I think the answers to these questions are unfortunately a bit muddled Initially I was going to say that the Public Relations Officers who wrote those articles may have inserted the term without thinking or knowing However one possibility is that since ISAF is a reaction to the Bonn Agreement it may be considered peacekeeping with the parties including the fledgling national government and the various quasi legitimate warlords But the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not parties to any agreement To my understanding without an agreement in place between sides there is no peacekeeping Security Assistance the SA in ISAF to me is a subset of the military term peace support operations peacekeeping is another subset of peace support operations In the end I think the NATO and ISAF webpages must be authoritative and I have seen no mention of the term peacekeeping on any of the main documents I have looked at I don t claim to be an authority and soldiers and bureaucrats and politicians argue about the meaning of words all the time but to me peacekeeping has a specific meaning that ISAF does not fit