The Snow Leopard Project Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Alex Dehgan

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover photograph © Paul Biris/Getty Images

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  First Edition: January 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dehgan, Alex, author.

  Title: The snow leopard project: and other adventures in warzone conservation / Alex Dehgan.

  Description: First edition. | New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018029065| ISBN 9781610396950 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781610396967 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wildlife recovery—Afghanistan. | Snow leopard—Conservation—Afghanistan. | Wildlife conservation—Afghanistan. | National parks and reserves—Afghanistan. | War—Environmental aspects—Afghanistan. | Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Afghan War, 2001–

  Classification: LCC QH76.5.A3 D44 2019 | DDC 333.95/9755509581—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029065

  ISBNs: 978-1-61039-695-0 (hardcover); 978-1-61039-696-7 (ebook)

  E3-20181201-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  Bird-Watching with the Taliban

  CHAPTER 2

  The Snow Leopard Start-Up

  CHAPTER 3

  Afghanistan’s Biological Silk Road

  CHAPTER 4

  The Ordinary Extraordinary Life in Kabul

  CHAPTER 5

  The Forgotten Peoples on the Roof of the World

  CHAPTER 6

  The Buddhas of Band-e-Amir

  CHAPTER 7

  Vampires in the Land of Light

  CHAPTER 8

  The Search for the Last Afghan Cheetah

  CHAPTER 9

  Adventures in Conservation Diplomacy

  CHAPTER 10

  Back in the CCCP

  CHAPTER 11

  The Snow Leopard Comforter

  EPILOGUE

  The Snow Leopard Project

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Abbreviations

  Index

  To Peter Zahler and Pat Wright, who gave me inspiration and taught me dedication,

  To my parents, who gifted me with great opportunity, and boundless love & support,

  And to Kara, Fynn, & Cylus, who inspired me to be better for them and for the world.

  CHAPTER 1

  BIRD-WATCHING WITH THE TALIBAN

  FROM MADAGASCAR TO AFGHANISTAN (WITH A STOP IN BAGHDAD)

  A cool mist hung low over the dense reeds as I peered through my scope. Kol-e-Hashmat Khan, a wetland area on the outskirts of Kabul, was once the hunting grounds of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan. Converted in the 1930s by the king into a waterfowl reserve, its name translates as the “lake of the dignified leader.” Prior to the Russian invasion in 1979, over 150 species of migratory birds were recorded at the wetland, and it had supported as many as 35,000 waterfowl. Kol-e-Hashmat Khan had long represented an important stopover for one of the planet’s great bird migrations between Africa, South Asia, and Eurasia. It was an oasis for birds in the middle of traveling across a vast dry region, and it was also an oasis in the middle of Kabul. But the sprawling capital, particularly after the abdication of the king, suffering through three decades of war, and with the flood of refugees returning to Afghanistan and moving to Kabul, was quickly encroaching.

  Today, areas on the edge of the lake are thickly settled—lumberyards, car repair shops, butchers, and houses have crept right up to the water. The small wetland, just 200 hectares (494 acres), lies just south of Kabul, and coming across it is a jarring transition from the dusty, clogged traffic of Logar Road to the serene wetland populated with hundreds of birds just behind a metal gate. A simple, crumbling concrete observation tower stands at the edge of the lake, and King Zahir Shah’s steel rowboat, which he used for hunting waterfowl, is still tied up to the shore.

  I came to Kol-e-Hashmat Khan in 2006 to start building the Afghanistan Biodiversity Conservation Program with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York (better known as the Bronx Zoo). I was at the wetlands on that day as part of an effort to monitor the number and diversity of waterfowl, and I wasn’t expecting any company other than the birds. But as I peered through the spotting scope, the crunching of footsteps on the reeds broke the silence of the marsh. A young Afghan man in the traditional loose-fitting clothing of the Pashtuns, a shalwar kameez and a turban, approached me from behind. I was immediately uneasy. We were far out in the park. I was armed only with my scope, binoculars, and field notebooks. Usually, I did this kind of work with a partner, but today, I was alone. We were shorthanded, so my driver had to help our other projects, and my Afghan ornithologist, Naqib, was away on expedition. I looked up from the scope and turned to greet the young man.

  “Sobh-be kheir.” (Good morning.)

  His only response was a dark glare. We stared at each other for a long while before he asked—first in Pashto, which I didn’t understand or speak, and then Dari—“What are you doing?”

  I explained to him I was counting birds, part of my work of understanding what happened to Afghan wildlife.

  “I am a Talib,” he announced. Talib as in a member of the Taliban. He sat back and watched for my reaction.

