A Fascinating Documentary Guide to Afghanistan—in 1973

This grainy black and white Echo Newsreel from the National Archives opens with a shot of the Khyber Pass. “To drive north through the sullen mountains is to journey backwards in time, to an isolated nation that has consistently ignored the approach of a 20th-century world,” the narrator begins. The ten-minute video, courtesy of the Internet Archive, gives a bleak overview of the history and politics of Afghanistan.