Reuters, Beijing :The frantic hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been, in one way, a nearly miraculous display of international collaboration: 26 nations, many of them rivals, have opened up their territorial waters and airspace or have contributed closely held technology and surveillance data to a search that has riveted the world.That extraordinary cooperation has been instrumental in narrowing the search to a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean this week. But the effort has also underscored the limits of trust among powers like China, Malaysia, the United States, India and Thailand, all of which bring their own, often competing, strategic interests to bear.The instruments of the search – advanced radar and satellite arrays, banks of intelligence analysts, surveillance planes and ships – are also the tools of spycraft. And as they have come together, the imperative among participating countries to cloak their technological capacities and weaknesses has proved irresistible, at times hindering the search, military analysts say.”In Southeast Asia and in the wider region, there is no defense forum that enables the sharing of information and capabilities with regards to something on this scale,” said Jon Grevatt, an Asia-Pacific analyst in Bangkok for IHS Jane’s, a defense industry consultancy. “These countries have tried before to get to a situation in which they are sharing military technologies at a higher level than they are now. They have tried, but it hasn’t really happened. It’s further evidence of the continuing mistrust or lack of confidence in each other.”For example, Indian officials were reluctant to discuss radar data from the Bay of Bengal, along one of the plane’s possible paths. That turned out to be because there was not much data – the area was a weak spot in the country’s radar coverage. In an interview, a senior Indian military official said India did not keep “heavy surveillance” capabilities there because it was not a tense area, unlike the country’s northern border with Pakistan. It would have been possible to miss the jet at night, he said.
