About the hilarious new Afghan/Pakistan confrontation, from Dawn:
NOW this is an altogether curious affair. The Afghan government is reported to have objected to Pakistan naming missiles after Afghan heroes — Ghauri, for instance. An Afghan minister has said Pakistan has been asked “not to use the name of the great elders of Afghanistan on weapons of mass destruction or other war equipment”; it was welcome to use the names for peaceful things’ like memorials, monuments, etc. Why did Ghauri and Abdali and other warriors come marauding south? our foreign office should’ve replied. If they had stayed in Afghanistan, we wouldn’t have treated them as our heroes and been content to look around for indigenous heroes. This would’ve been a difficult, agonizing search.
Scratch our heads as much as we can, and we can’t come up with a really local hero for a Pakistani weapon. Our political and military leaders have been thoroughly discredited by one another. We can’t possibly name missiles after our mystics, poets and writers, who would turn in their graves at being associated with anything war-like. We could have a Musharraf missile or a rocket called Qazi I or Fazl II (hoping it wouldn’t fizzle out) or a tank dubbed Bhutto. But critics might say they have all proved to be rather loose canons and are best left untouched. We came up with Ghauri because India named one of its missiles Prithvi. The solution to the new missile crisis is simple — stop building missiles and other deadly weapons. No missiles, no need for names. Thank God, no one in the subcontinent has yet thought of finding a name for a nuclear bomb. And, meanwhile, is it possible, despite the militarization of society, to stop putting up war-like monuments in public places?