Journeys in the Hinterlands of Afghanistan

Journeys in the Hinterlands of Afghanistan

Golden Years of Wildlife Conservation

1971-1978

Khushal Habibi and Ronald Petocz

Journeys in the Hinterlands of Afghanistan

Khushal Habibi and Ronald Petocz

Copyright 2011 Khushal Habibi

Published at Smashwords

Acknowledgements

We owe our sincere thanks to many people who helped, guided, facilitated or otherwise inspired us during our time in Afghanistan and also to those who in one way or another are really a part of this book. Many of these friends and colleagues are now deceased but they are very much alive in our memories and thoughts. People are presented in their former positions in the 1970s as we then knew them. Tony Long, our first traveling companion, and Kazim Ali Kombari, our assistant and traveling companion of many years; Abdul Wahab Tarzi, president of the Afghan Tourist Organization; Ali M. Sultani, vice-president of the Afghan Tourist Organization; H.R.H Prince Sultan Mahmoud Ghazi, president of Civil Aviation and Tourism of Afghanistan; Dr. Tony Faymann, ILO Tourism Specialist and advisor to the Afghan Tourist Organization; Nematullah, our friend among the Wakhis of the Big Pamir; the Commissioner of Ishkashem; directors of CARE-Medico, Kabul; Courtney Siceloff, Peace Corps coordinator in Afghanistan and his wife, Elizabeth; Christoper Savage, World Wildlife Fund pheasant specialist; John Blower, Consultant, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Dr. George Petrides, Consultant and Professor, Michigan State University; Dr. Clas Naumann and Dr. Gunter Nogge, Professor, Biological Sciences Department, University of Kabul; David Scott, FAO Representative in Kabul; Robert Borthwick, UNDP Resident Representative, Kabul; Amir Gran, director of Afghan Tour and his wonderful staff who assisted us in the field; Khan Haji Rahman Qul, leader of the Kirghiz people in the Pamir; Mohammed Ayub, Kirghiz guide and friend; Abdul Haq, caretaker, Ajar Valley Wildlife Reserve; Ghulam Nabi Nuristani, guide; Engineer Sayed Aqa Anam, director, Department of Forests and Range, Ministry of Agriculture, and his staff; our friends Dr. Louis Dupree, Professor, American University Field Staff and Nancy Hatch Dupree, scholar and author; H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh, president WWF; Dr. Fritz Vollmar, director WWF; Guy Mountford, conservationist and author; Dr. Phil Kahl, flamingo specialist; Dr. George Archibald, director, International Crane Foundation; Ronald Sauey, International Crane Foundation; Dr. Gilbert Child, former director, Technical Division, Forestry Department, FAO, Rome; Hans Robbel, M. Moyeau and J. Bryce, project operations officers, Forestry Department, FAO, Rome; Jan Sweitering, UNDP Programme Officer, Kabul; Dr. Fred Harrington, wildlife advisor and pilot, Department of Environment, Tehran; Dr. Derek Scott, ornithologist; Dr. Max Klimberg, ethnographer and art historian; Theodore L. Eliot, United States Ambassador to Afghanistan; Joel Scarborough, Asia Foundation Representative, Kabul; Ahmaduddin Laghmani, guide, Afghan Tour.

A special thanks to the staff and friends of our UNDP/FAO project who participated in many of our surveys and field studies during the mid-late 1970s: Drs. Willem Rodenburg, Dr. Terje Skogland, Dr. Christopher Shank, John Y. Larsson, Abdul Jamil, Abdul Wassey, Abdul Rahim Sekandari, Naziffulah Komak, Torpekai Gardezai, Abdul Ghani, Abdul Nabi, and Abdul Wudud.

There are many other people in Afghanistan, far too many to thank individually for their hospitality, assistance in the field and help along the way. To all of you, besyar tashakur.

