User:MBlaze Lightning/Myra MacDonald
Myra MacDonald | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Occupation(s) | journalist and author |
| Notable work | Heights of Madness: One Woman's Journey in Pursuit of a Secret War, Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War |
https://myramacdonald.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.orchardhill.org.uk/content/pages/documents/1479228093.pdf
http://www.thebaron.info/people/trainees
https://warontherocks.com/author/myra-macdonald/
https://books.google.com/books?id=m_IwDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT6#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.thebaron.info/comment/going-home-myra-macdonald
http://edpolunion.com/calendar-1/2017/3/2/the-backbench-live-the-changing-world-of-journalism
Myra MacDonald is a Scottish journalist and author. She is an authority on South Asian politics and security.
She was educated in Scotland, first at Hutchesons' Grammar School and then at University of St Andrews.
After graduating from St Andrews University with a degree in Psychology, MacDonald joined Reuters as a graduate trainee in 1984, spending a year in Paris.
Her early work years included a stint in Luxembourg, followed by a posting to Cairo. In the 1990s, she was back in Paris as Reuters chief correspondent.
In March 2000, she was assigned overseas as Reuters bureau chief in New Delhi. She served in this position until 2003, when she took a leave of absence to research the Siachen conflict. In her own words, she described her stint in India as:
When I left for India in 2000 I had little inkling that South Asia would become the region to which I would want to devote the rest of my career. Somehow having a car crash on the way into Delhi from the airport - and then piling out onto the side of the road with my nine-year-old daughter and French au pair while watching the cows go by - failed to put me off. We had a small earthquake the next day and a near-war a year later, so some might call me contrarian. I would prefer to say that in the years covering both India and Pakistan I have rarely met more generous people - in both countries.
Her research took her to both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the war zone in Siachen, and ultimately culminated in the publication of the book Heights of Madness: One Woman's Journey in Pursuit of a Secret War in 2007, the work for which she is best known.
In addition to her own research, she has also given presentation on Siachen to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
After the publication of her book, she turned her focused on writing about Pakistan. By November 2013, when she left Reuters, she had been working as its foreign correspondent for nearly 30 years.
Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War[edit]
After leaving Reuters, she began work on a new book, Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, which was published in 2016. In the book, MacDonald focuses on the India—Pakistan relations over the past almost two decades since the two countries conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1998 and declared themselves as nuclear powers. It is in this framework, she says that it is precisely this declaration that emboldened the Pakistani establishment into believing that it could continue with its "reckless reliance" on its "militant proxies" to target India and destabilize Afghanistan. In the book, she explores the past many incidents of terrorism targeting India, starting from the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was on its way to Delhi from Kathmandu, in December 1999 to the the December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, 2008 Mumbai attacks, and another terrorist attack on Pathankot Air Force base in January 2016, that were all executed at the behest of Pakistan by terrorist groups that it sponsors.
She details how Pakistan's unrelenting sponsorship of terrorism in India, and more particularly in Kashmir, undermined democracy in its own country and its economy, led to loss of opportunities for peace, and how it itself lost control over the militant groups that it had been fostering. And how India, on the other hand, used this time to make significant and rapid economic gains. MacDonald has also criticized U.S. policy in the region, which she says has been only somewhat sympathetic to India, but not to the degree to which she would like.
Andrew J. Nathan reviewed the book in Foreign Affairs, noting that the book "is a slashing indictment of Pakistani strategy by a journalist who has covered South Asia for decades."