MARJAH, Afghanistan — Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a stronghold in Helmand province.
“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.
A tour last week of the Marjah area drove home the hard fact that President Barack Obama’s plan to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 is colliding with the realities of the war.
There aren’t enough U.S. and Afghan forces to provide the security that’s needed to win the loyalty of wary locals. The Taliban have beheaded Afghans who cooperate with foreigners in a creeping intimidation campaign. The Afghan government hasn’t dispatched enough local administrators or trained police to establish credible governance, and now the Taliban have begun their anticipated spring offensive.
“This is a bleeding ulcer right now,” McChrystal told a group of Afghan officials, international commanders in southern Afghanistan and civilian strategists who are leading the effort to oust the Taliban fighters from Helmand.
“You don’t feel it here,” he said in a 10-hour front-line strategy review, “but I’ll tell you, it’s a bleeding ulcer outside.”
Throughout the day, 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.
