CNN’s Amanpour and Sciutto Pan Obama’s Middle East Policy

CAMEROTA: "Surprisingly frank were the conversations, as described by Putin, Christiane. What do you think happened in there?" 
AMANPOUR: "You know, all that matters beyond the atmospherics is do they have a plan to fix what's happening in Syria? So far, no, they don't. Neither President Obama nor President Putin outlined, in their speeches yesterday, anything resembling a real plan to stop the war. Putin wants to support Assad. Really? He's got a tiny rump state. He's the one responsible for the mass murders, for the mass, you know, fleeing of the refugees."
CAMEROTA: "He's been a failure, you know, in terms of combating ISIS. So then what is Putin's play?" 
AMANPOUR: "Well, it looks like Putin has skillfully, some might say, simply out-leveraged the United States, which is not there, has no skin in the game. It has no cards on the table. Putin has put his military, aircraft, helicopters, armored vehicles, personnel and came up with a surprise intelligence sharing with Iran, Iraq and Syria and said, here, this is our fait accompli. And you guys are wrong. You guys don't know that ISIS is what you've created. In fact -- in fact, Putin -- rather Assad is the one who people are fleeing. And because he's been there, you know, the terrorists have been able to rise there."
BERMAN: "Let's just show what Russia has in Syria right now, because it is interesting by comparison. Five hundred Russian troops, actual Russian troops, boots on the ground right there, 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. Fifty guys, Syrians that they've trained that occasionally hand the arms over to ISIS."
SCIUTTO: "And four or five that made it to the battlefield. That's an utter failure. You heard Vladimir Putin poking fun, really, at that U.S. effort to train rebels at that speech yesterday. A key disagreement. As 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 said, was the source of the problem, and Putin says Assad is a solution to the problem. So you have to wonder where the common ground is going forward. I mean, they both say that they agree that you need a political solution. But if you have that fundamental disagreement and you haven't moved any closer on that, you just have to wonder how you move the ball forward."
AMANPOUR: "But even the political solution, there's no notion of how to do that. They've tried that before, and Assad has simply refused. The Geneva talks, et cetera. I know this seems like past history now, ancient history. But they tried it, and it hasn't worked." 
BERMAN: "Is the initiative more with Putin right now than it is with Obama in the White House?" 
AMANPOUR: "Let's see. Because the White House seems to have changed its strategy. In other words, in public, yesterday, President Obama said, "I'm willing to work with anybody, Russia and Iran included." The Iran bit is a change. They didn't want to talk to Iran. They excluded Iran for a long time. And then the other bit that's a change is from Putin, Assad must go to Assad can stay a little bit. So it's still very muddled."

SCIUTTO: "Christiane is right on point, too. Putin has skin in the game right now. It's got troops on the ground. And the White House response to that, it seems to be, in effect, good luck. We've had our experience there. Let's see. And you hear this quietly, privately from White House officials. Let's see how it goes for them."
AMANPOUR: "Most unfortunately, that seems to be a trend that also happened with Ukraine, and actually, they're still there in Ukraine." 
SCIUTTO: "Absolutely." 
AMANPOUR: "It's quite dangerous to give Putin his head, so to speak, in these situations."
CAMEROTA: "Let's move to the breaking news about what's going on in Afghanistan. The Taliban, Jim, has taken over this city. How big of a surprise is that?" 
SCIUTTO: "It's a bit of a surprise. And it's also a real danger, because this is -- 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."
BERMAN: "With superiority." 

SCIUTTO: "With superiority and airstrikes. One airstrike today. But we've seen in Iraq that airstrikes alone don't gain ground back. It's been a year since ISIS has swept through Iraq. You've had hundreds of airstrikes, and Iraqi security forces haven't been able to hold back ISIS. So you need -- you need more than that if you're going to push them back from Kunduz." 
BERMAN: "Of course, Jim, there are 9,800 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan, due to leave over the next 12 to 14 months. Does that change the situation right?"
AMANPOUR: "To be honest, I think a lot of people probably are worrying about that now, because we saw what happened when forces left Iraq. It left Iraq unable to stand its forces up, unable to defend. And then we had ISIS, and everybody said, "What a surprise." But you know, this has been going on. The Kunduz battle has been going on for pretty much a year."
BERMAN: "People have been watching this develop. This was a slow boil there." 
CAMEROTA: "I mean, just the symbolic victory of the Taliban being back."