Why Pakistan's tourism problem isn't K2

Bern Hall, boarding school, and learning how to lose

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Azam Jamil as a guest he had been trying to book for the better part of a year — a conversation delayed first by scheduling and then by Jamil’s surgery, from which he had fully recovered. The warmth is immediate, but the conversation quickly turns serious.

Jamil was born in 1953 and grew up between Lahore and Rawalpindi, attending two schools that shaped him in very different ways: Aitchison College in Lahore and Burn Hall in Abbottabad. Most people assume Aitchison is the more prestigious of the two. Jamil disagrees. “Burn Hall was actually called the Eton of the East,” he says. “We had the royal family of Malaysia, their nephews and nieces from East Africa, members of royalty. The Mir of Hunza’s son was my class fellow.” Burn Hall’s proximity to the Pakistan Military Academy meant students attended passing-out parades regularly. “There was nothing more inspiring than that. You just wanted to sign up there and then.”

He keeps two photographs at home — one from Burn Hall, one from Aitchison. “When we have a military government, I put the Burn Hall picture up because half of them are generals. When we have a civilian government, I put the Aitchison picture up because half of them are ministers. So I’ve got it covered both ways.”

But the real lesson from boarding school, Jamil argues, was not academic. It was survival. Being left by your mother at a school where you feel isolated and vulnerable teaches bonding, resilience, and the ability to depend on the person next to you. “I have friends from Abbottabad Burn Hall who are still close friends, and I hardly have any friends from university.”

This leads directly into his sharpest critique of the current school system. Muzamil, who has a two-year-old son and thinks about education constantly, raises the question of whether organized schooling is actually optimizing for the right things. Jamil’s answer is blunt: the biggest disservice the school system does is that it does not teach children how to lose.

“If there’s a race in school and out of a class of 20 this guy comes nineteenth, he gets a prize. I said, hello? Why? Because they want to make the parents happy. Because now it’s a business. It’s no longer the imparting of education.” The consequence arrives years later, when that child joins a bank or a corporation and discovers that the A’s do not exist in the workplace. “By the time this kid is 29, he would have changed five jobs. And when he’ll go looking for the sixth, nobody’s going to hire him because now he’ll have an unstable variant on his CV.”

Sports, he argues, was the one mechanism that reliably taught children how to fail and recover. Removing it from the curriculum removed the last corrective. “Physical fitness is a very small byproduct of sports. What about character? What about values? What about teamwork? What about depending on the kid next door?” The person responsible for the system’s collapse, he says, is not a politician. It is the first parent who walked into a principal’s office and demanded a teacher be fired for disciplining their child. “That was the start of the demise of your school system.”

Nur Khan, PIA, and the airline that pioneered in-flight movies

Jamil stumbled into hospitality the way many careers begin — through a chance encounter. After graduating with a BA in economics, he was playing tennis at a club when Nur Khan, then chairman of both InterContinental Hotels and PIA, asked him what he was doing with himself. “My office tomorrow morning,” Nur Khan said. That was forty-seven years ago.

The conversation about Nur Khan opens into a broader reflection on what Pakistani institutions looked like when they were run by people who had fought wars and were done by their early fifties. Nur Khan became chairman of PIA at 34, as a serving air commodore. He fought the 1965 war, became air force chief, retired, and returned to PIA at 48 or 49 for a second stint. Muzamil notes the contrast with today’s Pakistan, where parliament and the corporate sector are dominated by people in their seventies who show no inclination to leave.

Jamil’s account of what PIA achieved under that leadership is striking. “The first full-length feature film to be shown on any aircraft on this globe was shown on a PIA plane.” Nur Khan had been bored on a flight and told his team to do something about it. When they said Boeing would not allow modifications without Seattle’s approval, he sent the director of engineering to Seattle to find a way. PIA also created Pakistan’s first broiler chicken industry. The airline needed 15,000 meals a day and could not source enough chicken, so Nur Khan sent a team to Sweden, signed a joint venture, and PIA Shaver Limited introduced the broiler to Pakistan. “Now you and I have it five times a day.”

The fall from that to today’s PIA is, in Jamil’s telling, a story of politics overwhelming operations. “PIA became the garbage dump of politicians. Anybody you wanted to please and give a job, you just dumped him into PIA.” But the deeper problem is structural: “The biggest reason why PIA is not functioning is we are running non-core businesses. It’s a seventies airline trying to survive in 2023.” He contrasts this with how modern airlines operate — engineering outsourced, ground handling outsourced, one check-in agent at Heathrow cycling between seven airline uniforms and being paid by all seven. “You tell me why will they not make money?”

The cockroach problem: why K2 doesn’t cut it

When the conversation turns to tourism, Jamil is equally direct. He spent forty years criticizing the government from the outside, and then, as he puts it, “God took his revenge. He put me on the other side.” His time as Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Tourism lasted five months. In that time, he says, he realized within a day that the system does not allow movement.

His core argument is that Pakistan’s tourism conversation is always about assets — K2, Fairy Meadows, the Karakoram — and almost never about the basics. “I told the prime minister, it’s not about our assets. Our house is not in order.” The example he uses is visceral: “When you enter a bathroom and there are five cockroaches there, it doesn’t matter if K2 is 8,611 meters. The five cockroaches matter.”

The visa system is a particular target. A foreign tourist wanting to visit Skardu waits three months for a visa that passes through the Ministry of Industries, then Interior, then the military. “When you treat that tourist as a potential criminal who’s coming to harm your country, who is going to come?” When Jamil left the government, he had on his desk visa requests from 2006 — all headed to Kartarpur — representing an estimated $700 to $800 million in potential revenue. “File, file, file.” He is clear that digitizing the paperwork would not solve the problem. “Data can go online. The decision will not go online. He’s going to think ten times before he signs.”

