Can you kill your way to victory? Yes, if you are engaged in a hot war against a conventional enemy. Yes, too, if you face homicidal extremists. Killing them may be the only option. Indeed, death is the essential dimension of warfare. But, in defense of State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf (who has been mocked for suggesting a jobs program is the way to defeat terrorism), killing is not a grand strategy. Killing is certainly not the way to win a cold war or a long war. Economics is.

“We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. … But we cannot win this war by killing them,” Harf said during an MSNBC interview. “We need … to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs…”