Pakistan at some instance of time will have to go into engine production, its looks idiotic to say that we want to manufacture planes, however, not engines.
If u make everything in a plane but not the engine, it'd still be assembling not 100% manufacturing.
In a hypothetical situation, lets assume, pakistan manufactures everything in JF17 except engines and no one in the world is ready to sell you planes or engines, how'd pakistan make its planes airbourne?
We have to have a state of the art engine with complete TOT.
So in my opinion pakistan must capitalize on this opportunity.
Abbas,
Manufacturing engines is not an easy task. Its pretty sophisticated and require a well built industry for metals and materials -- both of which we lack. Also setting up all the infrastructure in place requires heavy investment which we cannot afford at this point in time.
Regarding the ToT, even India is vary of the conditions and think only a few low level tech will be transferred and not 100%. This leaves you standing nowhere. Frankly, even if 100% were to be transferred, without and established and experienced industrial base, it would be unlikely to bear any fruits. India has failed with the kaveri with all the investment, China is struggling to make an engine with all its industrial might.
Even countries with far greater GDP and direct US defense assistance like Israel decided not to go for Lavi for one reason only--cost--and instead preferred buying off the shelf. Unless you are a huge country that plans to invest heavily in the defense sector in order to capture the global market with your products accompanied by your political and strategic presence, investing heavily just for personal use is not such a wise idea.
If anything, pakistan should demand the rights to manufacture some components in the RD-93 that needs to be replaced more often and/or be able to overhaul the engine. That in itself will be a major step forward. As a precaution, we can and should have some spares lying around. With the current world scenario, its pretty unlikely pakistan would struggle finding parts for the RD-93 either legally or through black market (with knowledge of russia) or even chinese parts.