He also argues that the Eighteenth Amendment, which devolved tourism to the provinces, was a mistake for this particular sector. “People come to Pakistan. They don’t come to Sindh.” The absurdity of devolution is illustrated by Taxila, a UN world heritage site split between Punjab and KP, where each province’s cleaning crew sweeps its half and ignores the other.

His proposed solution is to get the government out entirely. The PTDC motels are already being handed to the private sector — GB has completed the process, KP is in progress. The model he trusts is the one he saw at the Aga Khan Development Network: involve the community, give them a percentage of the profit, and they will maintain what they own. At Shigar Fort, a share of profits goes to Shigar village. “Today if you throw a juice carton in the lawns of Shigar, a local kid will pick it up before the hotel management will.”

The blue-water economy nobody is using

One of the more surprising sections of the conversation concerns Pakistan’s coastline and river system. Muzamil raises the question of why tourism infrastructure has never developed in the south, given Karachi’s size. Jamil’s answer is simple: the weather is insufferable for eight months of the year, and school holidays fall in summer, when the south is at its worst.

But the larger point is about what he calls blue-water potential. Pakistan’s rivers, coastline, and waterways represent, by his estimate, a $100 billion opportunity across tourism, cargo, offshore drilling, pharmaceutical chemicals, and fisheries. Current earnings from these resources are around $400 million — less than half a percent of that figure.

He describes a proposal he brought to the prime minister: river cruises along the Indus from Kalabagh, where the landscape is stunning and the history is dense. “Every ten minutes, Alexander jumped somewhere here. Babur passed through here.” The rivers are also easier to develop than the coast, which carries security complications. “Rivers are close to a majority of your population.” A family from Lahore could cruise down the Chenab. A family from Karachi cannot easily get to Gwadar.

On the coast, he mentions Gwadar prawns — “it will put every prawn in the world to shame” — and notes that some of the most expensive fish in global trade is smuggled out of Pakistan because there is no policy framework to farm it sustainably. “Everything in that aquarium behind you is imported,” he tells Muzamil, pointing to the studio set. “There is fish in our waters. We just don’t have policy.”

Hospitality schools and the management gap

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises a point about the gap between infrastructure and service quality in Pakistani tourism. Jamil agrees immediately. In the last five years, he has set up two hospitality schools — one for Akhuwat and one for the Hashoo Group — both now in their second semester. In two to three years, each will produce around 400 graduates annually, trained in culinary arts, housekeeping, and hotel management.

“This should have been done fifty years ago,” he says. The reason it wasn’t is partly cultural. When he told his father he was joining a hotel, there was a visible frown. “Acha, mera beta bearer ban jayega.” Certain jobs were not considered respectable. That has changed. “Now kids are spending millions of dollars in hospitality education. Every house has some kids studying hospitality overseas.”

He also pushes back on the assumption that hospitality means hotels. “Do you know more meals are served at the Aga Khan Hospital than PC and Marriott put together?” The Aga Khan Hospital in Karachi serves more meals every day than both five-star hotels combined, including their weddings and banquets. Shopping malls, airlines, cruise ships, hospitals — hospitality is now everywhere. “Hospitality is your largest employer for the next ten years globally.”

Instant gratification, adversity, and the generation Muzamil belongs to

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Jamil directly what he says to young Pakistanis who are losing faith — not in a political party, but in the country itself. Jamil’s answer begins with a distinction he draws between his generation and the current one.

“You guys are the generation of instant gratification. We are the delayed gratification.” He is not criticizing this. He says the generation deserves everything it has access to. The problem is applying that expectation to the two areas where it cannot work: career development and relationships. “There is no instant gratification in work or in the acquisition of any skill.” A person who expects their career to move at the speed of a food delivery will switch jobs five times before 29 and find no one will hire them for the sixth.

His message to despondent youth is not reassurance. It is a challenge. “If things are really screwed up, do you have to work harder or less hard?” He acknowledges his own generation’s role in the country’s decline. “The Pakistan I received from the Nur Khans and the Pakistan I’m giving to you is not the same Pakistan. I have played a huge role in destroying it. But the fact is this is all you have. Now fix it.”

He has spoken to an estimated 200,000 young Pakistanis over thirty-five years without charging a fee. He lives in a rented house after forty-eight years in the profession, having chosen to send three children to the best schools rather than buy property. Three years before this recording, he had a quadruple bypass — discovered while playing golf, with no prior symptoms, because extreme athletes sometimes have none. He was opened up before his wife could reach Lahore. Today he climbs hills with his son and plays golf daily.

“When I went to see my surgeon, he said, you know what’s cured you? The smile on your face. He said, we just did a plumbing job. The rest was up to you.”

His son, when offered a position through Sheikh Mubarak Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, refused point blank. “Abba, I’m not going to the Middle East to work. I will work in Pakistan.” Jamil suspects his children have watched their father give everything to the country for so long that leaving feels like betrayal. “Maybe that makes them feel a little guilty as well.”

Asked how he sees Pakistan in 2050, Jamil does not pretend to have data. “I’m just a hopeless romantic and I will always shoot from the hip.” His gut says the country will survive. “This qaum — the day they make a decision, they are a funny lot. Turning around is not difficult for them.” Until his last breath, he says, he will walk into every room and tell every young person the same thing: you have no choice but to fix this. Come on.