We would also like to recognize and thank the organizations which supported our work over the years: Civil Aviation and Tourism Authority, Kabul; Afghan Tourist Organization, Kabul; Department of Forests and Range, Ministry of Agriculture, Kabul; World Wildlife Fund, Morges (World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland); International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, IUCN, Morges (World Conservation Union, Gland); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO, Rome and Kabul; United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, Kabul.

We thank Parthamina Habibi for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this book. Our special thanks are reserved for Dr. John King, professor emeritus, Michigan State University, whose suggestions and comments led to much improvement of the manuscript.

We also wish to thank Ahmad Khalid Amini, Project Coordinator and Sayed Faheem Eqbali, Training Assistant, GIS Services, Afghanistan Information Management Services (AIMS) in Kabul for producing the location, physiographic and Wakhan maps that appear in this book. Our special thanks to Arnab Roy, artist, for the fine drawings of wildlife that have added so much to the presentation.

We wish to single out our sincere thanks to Carla Grissmann, author, editor and dear friend, who not only reviewed and edited all our field and FAO reports during those years in Kabul, but has meticulously edited and commented on the first and final drafts of this book—thank you, Carla Jan.

Map of Afghanistan showing the routes we travelled during our trips from 1971 to 1978.

Preface

The 1970s were auspicious years in our lives as we were able to travel to some of the most isolated parts of the country and experience the exhilarating closeness of Afghanistan's wildlife. Our keen mutual interest in wildlife conservation and the urge to explore the mountains of Afghanistan formed the start to our adventures and secured our bond of friendship over the years. We traveled to some of the remotest parts of the country several times over and became well-acquainted with the land and its people as our reconnaissance journeys grew bolder and our careful observations expanded to cover conservation targets as diverse as Marco Polo sheep in the Pamirs and the world’s highest breeding places of greater flamingos in the saddle of the Koh-e Baba range. Our journeys were well-documented as we recorded our travels in thousands of color slides and black-and-white photographs. Our scope of work increased over time and with the growing interest and involvement of government agencies, we were commissioned to undertake biological and ecological surveys in different parts of the country to assess which areas merited protection as nature conservation areas and national parks.

In 1978, violent political turmoil brought abrupt changes, making it all but impossible to return to Afghanistan to continue our work in the dangerous atmosphere that prevailed over the countryside. Afghanistan was little known and of less concern to the western world at the time, but as tensions mounted, the country became a focal point for international politicians and the world media. Newspaper articles about the Afghan conflict began to appear in the press almost on a daily basis; books were written focused on the warfare and suffering which the Soviet invasion brought. With the departure of the Soviet army, civil war between different factions continued for another decade and the country became a forgotten story once again, an object of international intrigue and manipulation that has continued to this day.

In time the number of color slides and black-and-white photographs taken in the field increased to some ten thousand which upon leaving the country were left in safe storage in New Jersey for years. In the 1990s we met in the United States during a short visit and began reviewing the many color slides so long in storage and the idea for a book began to germinate. Afghanistan was our home during those golden years and we still carry those fond memories of adventure, friends and privileged travel close to heart. Although separated by continents and oceans, we began to slowly write about our experiences, coming together from time to time to examine thousands of photographs and edit text that we had both written from our notes and memories that were unique to each of us. It's been a long haul but we pressed on devoting time and effort to the undertaking between our busy professional schedules and other commitments. We wanted to share our experience, offer a glimpse of the many wonders of this incredibly beautiful, diverse and special country in a small selection of our photographs. For a long time we've wanted to tell another side of Afghanistan's story, not of the misery of the war, which portrays the country as an unruly tribal people in constant conflict, but of the awesome beauty of its imposing mountains and pristine valleys, where wild sheep and goats live in the remote hinterlands and eagles soar freely riding thermal currents in search of prey, and where melting glaciers generate torrential glacial streams forming the rivers that bring life to the country.

This book is a personal testimony, a narrative of the land, its wildlife, its people and our travels in Afghanistan over an eight-year period between 1971 and 1978. We have included excerpts from the writings of historians, observations of famous travelers, and the journals of adventurers and pilgrims of centuries past.

