I looked into this a few years back and the cost/benefit of the initial use of atomic weapons is not as cut and dried as many people believe. That's not really the topic here though.

It's absolutely true that weapons can be tools for peace, but I don't think that is how the projects in Afghanistan and Iraq played out. Even with the best intentions the fact that it is a military operation planned by military leaders and staffed by trained military personnel means that you're going to get particular kinds of approaches.

I think the suggestion is to approach these projects as an equivalently resouced mission with different aims and led by different people and to see if the balance of resources they would choose would be different.