It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.

I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.

When I visited Syrian special forces along the front lines, I was given extraordinary amounts of detail. They gave me the code numbers for the various positions they've got, told me where the rebels were - about 800 meters away in a forest. I met soldiers who had been wounded but were still serving.

My experience has been whenever captured soldiers are released, it at least creates a window for dialogue.

Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.

[But training isn't a one-way experience.] The Afghan soldiers are able to teach us how the enemy fights, ... The Afghan troops are also very physically fit -- and they will work the daylights out of us.