Can think tanks, with thousands of smart people around the globe, help find missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
Following is a brief look at how think tankers around the world view the incident.
Brookings President Strobe Talbott notes that hijackers could have taken the plane, headed toward India, but crashed like UA Flight #93 on September 11, 2001.
Andrew Davies, a senior analyst at the Austrlian Strategic Policy Institute, says that even if the aircraft flew within the range of Australia's radar system, it's possible that it wouldn't have been picked up.
Ajai Sahni, executive director of India's Institute for Conflict Management, said it's amazing that an airplane could fly so far, over multiple overlapping jurisdictions, without being detected.
Nicholas Chan, socio-political analyst at Penang Institute, said that it has become increasingly possible that if we do not know what happened to MH370, we might never find it.
Ernest Bower, a Southeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said he thinks that Malaysia was defensive and embarrassed that its military and radar operations failed to track the plane.
The Heritage Foundation has a piece titled "Two Stolen Passports Were Used by Malaysian Airlines Passengers. Here's How To Make Sure That Never Happens Again."
Here is a piece from Joshua Kurlantzick of Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) titled "Why Malaysia Will Say Almost Nothing About the Missing Plance."
It was recently noted that Islamic think tanks were set up in Malaysia under the leadership of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in what he called an "Islamicisation drive."
The world has 6,826 think tanks. Malaysia has 18 think tanks.