Our experiences reflect times of peace, when it was possible to explore the deepest reaches of the mountains, deserts and wetlands without fear of being maimed by mines, when battle lines had not been drawn among ethnic groups, and when fratricidal warfare was not the order of the day. We hope that it demonstrates our gratitude to so many people who gave us encouragement and assistance through all those wonderful years. Afghanistan was our home for so long and it changed our lives forever. We fervently hope that with this book readers may better appreciate some of the many wonders of this fascinating and enduring country that, enshallah, may one day be at peace again.

Khushal Habibi, Clarksville, Maryland

Ronald Petocz Manila, Philippines

Introduction

Unpredictable incidents in life sometime change one's destiny. This certainly happened on a sunny spring day in 1971 when we first met in the corridor of the Faculty of Science of Kabul University. Ron aged 29, arrived in Kabul driving an old VW mini-van bought from a housepainter in Amsterdam and self-funded, with the goal to study the legendary markhor in the forests of Nuristan in eastern Afghanistan. He was looking for an interpreter and the German faculty members suggested Khushal Habibi, aged 25. Although born and raised in different cultures, we shared a mutual love for the wilderness and an earnest resolve to embark on a sojourn full of unknown potential. We immediately felt at ease with each other and started to make preparations for the journey together with Ron's colleague, Tony Long, a free-lance nature writer.

Ron had recently finished three years of post-doctoral research on bighorn sheep and mountain goats in Banff National Park in Canada on a fellowship grant from the Environmental Sciences Centre (ESC), University of Calgary working under Dr. Valerius Geist, the foremost wild sheep biologist in North America. Ron had come to Canada after finishing his PhD at the University of Alaska in Geology and Paleontology, entered a new research field in Wild Ungulate Ecology and Behavior in Canada, and was really undecided about what to do in the future, but knew he wanted to travel and see some of the world before settling down to a permanent job. Just after completing his research, a friend offered him a job for the summer as a crew member on a small four-man commercial boat based on Kodiak Island seine fishing for salmon off the coast of Katmai National Park in Alaska. The money he made fishing set him up for his travels, but before leaving for Europe, his director at ESC, Dr. J.B. Cragg, encouraged him to have a goal at the end of his travels, knowing that after months of travel Ron would need something concrete to look forward to. Ron then wrote a short proposal to work on markhor in Nuristan as it sounded like another interesting venture where he could apply his newly learned research skills; he received the recommendations of Drs. Cragg and Geist and took a flight to London just before Christmas 1970.

While there he looked up Tony Long, a free-lance writer who had used some of Ron’s work on bighorn sheep in a forthcoming book. Tony asked if he could later join Ron for the markhor project in Afghanistan. Tony had become bored rewriting other peoples’ work for popular publications and was anxious to experience a bit of the wild himself.

Ron left London for Amsterdam, bought an aging VW van and fixed it up as a traveling caravan and spent a few months driving through Europe, camping in his van and staying at youth hostels. Ron met people at WWF/IUCN Headquarters in Morges, Switzerland, and the technical director of FAO’s Forestry Department in Rome who knew Dr. Cragg well and gave additional written endorsements to the Afghan authorities to support Ron’s research proposal. Months later, Ron and Tony met in Athens and traveled overland together picking up a young British actor who happened to be hitchhiking in Yugoslavia and continuing across Turkey and Iran in somewhat of the hippy-world-traveler traditions of the day, quite an adventure in itself. Arriving in Kabul, Ron presented his papers to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but was told it would take two to three months to review and assess his proposals. That was indeed a disappointment but Tony decided to stay on in Kabul to enjoy some tourist travel in Afghanistan; Ron and Mike (the actor) headed for Nepal carrying rucksacks and traveling by local transport, they made it to Everest and visited base camp where one of Ron’s friends was climbing on the international expedition then in progress.

