Naeem Salik
There is always a moral to every story and the moral of the Hersh story is that we should resist the temptation of opening our doors to everyone, especially the Hersh types
Seymour Hersh is known for his
sensational stories but in his recent piece inThe New Yorker on the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets, he is not only wide off the mark but has gone overboard in mixing fact with fiction.
Hersh’s sources, as usual, are nameless and faceless ‘current’ and ‘former’ officials both in the US and in Pakistan. But he has not woven his arguments around the inputs from the few sources he has identified. Of course, because the information provided by other sources, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the spokesman for Admiral Mike Mullen and officials of the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency, did not fit well into his preconceived plot, Hersh has ignored them. The story is also replete with factual errors, some of which are quite horrific (one example: Hersh has declared Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani to be Admiral Mullen’s counterpart in Pakistan, which is clearly not the case).
According to Hersh, the greatest American worry is a mutiny within the Pakistan Army rather than the Taliban overrunning Islamabad. The fact of the matter is that for a long time now, the American media was going to town with the supposedly imminent takeover of Islamabad by the Taliban. Anyone who is remotely familiar with the Pakistan Army would know that a mutiny in the Pakistan Army is not even a remote possibility, given the unfeasibility of something like this in an army of such size.
Hersh’s piece swings between the bizarre and the absurd and exhibits a deliberate and blatant distortion of facts. The whole notion of ‘specially trained American units’ coming into Pakistan to guard Pakistani nuclear assets is ridiculous given the fact that Pakistan has the fifth largest military in the world with a highly trained and motivated special services groups of its own. Hersh is conveniently forgetting that in Somalia, the Pakistan Army rescued American forces pinned down by Mohammed Farah Aideed’s rag tag group and later covered their withdrawal from that country. More recently, the Pakistan Army has been covering the back of American troops fighting in Afghanistan.
Hersh does not recognise these facts. Interestingly, he states that for the success of the so-called ‘secret understanding’ between Pakistan and the US, secrecy was important due to growing anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. If this is true, how could US officials be so callous in sharing this information with Hersh and a senior journalist like himself be so irresponsible and spill the beans without considering the consequences? Incidentally, Hersh had written a similar story in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 incident wherein he claimed that US and Israeli special forces were jointly training to go and take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
Again, the notion of the Pakistani arsenal being kept in a disassembled form is without basis. It was former President Pervez Musharraf who said in a statement in 2002 that the Pakistani weapons and delivery systems were being kept separately. No Pakistani official has ever gone beyond saying this but Hersh has somehow got the idea (of course from his unnamed sources, among them former and current intelligence officials) that the warheads are stripped to the nuts and bolts. Based on that assumption, he has then come upon this brilliant scheme involving US commando teams landing up at some Pakistani airfield in a C-17 cargo aircraft, picking up the ‘nuclear triggers’ and making off with them in the cargo plane, while the Pakistan Air Force and air defences enjoy a sweet slumber!
The whole question of US assistance has also been distorted. The fact of the matter is that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had offered to share ‘US good practices’ with Pakistanis while making clear that he was not interested in knowing what Pakistan had and where. This is completely different from Hersh’s claim that State Department officials have been allowed into the ‘onsite safety and security’ of the Pakistani arsenal.
Hersh should also know that being a state party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the US is not permitted to collaborate with any other state on nuclear safety; nor do US domestic laws allow such cooperation. The areas of interaction are mainly related to Personnel Reliability Programmes, export controls and border controls. These are the areas where the US can assist Pakistan without impinging on its legal obligations; this is also the only framework within which Pakistan would be comfortable with ‘assistance’ and be able to maintain operational secrecy.
Also, Hersh has tried to link up various things which have no correlation with each other. For instance he claims that the US would be doubly magnanimous by not only providing special forces to enhance the security of Pakistani nukes but also pay money to the Pakistan Army so that General Kayani could fulfil his desire to provide better housing to soldiers. Instead of speaking to his dubious sources or jumping to conclusions, had he just gone around Rawalpindi or any other garrison, he would have seen that new accommodation for the soldiers has already been constructed without waiting for American largesse. Rs 7 billion were set aside for this project several years ago.
Hersh’s linkage of the terrorist attack on the GHQ and nuclear security is also bizarre. He didn’t express similar concerns after the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, perhaps because American nuclear weapons are not stored in the Pentagon – but neither are Pakistan’s at the GHQ!
However, the most laughable point in the article is a comment based on the statement of a ‘former senior intelligence official’ that he was shown the target lists and mobilisation plans for Pakistani nukes, as well as their security plans so that they could be augmented. Why on earth would one need to look at the target lists and mobilisation plans to augment the security and who in his right mind would be willing to share target lists with an unconcerned person, forget a foreigner?
There is always a moral to every story and the moral of the Hersh story is that we should resist the temptation of opening our doors to everyone, especially the Hersh types. We are more generous and hospitable than we need to be, and sometimes the quest to get publicity backfires. In the future, all requests for interviews with top leadership need to be vetted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Information to verify the credentials of the concerned journalist, whose questionnaire should also be seen beforehand. Concerned officials also need to be duly briefed about their responses which must be recorded to keep a check on misquotation and misrepresentation.
Our media also needs to be careful not to dignify such stories by giving them undue coverage. People like Hersh need to be ignored. Hersh’s competence at misleading readers have been corroborated by the highest authority in the US. Bob Woodward has quoted President Bush in his book Bush at War as saying that “Hersh is a liar”. So Hersh, apart from being the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the recipient of this dubious accolade as well.
Brig Naeem Salik (retd) is an Islamabad-based security analyst
