State Department Deputy Press Secretary Marie Harf was asked if the Obama administrations policy of using drones strikes to combat terrorism was like a game of Whac-A-Mole.
Harf did not agree with this comparison claiming "that the threat… has shifted geographically, but it's just a different type of threat."
Below is a transcript of the exchange:
Q: So when we hear you say in essence -- and I'm boiling down what you just said -- that the threat has moved from one region to another and this particular tool that we use is still going to be readily deployable in the next theater where the threat has moved to, why shouldn't we regard that as Whac-A-Mole?
MS. HARF: Is Whac-A-Mole a technical term, James?
Q: (Chuckles.) Yeah.
MS. HARF: Can you be a little more specific?
Q: To denizens of arcades and video games, Whac-A-Mole is a game --
MS. HARF: I know what Whac-A-Mole is, but what do you mean in reality here?
Q: So in other words, you're telling us the threat shifted from one place -- it moved to one place to the other. So we're still going to use it in the next place. So why shouldn't we regard that the broader counterterrorism effort isn't in fact some large game of Whac-A-Mole?
MS. HARF: Well, it's not just that the threats -- the threat – excuse me -- has shifted geographically, but it's just a different type of threat, right? When we looked at the threat from al-Qaida core in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the ability to conduct a large- scale, 9/11-style attack -- I'm not arguing that all the groups in other places around the world have that capability or indeed that desire. We've talked a lot about AQAP in here. When they shifted sort of from being a group that was more focused on Yemen or the Gulf to, we saw over the past several years, them increasingly trying to attack the U.S. interest or the U.S. homeland. So it's not that the threat is one-to-one. It's that where al-Qaida offshoots operate, we take a look at both what they have the capability to do, where they're focused on internal/external planning and what kinds of tools are more appropriate to counter that threat. And it's different everywhere.