We made him a hero, but I reject him
In the long arc of nation-building, the names a country gives its weapons reveal what it worships and what it fears. Pakistan's defense minister has now said aloud what history has long whispered: that the medieval warlords adorning Pakistan's missile arsenal were invaders and plunderers, not heroes. His call to rename these weapons, made as relations with Afghanistan deteriorate, opens a rare and unsettling question — whether a nation founded on a particular story of itself is prepared, nearly eighty years on, to tell a different one.
- A sitting defense minister publicly called Mahmud Ghaznavi a thief and a bandit, shattering a taboo that Pakistani public discourse had maintained for generations.
- The missiles in question — Ghaznavi, Ghauri, Babur, Abdali — were named after foreign Turkic and Afghan conquerors, a deliberate post-1947 choice to anchor Pakistani identity in Islamic conquest rather than indigenous heritage.
- Worsening military tensions along the Afghan border have made the irony impossible to ignore: Pakistan's weapons honor the very rulers Afghanistan might claim as its own historical figures.
- Renaming the arsenal would force Pakistan to excavate an identity it has long suppressed — one that includes Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh histories the Two-Nation Theory was designed to exclude.
- No formal renaming process has begun, but the conversation itself marks the first visible fracture in a national mythology that has stood largely unchallenged since partition.
Pakistan's defense minister Khawaja Asif said something remarkable in late June: that Mahmud Ghaznavi, the 11th-century ruler whose name Pakistan gave one of its most powerful missiles, was not a hero but a robber who looted the subcontinent and killed thousands of Ismailis in Multan. The names should change, Asif concluded — a statement that would have been unthinkable in Pakistani public life just years ago.
The proposal sounds administrative. It is anything but. Pakistan's missile arsenal reads like a roll call of medieval Islamic conquest: Ghaznavi, an ethnic Turk who invaded India seventeen times from Afghanistan; Ghauri, the Afghan ruler who established the Delhi Sultanate; Babur, a Uzbek who conquered Afghanistan before pushing into India and founding the Mughal Empire; even a naval frigate named Alamgir, after Aurangzeb, remembered as much for taxing Hindus and destroying temples as for military prowess. None of these figures were from the land that became Pakistan. All of them invaded it or passed through it on the way to somewhere else.
This was not an accident of history but a deliberate act of nation-building. When Pakistan emerged from partition in 1947, it needed heroes who could anchor an identity distinct from India's civilizational continuum. The Two-Nation Theory — the founding idea that Muslims and Hindus were separate peoples requiring separate states — demanded figures who embodied Islamic conquest over Hindu civilization. Foreign warlords fit the purpose. In naming its most lethal weapons after them, Pakistan also sent a pointed strategic message: these missiles faced India, and they honored men known for violence against Hindus.
The contradiction has sharpened as Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan has collapsed into repeated border clashes. The figures Pakistan honors as heroes are figures Afghanistan might equally claim — and the absurdity of aiming weapons named after Afghan rulers toward one neighbor while fighting another has become harder to dismiss. India, for its part, named its weapons after Sanskrit concepts — Prithvi, Akash — or figures from its own epic tradition who resisted foreign invasion, carefully avoiding anti-Muslim symbolism in a secular state's arsenal.
Asif's intervention matters not because renaming is imminent — no formal process has begun — but because he named the contradiction plainly. To follow through would require Pakistan to do something it has never seriously attempted: acknowledge the Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh heritage of its own land, and ask what Pakistani identity means when it no longer depends on glorifying foreign conquest. The conversation has started. Whether it leads anywhere is the question that will define what comes next.
Pakistan's defense minister has opened a door the country may not be able to close. In a video posted to Facebook on June 28, Khawaja Asif said something that would have been unthinkable in Pakistani public discourse just years ago: that Mahmud Ghaznavi, the 11th-century ruler whose name adorns one of Pakistan's most powerful missiles, was not a hero at all, but a thief and a bandit. Ghaznavi, Asif noted, invaded from Afghanistan, looted the Indian subcontinent, and returned home—and in the process killed thousands of Ismailis in Multan. The defense minister's conclusion was stark: these names should change.
The proposal sounds simple enough. But it cuts to something far deeper than nomenclature. For nearly eighty years, Pakistan has built its national identity around a carefully curated pantheon of foreign invaders. The Ghaznavi missile is named after an ethnic Turk who ruled from Afghanistan and, according to legend, invaded India seventeen times beginning in the 11th century. The Ghauri missiles honor Mahmud of Ghor, another Afghan ruler who invaded the Indian subcontinent in the late 12th century and established the Delhi Sultanate. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, was a Turk from present-day Uzbekistan who first conquered Afghanistan before moving into India—and he too has a missile named after him. Even the Pakistani Navy has a frigate called Alamgir, named after Aurangzeb, Babur's descendant, who is remembered as much for imposing religious taxes on Hindus and destroying temples as for any military achievement.
