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WHEN you think of Afghanistan, you probably picture a place that is dusty, deadly and dun-coloured. Diversity of the biological kind tends not to spring to mind.

Images of khaki-coloured hills, dotted with rocky outcrops and the odd tree, serve news coverage well enough. But that is a sliver of the country鈥檚 rich landscape.

Where is the footage of the high mountain grasslands, glacier-fed lakes, pine forests and savannahs dotted with wild pistachios? The wildlife is equally spectacular. There are bears, deer, wild sheep and a dozen species of wild cat, including the iconic snow leopard. There are breeding populations of flamingos among the country鈥檚 big concentrations of waterfowl.

At least, there used to be. After nearly 40 years of conflict in the wake of the Soviet invasion, no one was really sure what was left.

Might wildlife have benefited from the social upheavals, the mass migrations of rural people, even the extensive minefields? Elsewhere, no-go areas produced by war have had just such an effect, while the demilitarised border area between North and South Korea teems with wildlife, as does the exclusion zone around the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.

If this were also the case in Afghanistan, conservationists in the US thought, then a system of national parks might be useful as part of the rebuilding programme there. The best locations might overlap with old royal hunting grounds, but no one knew for sure. Someone had to go and see.

That someone was Alex Dehgan, an Iranian-American with a passion for wildlife and a unique CV: a law degree, two stints working on environmental law in post-glasnost Russia, a PhD in lemur biology that took him to some of the more remote parts of Madagascar, and a spell at the US Department of State.

Dehgan鈥檚 brief, from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, was daunting: to start a conservation programme in the teeth of intermittent US government opposition. He had to start from scratch in an ancient, multilingual, multicultural society of extreme complexity in a country that was still a war zone, one with precious little functioning infrastructure.

In The Snow Leopard Project, Dehgan relates with relish how he, his partner and a small team of local experts got the project up and running in both Kabul and in some of the most remote and logistically challenging terrain on Earth. It involved survey teams working off-road for weeks, with only horses and yak for transport.

鈥淭here are bears, deer, wild sheep and a dozen species of wild cat, including the iconic snow leopard鈥�

Consequently, his accounts of that time are almost as interesting as his adventures with the wildlife, which turned out to still be diverse. Both aspects of the book are full of the rare and the unusual. We learn of golf courses cleared of mines and then grazed by sheep to make sure they are safe, of wine poured from teapots.

Dehgan recounts the story of a regional leader who rode for days on horseback to invite him to visit his homeland, and that of the Paghman stream salamander (Afghanodon mustersi), which only lives in cold, mountain water. He highlights the plight of large mammals in a country with many guns but few sources of income. Happily, he reports, snow leopards are coming back from the brink.

These are the sorts of experiences that drive many authors to bombast, but Dehgan has a nice line in wry factuality and studied carelessness. 鈥淒espite the mines, kidnappings, improvised explosive devices, bombings, dangerous aircraft, lack of infrastructure, and omnipresent military forces,鈥� he writes, 鈥淎fghanistan was by far the easiest place I had worked as a conservationist.鈥�

He goes on to explain that, in a country where the livelihoods of many people rely directly on the land, 鈥減rotecting the wildlife was an easy sell, because I was selling a stake in what it meant to be an Afghan鈥�.

The Snow Leopard Project is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary country. It is a source of inspiration at a time when the planet as a whole seems like a minefield for nature and natural splendour.