Pakistan is among 189 countries that signed the ‘Millennium Declaration’ in September 2000[1] and thus agreed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) emerged as an outcome of the Declaration, pledging that MDGs achievement would be a corner stone in the overall development paradigm and planning processes in the country. The MDGs as agreed upon by the key world leaders are actually the minimum development goals besides others to reduce hunger and poverty by halve, improving gender equality, male-female ratios in health and education services and providing a strong global partnership through an aid and technical support mechanism to achieve MDGs[2].
The signatories to the ‘Millennium Declaration’ own the sole responsibility of achieving the goals by meeting the set quantifiable targets and indicators against each goal, the United Nations, global financial institutions and developed countries share this responsibility in terms of providing financial and technical resources.[3]  So, with a dual responsibility MDGs are nothing but a global partnership for development. The member countries were given the task of localization of MDGs fitting to their development needs but with a global commitment to show up what they have been doing through submission of progress reports to the UN.
Pakistan has submitted ‘Millennium Development Goals Report 2010’ as the fourth in the series of reports to the UN providing analysis of existing state of MDGs, challenges to development posed by various crises and a road map of commitments towards achieving MDGs. The reporting period 2006-10 has been the most turbulent in the recent history of Pakistan as it faced the brunt of 2008 global economy meltdown, resulting in fuel and food prices hike, war on terror, Internally Displaces Persons’ influx, suicide bombing, businesses shut down, floods in 2010 that crippled the economy. Even this situation continued in 2011 with more floods and brewing political hotspots and soaring of relations with the United States.
The home grown and external contexts and factors impede the efforts of the government to cope up with day to crises, coming up in a row, and put ‘the state in the making’ in an awkward position causing major off tracking the MDGs targets. Pakistan-‘the country in transition’ or ‘the state in the making’- in terms of development per se thus literally missed the MDGs targets and even the current state of affairs neutralized whatever had been achieved in the past decade. So, the MDGs that were accepted as a corner stone in the overall development framework off tracked and marred the development at a time when we are only four years away from the 2015 deadline of MDGs achievement.
This paper analyses the state of MDGs targets and achievements and Pakistan’s MDGs Report 2010 amid internal and external factors and sees how important is the shift from a ‘security paradigm’ to a ‘development paradigm’ in a ‘state in the making’. The paper also analyses the argument whether off tracking MDGs targets is because of internal and external influences ‘failing the state’ or impeding the efforts of ‘the state in the making’ to deliver on MDGs as commitment to development.