McChrystal: "Marjah (the 'predictor' for success at Kandahar) is a 'Blleding Ulcer' ...."

Pat Lang said the 'clock is ticking' and the Taliban hear it too well! McClatchy's/ here

"........ "You've got to be patient," Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. "We've only been here 90 days." "How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?" McChrystal replied.

"I can't tell you, sir," the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered."I'm telling you," McChrystal said. "We don't have as many days as we'd like."

The operation in Marjah is supposed to be the first blow in a decisive campaign to oust the Taliban from their spiritual homeland in adjacent Kandahar province, one that McChrystal had hoped would bring security and stability to Marjah and begin to convey an "irreversible sense of momentum" in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan.

Instead, a tour last week of Marjah and the nearby Nad Ali district, during which McClatchy had rare access to meetings between McChrystal and top Western strategists, drove home the hard fact that President Barack Obama's plan to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 is colliding with the realities of the war.... "You don't feel it here," he said during a 10-hour front-line strategy review, "but I'll tell you, it's a bleeding ulcer outside."....... McChrystal expressed impatience with the pace of operations, echoing the mounting pressure he's under from his civilian bosses in Washington and Europe to start showing progress.

Progress in Marjah has been slow, however, in part because no one who planned the operation realized how hard it would be to convince residents that they could trust representatives of an Afghan government that had sent them corrupt police and inept leaders before they turned to the Taliban........

"By day there is government," he said. "By night it's the Taliban." (more/here)