Pakistan has an enviable record of contribution towards global security, peace, and stability under the auspices of United Nations. Since 1960, it has been actively involved in most of the UNs peacekeeping missions, and today stands at the top with 10,175 troops and observers serving many ongoing missions. So far, Pakistan has participated in 41 missions in some of the most dangerous conflict zones, like Congo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Somalia, Cambodia, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where our soldiers have helped restore peace and in the provision of humanitarian assistance. Pakistan has made the largest troop contribution to such initiatives, and so far deployed 130,000 peacekeepers from Far East Asia to Central America. As a signatory to the MoU on UN Standby Arrangement System, Pakistan has pledged a brigade size force, including air force and navy assets, for the peacekeeping missions. Hopefully, it would participate in the high-profile missions involving the enforcement of no-fly zones, naval blockades, etc. The performance of Pakistani peacekeepers has been acknowledged worldwide, especially by the governments of the affected areas and UNs leadership. An undisputed professional standing of our peacekeepers has made them the passion of every UNSGs special representative and force commander in every mission. Pakistani peacekeepers have persistently sacrificed their lives in the line of duty; the fatalities account for over 10 percent of total UN deaths. Meanwhile, almost an equal number of the peacekeepers have been wounded over the five decades. Tragically, 122 Pakistani military, police and civilian personnel have lost their lives while serving the United Nations. Such missions expose our troops to attacks from warring militant groups, hostile social environment, adverse weather conditions, and health hazards. Many, in Pakistan, vividly recall the tragic episode that occurred in Somalia during 1993. Five groups of Pakistani peacekeepers were attacked by the militants belonging to warlord Mohamed Ali Farrah Aidids militia; the attackers used women and children as shield, but the Pakistani troops fought back courageously, and ensured that the women and children remained unharmed. During this episode, 23 Pakistani soldiers lost their lives and 56 sustained injuries. Peacekeeping is envisaged as a non-coercive and politically impartial instrument. Traditionally, it has been based on a triad of principles viz consent of parties to the conflict, impartiality of the peacekeepers, and use of force by lightly armed peacekeepers only in self-defence. In the past, constraints imposed by these principles have led to the abandoning of some of the missions, leaving the suffering civilian population in a state of limbo. The genesis of the 'peacekeeping mission is rooted in the contradiction between the rejection of war and the need to keep peace by force. The UN Charter, which is based on the idea of preventing war, does not envisage peacekeeping. Yet, this method of crisis management has evolved out of the fear of a war breaking out. Dag Hammarskjld and Lester B. Pearson invented peacekeeping in 1956. Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter provide for political and military procedures for resolving conflicts. The idea was relatively simple: Establish a means for dialogue (Chapter VI) and, if the situation becomes a threat to international peace, take military action (Chapter VII). Early day missions were timid, involving only military observers. Then it became clear that they had to be protected, and that it would be useful if the forces were interposed between the parties to a conflict. At first, attempts were made to resolve the problems of protection of the peacekeepers with allocation of additional resources, like increasing manpower and firepower, in the field for protecting the units more effectively. But as difficulties persisted, it slowly became clear that there was a doctrinal gap. The first stage of peacekeeping lasted until the fall of Berlin Wall. Its success depended on the assumption that the belligerents would respect their commitments; and that they could more or less control their forces. This remained the case as long as the conflicts involved national armies. But from 1990 onward, the disintegration of some States undermined an essential condition of peacekeeping: The consistency and effectiveness of the commitments made by the parties to a conflict. In a civil war, the commitment of non-state actors to peace agreement can never be assumed; consent becomes a relative and evolving concept. It could be ambiguous and withdrawn arbitrarily. Hence, the security of peacekeepers continues to remain on tenterhooks. Undoubtedly, there ought to be a balance between mission accomplishment and survival. This must be imbedded in the design of each mission, from conception through execution to safe extrication. When the safety of peacekeepers is threatened, peacekeeping is likely to go beyond an exclusively defensive posture. Such situations must cater for limited and local offensive actions with the proviso that they are not diverted towards perpetual coercive ends. The protection of observers and peacekeeping troops requires situation based application of force and means to do so, which should be readily available to each field commander. These lessons have been learnt at the cost of deplorable humanitarian failures that made people doubt the relevance of UN peacekeeping capability in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda. Today, peacekeeping has weaknesses at every level of its implementation. The root cause of all of these weaknesses is physical vulnerability at the tactical level. It has become worse as States have become weaker and, thus, less able to guarantee their consent. Moreover, intra-state conflicts need more and more peacekeepers, as compared to inter-state conflicts. Notwithstanding the evolution of the post-cold war era constraints, peacekeeping will always be a matter of consent, rather than compulsion. However, robustness of force and structures would increase the ability to control the area of operations where a crisis is taking place, while, at the same time, protecting those who are executing the peace mission. The UN needs to devote a great deal of effort to evolve a viable doctrine for its peacekeeping activities to increase the coherence in conception and conduct of these operations. The envisaged doctrine should aim at improving the military components ability to control the situation through rapid mobility. Also, the UN should find procedural ways and means to compensate for the inherent structural weaknesses of its force composition viz their extremely diverse multinational nature, inter-operability issues, and difficulties of command articulation. The writer is a retired Air Commodore and former Assistant Chief of Air Staff of the Pakistan Air Force. At present, he is a member of the visiting faculty at the PAF Air War College, Naval War College and Quaid-i-Azam University. Email:khalid3408@gmail.com