  I looked at him for a moment, shrugged, and turned back to my scope.

  He stood silently behind me, and I did my best to ignore him. I nervously counted ferruginous pochards, Jacanas, tufted ducks, shovelers, and multitudes of coots floating between the reeds, unsure of what he would do. After a few minutes conducting my awkward survey, I gestured for him to come over and look through the scope.

  He looked at me first warily and then, his curiosity getting the better of him, approached and peered through the eyepiece as I showed him how to adjust it. After a few minutes, he turned his head to me and smiled and then peered into the scope again. Before long, I was showing him how to type birds and their names. As we scanned the reeds, I felt the surreality of the moment sink in. How had I found myself bird-watching with the Taliban?

  THIS BOOK CHRONICLES the long, strange path that led me, and other conservationists, into some of the world’s most dangerous places, all in the service of conservation. In particular, it lays out the story of conservation in postwar Afghanistan, a country that had become nearly a blank slate for conservation. There was a chance, after nearly thirty years of conflict, to start over, to create new and unique protected areas, and the laws, policies, and institutions that protected them, from scratch. This was a country where exploration wa
s still possible and where the unknown had not been exhausted but in fact was refilled.

  If we were successful, these would be the first national parks in Afghanistan’s history. Afghanistan had come close in 1979 in creating the parks, but that effort was interrupted by the Russian invasion. The country had to wait nearly three decades to try again. But this time, we were starting from scratch—the ecosystems and their flora and fauna had been devastated by the war, and we didn’t know what we would find and whether what was left was even worth saving. And there was a bigger question: When the country faced so many other challenges, why should we care about a few snow leopards and big mountain sheep?

  We would be founding a start-up in the middle of a post-conflict war zone, and we had a singular window, before Afghanistan imploded again, to take advantage of the relative peace and safety, to accomplish our goals for the country. However, this meant that we would need to build everything from the ground up and get ourselves out into the field in thirty days. The project, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), was under tremendous pressure to show results, and as a result, almost immediately we would have international staff coming into Kabul and starting on our initial surveys. This required a fast start-up. We would need to learn how to deal with the complexities of Afghan society and government bureaucracy, navigate remote terrains, and create the infrastructure, security, and logistics behind the entire project.

  We had an extraordinary plan—a set of comprehensive surveys of three major regions in Afghanistan for their fauna and flora; assessment of the underlying threats driving their species extinct and the creation of solutions to address those threats; the constitution of the governance structures at the village, regional, provincial, and national levels to enforce the rule of law; the development of programs to build community support and ensure they benefited from future protected areas; the formation of the support infrastructure for those protected areas; and finally, the establishment of the areas themselves and the bringing together of other governments to partner with Afghanistan in the transboundary management of these remarkable and unique places. This plan would take decades with other countries, but we only had three years of funding from USAID and an unknown window of safety in which to operate. And the project was already six months behind schedule.

  The unknowns would be the hardest part of the project—not knowing the status of the wildlife, the safety of the roads, or whether we would have the support of the people and the governments. However, while Afghanistan operationally was a difficult place to work, it was also an extraordinary place to be. First, the Afghan people are among the loveliest you could hope to meet. For people who have suffered so much, they are cheerful and hospitable, and this was even true of many of its government officials with whom we dealt. Second, Afghanistan attracts an inherently interesting set of people from outside its borders. The journalists, humanitarians, and development officers that Afghanistan attracted in the early years after the US conflict were among the most extraordinary, warmhearted, and intellectually rich people you could meet.

  Finally, perhaps because we were in Afghanistan to do science, as conservation diplomats, we did not have to deal with the kind of corruption or bureaucracy most other programs did. The majority of Afghans were remarkably enthusiastic about our work and supported us in doing it. This may have been because, as an Iranian American, I may have been less of an outsider to their society, more familiar to them than the other foreigners that flooded into their country. But I think there was another reason—for people who had spent much of the previous three decades as refugees in other countries, protecting the unique and charismatic wildlife of the country was a way to help restore their identity. The protection and renewal of wild Afghanistan, of its flora and fauna, represented a restoration of the country’s own ferocity and identity. This was an essential component of postwar reconstruction. Although Afghanistan’s national character always tended toward generosity, friendliness, and warmth, our work in conservation seemed to generate even greater kindness and support.

  HOW I GOT to Afghanistan is a long and unlikely story. It took me through studying extinction among endangered lemurs in the dwindling eastern forests of Madagascar, to science diplomacy work for the State Department focused on the Middle East, including a foray into Iraq, before being invited to help establish the Wildlife Conservation Society’s first national park in Afghanistan. My career might sound a bit haphazard, but it prepared me perfectly for the role that I played in Afghanistan. Law, lemurs, and diplomacy comprised a curriculum not found inside any graduate school. A sense of adventure and a dose of serendipity kept sending me down different paths, and they ultimately led me to that wetland outside Kabul.

