From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2744088/I-don-t-know-means-State-Department-official-dismisses-completing-mission-against-ISIS-buzzword-one-week-Obama-admits-don-t-strategy-yet.html
Fox News Channel correspondent James Rosen asked [Marie] Harf on Thursday whether the administration believed the battle against ISIS would extend past January 2017, when President Barack Obama will leave office after eight years.
It's a question he had asked Harf's boss, Jen Psaki, in Tuesday's briefing. Psaki deflected it.
But Wednesday on CNN Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said that the 'sustained effort' required to cripple ISIS is 'going to take time, and it will probably go beyond even this administration to get to the point of defeat.'
'Now,' Rosen said Thursday, 'the administration has placed some kind of time-frame on this. So perhaps you could explain why this president, who has about 2-and-a-half years left on his term – a little less than that – feels he cannot complete this mission.'
A visibly annoyed Harf snapped back.
'Let's talk about what this mission means, because I think that's a catch-phrase,' she told Rosen.
'Obviously, we cannot kill or capture every terrorist in the world,' she said. 'That's not how – that's not how this ends. We've been clear about that. What we can do is take the fight to them. Take their leaders off the battlefield. Cut off their funding. Build partner networks on the ground. ... So we can take away their capability to attack the United States and significantly degrade that.'
Harf seemed to mirror a schizophrenic policy articulated a day earlier in Estonia by Obama himself, when he first said he aimed to 'destroy' ISIS but then vowed only to make it a more 'manageable' threat.
Harf clung to Obama's second statement while ignoring the first.'That's how you fight terrorist organizations,' she said. 'Completing the mission is a term – I don't even know what that means when you're talking about terrorist organizations.
'It doesn't always fall into a nice little buzzword, as you used in your question,' she mocked Rosen. '"Complete the mission – why won't he complete the mission by the end of this term?"'
She cited the decline of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the Pentagon's recent attack on al-Shabbab in Somalia, and the drone-strike killing of the terror leader Anwar al-Awlaki as examples of intermediate victories that should reassure Americans.
'The record, Rosen shot back, 'could also be seen as including Benghazi, the current chaos in Libya, [and] the rise of ISIS to become the kind of threat that it is – but that would be argumentative. I don't want to go there.'
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