We have analyzed the performance of TCP in the CDMA mobile communications systems with the adaptive modulation and coding(AMC). The wireless channel using AMC is characterized with not high error rate but highly varying bandwidth. Due to time-varying bandwidth, timeout events of TCP occurs more frequently, which leads to the throughput degradation. The analysis model is composed of the two parts. In the first part, we divide TCP packet stream into ‘packet groups’and derive the probability distribution of the wireless transmission time of each Packet group that reflects the time varying characteristics of AMC. In the second part, we formulate embedded Markov chain by making use of the results of the first part to model TCP timer mechanism and wireless transmission. Since our system model is characterized by the forward link high speed data transmission using AMC, the results reported in this paper can be used as a guideline for the design and operation of HSDPA, 1xEV-DO, and 1xEV-DV.