  I started out as a lawyer, although not the typical kind. In the summer after my first year in law school, I flew to the collapsing Soviet Union with several hundred dollars and a credit card that didn’t seem to work anywhere in the country except for a telephone booth in a floating brothel on the banks of the Moscow River, from which I called my family once a week. I had gotten an opportunity to work with the Russian government on improving their environmental laws after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My position was to help rewrite environmental law and support the Ministry of Environment for the newly created Russian Federation as well as help build the country’s civil society. The economic and political impact of the war in Afghanistan, coupled with the suffocating administrative edifice of the former Soviet Union, caused the Communist Party and government to collapse abruptly under their own weight. I jumped at the chance to go to Russia, oblivious to what awaited.

  Russian society had fallen into disarray with the collapse of Communism. The Soviet Union was a seventy-year social experiment on an unprecedented scale—a test of whether the drivers of human nature could change—and that experiment had finally failed. The rules for living in Russia, never obvious or simple even under the Soviets, were now changing almost daily. Currency could be rendered worthless by government decree overnight, and inflation ran rampant. Accomplishing anything from buying a train ticket to making a phone call required ingenuity and adaptability. Everything I thought I would be doing in Russia was different from my actual work. Although I had been sent to rewrite environmental laws, ensuring that the laws were enforced was the more needed task. However, the lessons outside my work would be the most valuable to my experiences later. The salary was meager—it included my housing, which I shared first with a hedgehog in the Moscow Zoo, and then a dog at a Soviet block apartment outside of town, plus $300 for the summer—so I had to live as a Russian did and adapt to the society that was in the middle of 30 percent inflation a month and in which even the constitution seemed to change daily. My experience there was like white-water rafting in the dark. Russia was my first training ground for surviving in a foreign land in the midst of chaos. This knowledge proved invaluable more than once on the road to Kabul.

  After two summers in Russia, I finished law school and clerked for a federal court in Manhattan. As much as I enjoyed returning to a place where the rule of law maintained the fabric of society, I missed science. Law seemed to be a further refinement of previous interpretations and distinctions, while science provided me a chance to be curious, ask big questions, and seek out their answers in the larger universe. It would be a lecture series on extinction that I had attended at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in celebration of its one hundredth anniversary that would lure me back to science and adventure.

  So I gave up my career in law to begin a doctoral program in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. I wanted to answer a critical scientific question: Why, during periods of extreme environmental change, do certain species survive while others go extinct? I sought the answer in the lemur populations in Madagascar. The country had suffered from deforestation and fragmentation of its forests. We asked similar questions years later in Afghanistan. In Madagascar, we were looking at the aftermath of man’s war on the environment
as part of his survival. In Afghanistan, it was man’s war with himself. Both had impacts on the biodiversity of the countries.

  I formed a hypothesis in Madagascar that species’ adaptability to environmental change, and thus their survival, was directly related to their ability to alter their behavior, and that by quantifying this ability, we could predict the likelihood of species’ demise. I proposed that extinction is not a random process, but that species disappear in a predictable order. We could predict species’ susceptibility to extinction by measuring their “behavior plasticity,” or, in other words, the evolutionary moderated capability of a species to behave differently. In Madagascar, I found two species with different outcomes in response to fragmentation; one species, which was less limited by diet and skeletal structure, was able to cross vast areas of rice paddies to ensure it got sufficient food, while the other was constrained by its evolutionary adaptation to arboreal living and was ultimately trapped on the tiny island of forest.

  Before Madagascar, I had never handled the logistics of a large-scale field operation, nor did I have much experience in building and training teams. Our expedition required more than twenty field assistants and researchers, fifty porters, and a shipping container load of scientific equipment and supplies. We had to get every ounce of gear to Madagascar, hardly a travel hub. In the field, we were sometimes a one- to two-day walk from the nearest road, a twelve-hour drive from the capital, with no cellular signal, satellite phones, running water, or electricity. We participated in countless ceremonies for the ancestors and meetings with local kings and elected officials to get nearby villages to buy in. We built and trained our field teams from scratch, working with Malagasy villagers from the forest (the Tanala people) who had little more than grade-school educations. Once the team was assembled, we needed to get to the field sites that I had spotted and measured via satellite imagery and determine whether lemurs still existed in them—and whether their distribution was random or followed our model’s predictions.