(CNN) Five years after President Barack Obama first called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, the last American ambassador to that war-torn country issued a scathing criticism of U.S. policy.

"The United States does not have leverage to forge a consensus," Robert Ford told CNN's Clarissa Ward, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.

"And, frankly, the Obama administration is doing very little, if anything, to generate leverage to forge that consensus."

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Ford said that the administration had a "myopic" focus on ISIS.

"The Islamic State is a problem, but the Islamic State came out of the broader problem of the Syrian civil war. And it really isn't going to be solved outside the context, outside a larger solution to the Syrian civil war."

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