Afghanistan: From Snow Leopards to Soldiers: Conservation in a War-torn Land

Feb 5, 2019 | Virginia Gewin, Revelator
View Original

In 2006 Alex Dehgan, then the newly hired Afghanistan country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was given a daunting task: to strengthen biodiversity conservation and create the first national parks in a country that had weathered three decades of war. His first assignment was getting field biologists safely from the capital, Kabul, to remote, treacherous terrain to determine whether enough wildlife still existed to even merit establishing protected areas. That was only the first in a long series of logistical and political hurdles to achieve the project’s goals.