Seymour Hersh deserves every one of many awards for investigative journalism he has received, but not for his reporting on Pakistan, where his sourcing is weak and his conclusions are suspect.

Hersh’s latest, Defending the Arsenal, Can Pakistan’s nuclear weapons be secured? (The New Yorker, November 16, 2009) has one headline grabbing assertion:

Current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that [the Obama] Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide additional security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis.

In return, Hersh says, “the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities.”

If there were any truth to Hersh’s story, those “specially trained American units” can now forget about helping Pakistan to secure its arsenal: Public revelation of such an agreement makes it about as palatable within Pakistan as changing that nation’s religious preference. But there are many good reasons to seriously doubt Hersh’s headline, and the sources he relied upon to reach this conclusion.

First, Pakistan’s military establishment doesn’t need to provide access to its most sensitive nuclear sites in order to receive money for equipment and training from the United States. Second, there is a wide trust deficit at present between Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan’s military does not trust the United States to get up close and personal with its crown jewels, which is why offers to provide help along these lines have been rebuffed in the past. (Perhaps this has something to do with other press reports, Hersh’s included, of plans for “specially trained American units” with a mission to swoop in and remove Pakistan’s nuclear assets in the event of government takeover by extremists or other dire scenarios.) If special units of the US military were to visit nuclear-related facilities in Pakistan, it is highly unlikely that they would be served tea and treated as guests. Third, the very few individuals in Pakistan who know truth from fiction regarding nuclear safety and security don’t speak to journalists about particulars.

The authoritative Pakistani rebuttal to Hersh’s article was provided to the Pakistani media by Gen. Tariq Majid, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee:

There is absolutely no question of sharing or allowing any foreign individual, entity or state any access to sensitive information about our nuclear assets. Our engagement with other countries … to learn more about international best practices for security of such assets is based on two clearly spelt out red lines – non intrusiveness and our right to pick and choose.

Pakistan has accepted, and hopefully will continue to accept, assistance to increase security of its nuclear assets – as long as it is provided at a safe distance.

Hersh’s previous work on Pakistan has also been faulty, especially his reporting on a crisis between India and Pakistan in 1990 (The New Yorker, On the Nuclear Edge, March 29, 1993) that, in his estimation, came very close to a nuclear exchange. This crisis was generated by a significant increase in turbulence within Kashmir, and by military exercises near fighting corridors carried out by both Pakistan and India. What gave Hersh’s article great credibility was a quote by Richard J. Kerr, then Deputy Director of the CIA, that the 1990 crisis “may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.”

This is an astounding quote that is presumably based, as Hersh reported, on evidence of a mass evacuation of Kahuta, the movement of a heavily guarded truck convoy from a suspected nuclear weapon storage facility in Balochistan, and the arming of F-16s with nuclear weapons on strip alert.

The 1990 crisis clearly had a serious potential for escalation, as did an earlier crisis in 1986-7 sparked by large-scale Indian exercises involving heavy armor and live ammunition. During the 1990 crisis, Pakistan resumed production of highly-enriched uranium and signaled its readiness to employ nuclear weapons if matters spiraled out of control. But were India and Pakistan close to a nuclear conflagration, as Hersh’s sources believed? The Stimson Center convened a meeting of crisis managers who were stationed in Islamabad, New Delhi and Washington to assess what actually transpired. (See Conflict Prevention and Confidence-Building Measures in South Asia: The 1990 Crisis, Michael Krepon and Mishi Faruqee, eds. April 1994.) The US defense attachés based in Islamabad and Delhi participated in this post mortem. They played a key role in crisis management, as the governments of India and Pakistan allowed them to visit areas where they could directly assess the level of Pakistani and Indian military readiness for warfare.

The participants of Stimson’s crisis evaluation, including the US Ambassadors to Pakistan and India in 1990, believed that there was no credible evidence for the most hair-raising of Hersh’s conclusions. Despite — or perhaps because of — the potential for escalation, both India and Pakistan refrained from mobilizing their ground forces during this crisis. India did not put armor in the field that would be required for a military campaign, and Pakistan held its strike corps in their cantonments.

The United States has been a trusted crisis manager for India and Pakistan since both countries acquired nuclear weapon capabilities. This role is becoming harder to play. Overblown reporting doesn’t help matters.