how those prepared to change sides would be protected. He insists, however, that his mission is “doable”.

He argues that the Afghan people are courageous, weary of war, and acutely conscious of what life was like before the US ousted the Taleban in 2001: “They know exactly how autocratic, bloody and murderous circumstances were under the Taleban, and they would not wish to return to that.”

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