Bilal Khan (Quwa)
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Yep absolutely.The difference between India and Pakistan can be summed up in these two rows on literacy rates
India
1951 18.33 1961 28.3
Pakistan
1951 16.3 1961 16.2
Pakistan has never caught up
Also, no investment in upskilling Pakistanis.
Sure, at the start there may not be enough places within Pakistan to absorb the talent, but its continual availability will eventually bear fruits. So, if I had an able labor force, a Pakistani investor could at least use it to start producing auto parts at home and, with time, compete to enter Toyota's global supply chain. That'd drive both exports and also reduce our foreign currency outflows (by substituting foreign parts with local ones).
That said, in the years before that point, we could have had Pakistanis getting employed overseas as skilled workers (much like Indians did through the 1980s and 1990s). So that could've helped with building soft power, investment linkages, and so on.
One thing I realized with Pakistani leaders, especially military and pro-military types, is the lack of big-picture thinking. I'm not talking about bullsh!t ISPR big picture thinking, but big picture from the standpoint of nation-building. Not one of them saw the value of Tejas, for example. They all called it a samosa jet, yet completely missed how the project helped India build domestic expertise on flight controls, composites, aerospace design, etc. In turn, that expertise (i.e., labor, R&D centers, facilities, etc) helped them absorb lucrative offset deals with Lockheed Martin and Boeing which, in turn, grew their aerospace exports (e.g., supplying Apache fuselages). And now, that expertise is rolling into the ORCA/TEBDF and AMCA.