Its true we will sustain casualties, and KIA's and probably some MIA's, this is the nature of war. But this guy paints a picture of doom and gloom, purposely trying to scare the american people and make them think we are in over our heads so to create opposition to the war by those scared americans.
This reporter could well have slanted it to make it look as it really was, an assault on the enemy by our brave special ops force and although they sustained light casualties, from heavy resistence of the Taliban, they accomplished their mission and extracted their forces from the area, with none killed. Although the special ops team met with an unsuspected heavy resistence, during the engagement hundreds of taliban soldiers are thought to have died.
Now thats the way to write this story, which is probably exactly the way it happened.
The only person who can MAKE me "think we are in over our heads" is me. Reporters can report, writers can write; analysts can do all the analyzing they want. Only the weak of mind will fall sway to whatever bias exists in the words, the voice, the inflection of others.
I'm certain that you, as a free thinker and member of a great web community, will be able to accept the information in Hersh's story without becoming a victim of the "doom and gloom" you say Hersh is trying to peddle. Above all, however, let's agree that knowledge is our power. We should seek it from all sources and use our own reasoning, our own sense, to make decisions.
The day after the raid, Pakistani sources said "the Taliban were mauled, with more than 20 soldiers killed." Now that I believe. Pakistan has close ties with the Taliban and the Pakistani media knows what's happening in Afghanistan. But the Taliban are fairly smart, experienced warriors, and I wouldn't be surprised if they used some deception and camoflouge to make it look like Omar's house was lightly defended. This deception could have been a ploy to draw us into a raid on his house, after which they planned to launch a fierce counter-attack. Let's just look at the bright side: we probably gained some extremely valuable intelligence about the Taliban and only suffered light casualties. Next time we'll bring even more firepower.