Mark Cocker

Mission improbable

A dangerous mission in Afghanistan

Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him in postwar Baghdad, he had spent the early part of the century searching for Iraqi scientists who had previously worked on weapons’ manufacture for Saddam Hussein. Presumably the life-threatening risks entailed in that role were insufficient, because he then allowed himself to be headhunted for fresh challenges in Afghanistan.

Not only was the new post more dangerous, even on paper its goals looked to border on madness. Dehgan’s brief, scripted by the New York Zoological Society and funded by the United States Agency for International Development, was to design and set up from scratch a conservation infrastructure in one of the most mountainous, least accessible countries on Earth.

He was tasked with identifying, gazetting and constructing administrative plans for a network of national parks and wildlife reserves in a state where none had previously existed. All of this would have been difficult in a region blighted merely by poverty, debt and corruption. In one that has known nothing but chaos and conflict for 40 years it was mission impossible.

For these reasons the reader is half expecting Dehgan to be a camo-wearing, cigar-chewing action figure, in the manner of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but perhaps with binoculars around his neck. In fact he is of Iranian descent, has a doctorate in the ecology of Madagascan lemurs, speaks Farsi and comes across as mildness personified, is adept at inter-agency diplomacy and has the skills of a top bureaucrat.

In confirmation his text is peppered throughout with a bewildering array of organisational acronyms, of which I counted 37. Those beginning with the letter I alone — the ICS (Iranian Cheetah Society), ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) and IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) — along with the ubiquitous IEDs (improvised explosive devices) give you a sense of the book’s capacity for confusion, but also of the rather strange conflation of themes of which it is compounded.

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