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, is a bustling metropolis surrounded by the Koh-e Baba mountains. The history of Kabul dates back some 3000 years during the time of the Median empire before being conquered by the Achaemenid empire. It was the center of Zoroastrianism followed by Buddhism and later Hinduism before the advent of Islam. In the Rig Veda (Vedic Sanskrit hymns) it has been mentioned as an ideal city, a vision of paradise set in the mountains. Local architecture has not changed over the eons with flat-roof mud houses making up the majority of the population.

Back in Kabul after two months on the road they found that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had approved their plans for Nuristan, but it was necessary to secure travel permits from the Ministry of Interior. At that point, Ron realized they needed an Afghan traveling companion, so he went to the University of Kabul to see if they could find a willing, competent student to accompany them. He found Khushal Habibi.

Khushal had been a roving student since he was in high school and had traveled over most of Afghanistan’s mountains and deserts, visiting some of the remotest corners in buses and lorries and at times on his motorcycle. He had tasted the cantaloupe-size water melons of the northern plains of Dasht-e Laile, after a harsh waterless ride in the back of a Russian Gaz lorry; had seen dora bazi (a form of horse racing in which each rider whips his opponent) played in its most rustic form on the desolate plain of Chakcharan; met boars in the Hari Rud valley, swum in the supple water of the Konar River and made a resolution to climb the Paghman mountain visible from his hospital bed while recovering from appendicitis surgery and to touch the snow-clad peak. His first taste of nature was a hike through the hills of Bamiyan in the middle of the night to find the lakes of Band-e Amir. After traveling in moonlight most of the night with two classmates from the technical school he was attending he was mesmerized to see the deep blue waters of the lake at the break of dawn. As the three young travelers sat on the cliff overlooking the lake its color changed from dark to an azure blue in a matter of minutes, and the face of the lake mirrored tranquility as the sun rose into the valley. This experience instilled in him a deep love for nature and an urge to study biology rather than pursue a career in engineering. After graduating from high school he worked for the Kabul Times, traveling whenever the opportunity arose and then joined the Faculty of Science of Kabul University to follow studies in biological sciences. Meeting Ron created an opportunity to observe and study wildlife not just from the confines of the classroom, but in the natural settings of their ecosystem and to experience the hardships of traveling to their habitats, interacting with them and learning about the complexities of nature.

Ron and Tony had been staying in a small tourist hotel in Kabul’s Shar-e Naw district, the haunt of hippies and world travelers, cheap accommodations, a great bazaar, good local food and plenty of entertainment. A young man, barely into his 20s, Kazim Ali Kamberi, was employed at the hotel as a waiter and houseboy having left his home in a remote village in Ghazni province some years earlier to try to eke out a living in the city. He never really mentioned his parents, but had an uncle who lived in Karte Sakhi, one of the Hazara districts of Kabul. He invited Ron and Tony to meet his relatives on his single free day of the week. His uncle was a small-time carpet dealer, and we were welcomed and dined by the family. Kazim, a happy-go-lucky lad, spoke English quite well, self-taught and well-practiced with tourists, and as it neared time for us to leave Kabul, we asked if he would join us to do the cooking and to care for the camp as we knew he hated working for his employer who treated him poorly. He immediately quit his job, and we all moved to another hotel for our remaining days in the city. It was a good move for him and us, as Kazim became a willing travel companion, an acceptable cook and quite resourceful and street smart. Over the years, his keen eyes would be able to spot game just as well, if not better than Ron, and we were good friends in no time at all.

