Weekly Video Picks

Afghanistan Revealed (2001)

The Afghan countryside we encounter on TV is so alien to Western eyes, that it might as well be another planet. The punishing terrain, strange customs and shifting tribal alliances appear impossibly bewildering. Afghanistan Revealed, a 60-minute National Geographic documentary, sheds light on the people and history of this distant place. Best-selling novelist Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm) takes us on his personal odyssey through the part of the country that was controlled by the Northern Alliance during the year before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The movie's central figure is the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban, Tajik resistance leader who was assassinated two days before the World Trade Center bombings. His warnings about the global consequences of the struggle in which he was engaged now sound prophetic. There are also interviews with Taliban soldiers who've been captured. We see firsthand the misery caused by their repressive policies and the more than 20 years of continuous warfare. Women and children seem to have suffered the most.

Khartoum (1966)

Osama bin Laden isn't the first Muslim fanatic to believe he was chosen by Allah to defeat the West. In 1883 the self-proclaimed Mahdi, or “chosen one,” emerged from the deserts of Sudan to wage a holy war against Christianity and the British Empire.

Eighty thousand of his warriors massacred more than 8,000 British and Egyptian troops. Khartoum, directed by Basil Dearden, is a big-budget spectacle in the style of Lawrence of Arabia that dramatizes the doomed mission of Gen. Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston) to make peace with the Mahdi (Laurence Olivier).

The British military hero is a courageous, practicing Christian who had previously ended slavery in the region.

“I don't ask you to be unafraid,” Gordon says to those besieged by the Islamic warriors, “only to act unafraid.”

He assumes his previous accomplishments will win over the local populace, but dies in a clash of civilizations that seems to be repeating itself today.

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