Spanish soldiers in Afghanistan have recently carried out an unusual mission: to distribute 5,000 copies of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, translated into Dari, to Afghan children in the province of Badghis.

The story about the young master of asteroid B-612 and his vain-yet-beloved rose might sound like an odd weapon in the UN-led war against terror. And certainly neither baobab trees, which threaten the rose, or The Geographer, too busy making maps to leave his desk, figure in the Spanish army's tactics manuals. But a passionate book collector, Fuencisla Gozalo, managed to convince the defence ministry to add this mission to the army's plans.

The idea was hatched when Gozalo, who possesses copies of The Little Prince in 200 languages, heard a sad story about an Afghan man, Ghulam Sakhi Ghairat, who translated the book to Dari, one of Afghanistan's two official languages, in 1977.

Nobody in Afghanistan wanted to buy his version of the asteroid voyager, and so the translator, now director of the Kabul School of Diplomacy, was forced to pack his copies of the novella into crates and store them in his home. His home was later bombed in the US-led invasion. The translator survived because he was in New York at the time, but the Dari copies of the story about the prince who meets a downed pilot in the desert and asks him to draw a sheep, were destroyed.

Gozalo was so moved by the loss she asked friends for donations to print Sakhi Gahairat's translation herself. Thirty friends contributed a total of €2,500 – enough to print 5,000 Dari copies of Saint-Exupery's work.

"No child had ever been able to read The Little Prince," she said. "Now they can. They can learn the values that the book teaches: honesty, loyalty, friendship."