After some days of preparation we secured a travel permit from the government and set off in the VW van for Nuristan. The road into Nuristan soon turned into a sea of mud, and we were forced to turn back. Ron then decided to visit the office of the Afghan Tourist Organization to see how we might salvage the expedition and to seek their advice for an alternate site. He met with Ali Sultani, the friendly vice-president of the ATO, who subsequently arranged a meeting with Sultan Mahmoud Ghazi, the president of Civil Aviation and Tourism, who was well traveled in the country with a known appreciation for Afghanistan's wildlife. Ron showed Messrs Ghazi and Sultani some fine black-and-white photographs of his work on bighorn sheep and mountain goats which led them to suggest that we try for the Pamirs and a study of the famous Marco Polo sheep and Siberian ibex that inhabited this remote area of the country. The ATO had a tourist hunting program for Marco Polo sheep in the Big Pamir which had been ongoing for several years and our work there could benefit their program. And so it was agreed.

The high Pamirs are located in the Wakhan Corridor, a restricted travel area as it bordered the former Soviet Union, China and Pakistan and we needed to secure clearance from Afghan authorities before any travel could be undertaken. Undaunted, we composed a polite letter to the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Rawan Farhadi, and Ron secured a few minutes at the end of a day to meet him. Ron presented the letter to Dr. Farhadi, which was quickly read, with his answer, a flat refusal. As Ron was leaving his office, the deputy minister just happened to ask who would have accompanied him on the expedition. Ron mentioned Khushal Habibi, and the minister told him to sit down again. Khushal’s father was an academic, the foremost historian in the country at the time, and a colleague of Dr. Farhadi, himself an academic. Knowing the family well, he authorized our travel without hesitation. That was surely fortuitous! It was the key that unlocked the beginning of our journeys together in Afghanistan and opened the door to a close friendship we have continued to share throughout our lives.

Traveling through the remote valleys of Badakshan we encountered verdant fields, rivers, strenuous passes and high mountain peaks covered with hazy clouds adding excitement to our adventures in the hinterlands.

Over the years, our journeys into the hinterland were often to remote parts of the country, close to international borders, and we had to obtain special travel permission from the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Interior every time we traveled. The difficulty of obtaining travel documents decreased when the officials at both ministries came to know us better and realized that we were serious professionals who contributed to conservation development and were not just out for a joy ride. Money, however, remained a major constraint during the first year of our travels as we were self-funded and our available resources were limited. Our financial woes were exacerbated by an overloaded VW van which had neither the capability of traveling well on Afghan roads nor was designed for such a purpose. Being our sole means of transport on this first ambitious trip to the Pamirs, we prepared the VW the best we could, with an iron plate welded under the oil pan; we tuned up the engine until it purred and bought plenty of spare parts and extra tubes and tires. We put that vehicle to unrivaled tests until it finally broke down in the beautiful setting of Ishkashem, at the entrance to the Wakhan Corridor. That's a story in itself which will be told in a following chapter.

In many respects, we were lucky to survive our first trip together into the Pamirs, complicated as it was by financial woes and our inexperience of the land and its people. But soon our fortune began to change. The report of our findings in the Pamirs resulted in Ron being contracted as wildlife advisor to the Afghan Tourist Organization for the truly princely sum at that time of $100 per month (ministers and governors earned $100 a month), a position he held for some three years. During that time, we worked together often on reconnaissance wildlife surveys all over the country, accompanied by guides and personnel of Afghan Tour, the arm of ATO directly engaged with tourists. Throughout this time Kazim Ali continued to work with us, but we lost track of Tony Long soon after we completed our first trip to the Pamirs.

Afghanistan has always been rich in wildlife resources, but when we began to lay the foundations of wildlife conservation development there was little knowledge of the subject. The initial focus of our reconnaissance studies was to gather information on the distribution and ecology of the five species of Caprini (wild sheep and goats) that inhabit the mountains in different parts of the country. Our aim was to assess the wildlife in their remote natural habitats, study the relationships of nearby local peoples to the environment and gather as much scientific data as possible. All this was used in our efforts to convince the Afghan government and international agencies to make a serious long-term commitment to conservation development and among other things, to conserve targeted wildlife species and their habitat so that local people in these areas could directly benefit from sharing revenues derived from sustainable utilization of their wildlife through tourism and hunting programs.

Throughout this time, Ron kept in constant contact with people at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and International Union for the Conservation