For the PAF the issue wasn't the price of the Vixen 1000E or Grifo-E, but the fact that we didn't have a compatible LRAAM. Neither the Chinese or the Italians/British were going to open up their radar and AAM stacks to make our existing SD-10s (or next longer ranged AAMs) work from that radar. Likewise, our ties with France and the US aren't at a point where we could get the Meteor or the AMRAAM for the JF-17.
The story may have been different if we had developed our LRAAM. Heck, I even wrote about the option of actually making one with the South Africans in 2016 (i.e., 5 years ago).
Although risky and costly, the Marlin could be Pakistan’s opportunity to secure valuable technology for air-to-air and surface-to-air missile applications
quwa.org
The bigger issue isn't even that we didn't make our own AAM, but that we never invested enough in domestic R&D to actually build the inputs we'd need to readily make an AAM (or SAM). However, if we invest in these areas properly, then I don't think we'd even need to worry about Leonardo radars; we'd potentially have our own instead.
Unfortunately, even if we start now, we'll still need to wait 15-20 years before we get serviceable solutions. Like India, we will probably go through failure and reworks, but it's a necessary grind in order to get to the right end outcome. We should start now, but just remember, we'll still rely on China or whoever else in the interim.
