I did not expect to be moved by a fighter jet. I am not, by temperament, a military-hardware person. But I keep coming back, with a slightly sheepish pride, to the JF-17 Thunder — the lightweight fighter that Pakistan builds, and that has spent two decades quietly being better than it had any right to be.
Let me be honest about what it is, because honesty is the whole point. It is not a miracle of pure Pakistani genius. It was developed together with China, and it is assembled at the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex in Kamra, and the fair, accurate thing to say is that it is a partnership in which Pakistan has pulled its real weight. I would much rather say that than pretend otherwise. The kind of pride that needs a lie underneath it is not worth having.
What surprises me — genuinely, every time — is the competence. If you had told a younger version of me that the country I grew up in would be designing, refining, building and exporting a modern fighter aircraft, I am not sure I would have believed you. We are taught, often by ourselves, to expect mediocrity from our institutions: to assume the thing will be late, over budget, half-finished, a little embarrassing. And then there is this jet, on its third major iteration, with better radar and better missiles than the last, flown now by a handful of other countries’ air forces, holding its own against aircraft that cost several times as much.
What I am really admiring, I think, is not the machine but the discipline behind it. To build something like this you need engineers who keep showing up, a long chain of people who do unglamorous work correctly for years, and an institution patient enough to improve a thing slowly rather than announce it loudly and abandon it. Whatever one thinks about the army’s place in Pakistani life — and there is a real and necessary argument to be had there — the part of it that quietly makes things, that does the long, careful, professional work of engineering, has earned its respect honestly.
It is a strange thing to feel patriotic about. A jet is, in the end, a weapon, and I hold no romance about what weapons are for. But underneath the steel there is something simpler that I do let myself be proud of: proof that we can do hard things properly, when we decide to. That the excellence was in us, waiting for somebody to make room for it.
From a distance, that is what the Thunder really is to me. Not a symbol of power. A small, loud piece of evidence that the competence was there all along.