Thank you for your question, a highly pertinent question I was hoping to avoid.
Situations like Afghanistan are really hard for us, as I believe they are for the Canadian military. I believe the militaries are not necessarily the best placed nor do they have the required skills and capacities on their own to build peace. While I think they have a role to play in building the peace, I think there are distinct capacities--peacekeeping, peacemaking. And as I'm not a military expert, you can discard my opinion. But I think the militaries have a role to play in peacebuilding efforts, Afghanistan being one of the hardest environments. There are other examples of situations where the peace operations and peace missions have worked really well by combining the efforts of humanitarian organizations, national governments, national civil society, development efforts, institutional support to the government to build peace jointly.
I think with the way conflict has been developing--with fewer and fewer international conflicts and more conflicts within the countries where one group of people has as legitimate a right to that country as the other group of people in that country, and they are fighting between themselves, it becomes even harder for us to do development, as it does for the Canadian military to build peace in those circumstances.
So to sum up, the way I see it, it should be a much broader effort than the military's effort, and I think the role of the military in terms of peacebuilding should be to provide a secure environment so other players can perform the roles for which they have the distinct competencies. When the Canadian military says NGOs wouldn't be able to provide assistance if it wasn't for the military, the usual NGO response is that if they were able to secure the environment, we wouldn't have a problem providing assistance. This is the circular argument we get into in the field all the time.
I hope that answers your question.