Julian Weber is an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a graduate of Westpoint Military Academy with a degree in civil engineering. As U.S. involvement in Afghanistan comes to an end, Lt. Julian Weber finds himself involved in a terrorist attack by the Taliban, which claims his life. However, he quickly finds out that death is not always final as he is reincarnated into the body of a Baron's son and heir in an alternate Earth set in Late-Medieval Europe. In an era of political turmoil and civil strife, the Baron's young son is named Regent of the Barony of Kufstein and forced to contend with feudal powers. Will he be able to institute reforms leading his Barony into the age of industry? Or will he succumb to the pressure of his feudal overlords and a corrupt church that seek dominion overall?
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Afghan republic fell because societal values were incompatible with democracy and the country was simply ungovernable. This article traces the state’s collapse to the highly centralized political institutions imposed after the 2001 U.S. invasion. Instead of offering citizens an opportunity to oversee their government in a meaningful way, Kabul-centric institutions—holdovers from the country’s authoritarian past—undermined citizen trust in government. Flooded with vast amounts of foreign aid, the post-2001 system fostered corruption. After twenty years, Afghans were unwilling to fight for a distant government that did not treat them with dignity. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan ended on 15 August 2021. That afternoon, President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital city by helicopter to neighboring Uzbekistan. Just days earlier, he had sworn never to leave and said that he would die before abandoning his people. With Ghani gone, the Taliban offensive, which had captured dozens of provincial capitals in the preceding weeks, easily entered Kabul. Within hours, the insurgents sat comfortably at Ghani’s desk. Why did the Afghan republic collapse so completely and so quickly, spurring tens of thousands of desperate people to run to the Kabul airport in hopes of escaping the Taliban’s harsh rule and potential retribution? Conventional wisdom says that the U.S.-backed republic fell because the country’s government and society were hopelessly corrupt, and its values were incompatible with democracy. In other words, Afghanistan was ungovernable and would always be a lost cause for the outside world—a graveyard of empires.