This pattern is not accidental. When Pakistan emerged from the partition of British India in August 1947, it faced an urgent problem: how to construct a national identity distinct from India's civilizational continuum. The country's founders rejected much of the pre-Islamic heritage of the land itself and instead defined nationality almost exclusively through Islam and what became known as the Two-Nation Theory—the idea that Muslims and Hindus were fundamentally separate peoples requiring separate states. To make this identity stick, Pakistan needed heroes. But the heroes it chose were not local. They were foreign warlords, sultans, and kings—most of them Turks and Afghans—who had invaded the very territory that now constituted Pakistan. In naming its most lethal weapons after these figures, Pakistan sent a strategic message: these systems were aimed at India, and they honored rulers known for their violence toward Hindus and the destruction of Hindu temples.
The irony is sharp. Ukraine naming a missile after Catherine the Great, who annexed Crimea, would provoke outrage. Yet Pakistan has done something structurally similar for decades, naming its arsenal after foreign invaders—and only now, as border tensions with Afghanistan have escalated into repeated clashes, is the contradiction becoming impossible to ignore. The past, as the saying goes, has a way of catching up with the present.
What makes Asif's intervention significant is not just that he called for a change, but that he articulated what had always been implicit: that these figures were invaders and looters, not heroes. To rename the missiles would require Pakistan to do something it has never seriously attempted—to rewrite its national narrative. It would mean searching for indigenous historical figures to replace centuries-old icons, acknowledging the Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh heritage of the land, and reconsidering what it means to be Pakistani in a way that does not depend on glorifying foreign conquest.
India, by contrast, has taken a different path. Its weapon systems draw names from Sanskrit—Prithvi (Earth), Akash (Sky), Arihant (slayer of enemies)—or from its epic literature and Vedic tradition. When India has named weapons after Hindu kings, it has chosen figures like Vikramaditya, who fought Western invaders, not Muslim ones. As a secular state, India has been careful not to embed anti-Muslim symbolism into its military nomenclature. Pakistan, founded explicitly as an Islamic state, has done the opposite: by naming weapons exclusively after Islamic historical figures and using Persian and Arabic terms rather than local languages like Punjabi, Balochi, or Sindhi, it has sent a message that the modern Pakistani identity has no room for its Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh past.
Asif's call for renaming is not merely about changing words on a missile. It is about whether Pakistan is ready to confront the foundational choices it made in 1947 and ask whether those choices still serve the country's interests. The deteriorating relationship with Afghanistan has made the current names not just historically awkward but strategically incoherent. Whether Pakistan will actually follow through remains an open question. But the conversation has begun, and that alone represents a crack in a narrative that has held for nearly eight decades.
Notable Quotes
I do not consider Mahmud Ghaznavi a hero. He was a robber, thief, and bandit. He used to come from Afghanistan, loot India, and go back.— Defense Minister Khawaja Asif
It is time to change the names of missiles such as Ghaznavi and Abdali— Defense Minister Khawaja Asif
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why would Pakistan name its most powerful weapons after Afghan invaders in the first place? That seems to work against its own interests.
Because when Pakistan was founded in 1947, it needed a national identity fast. It couldn't claim the land's actual history—that was Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh. So it claimed Islam, and it claimed these foreign conquerors as proof that Muslims had always dominated the subcontinent. The weapons became a kind of argument.
An argument for what?
For the Two-Nation Theory—the idea that Muslims and Hindus were so fundamentally different they needed separate countries. By naming missiles after rulers who invaded India and destroyed Hindu temples, Pakistan was saying: this is who we are, this is what we stand for, this is who our enemies are.
But now that argument is breaking down?
The relationship with Afghanistan has made it impossible to ignore. You can't glorify Afghan invaders while you're fighting Afghanistan. The contradiction is too obvious. Asif's comments are really him saying: we built our identity on a lie, and it's catching up with us.
What would renaming actually require?
A complete reckoning. Pakistan would have to admit that these weren't heroes. It would have to find new figures to celebrate—probably local ones. And that means acknowledging the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh history of the land, which the founding narrative explicitly rejected.
Is that even possible at this point?
That's the real question. You can't unwrite eighty years of national mythology overnight. But the fact that a defense minister is saying it out loud suggests something has shifted.