On Tuesday's New Day, CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto tagged the Obama administration efforts to train Syrian rebels as an "utter failure" as he and CNN substitute co-anchor John Berman recalled the scant results of trying to build up Syrian rebels as opposed to the more substantial troops and weapons Russia has supplied to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The CNN correspondent saw a similar "indictment" of the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Taliban's recent seizure of Kunduz in Afghanistan.
At about 6:07 a.m., during a discussion of the inroads into the Middle East made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Berman informed viewers:
Let's just show what Russia has in Syria right now because it is interesting by comparison: 500 Russian troops, actual Russian troops, boots on the ground, 45 aircraft, tanks, armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, fuel tanks buried underground. Jim, the U.S. has 50 guys that they've trained -- 50 guys -- Syrians that they've trained that occasionally hand the arms over to ISIS.
Sciutto derided the Obama administration's results:
Four out of five who actually made it to the battlefield. I mean, that's an utter failure, and you even heard Vladimir Putin poking fun really at that U.S. effort to train rebels during a speech yesterday.
I mean, a key disagreement, they say the conversation was surprisingly frank. Of course it would be because they have a fundamental disagreement on Assad. The U.S. says Assad -- as Christiane (Amanpour) said -- is the source of the problem, and Putin says Assad is the solution to the problem. So you have to wonder where the common ground is going forward.
Moments later, CNN co-host Alisyn Camerota brought up the bad news out of Afghanistan:
All right, let's move to the breaking news about what's happening in Afghanistan. The Taliban, Jim, has taken over this city. How big of a surprise is that?
Sciutto saw a similar story there as in both Syria and Iraq:
It's a bit of a surprise, and it's also a real danger because this is a Taliban stronghold area. I mean, it's a real, it becomes an indictment -- again, as we saw in Iraq -- of the Obama administration policy of train and equip. You spend -- we spent a decade there, trillions of dollars, training the Afghan security forces, and they couldn't hold this ground.
After Berman injected, "With superiority," Sciutto added:
With superiority and airstrikes. Yeah, you had one airstrike today, but we've seen in Iraq that airstrikes alone don't gain ground back. It's been a year since ISIS swept through Iraq. You've had hundreds of airstrikes, and Iraqi security forces haven't been able to hold back ISIS. So you need more than that if you're going to push them back from Kunduz.
