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Comment by brsg | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was an interesting quote

A: Two thoughts. First, you can leave a foreign country behind in an orderly way. Ask the British Empire, which mostly ended its colonial occupations in an orderly way.

The interviewee says this as though it's common sense, but is it true? The examples that stick out to me are India, Israel/Palestine, and the South African colonies. Can these really be described as safe and orderly withdrawals? What are the examples of successful withdrawals? Are they really that much better than US withdrawal from Vietnam or Afghanistan?

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> What are the examples of successful withdrawals?

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean territories. Arguably Hong Kong.

You could also make a reasonable case for Egypt, Ghana, India/Pakistan... The withdrawal itself was peaceful and didn't leave the state in immediate civil war, even if it wasn't stable in the medium term.

I’d say the difference is that those territories were more or less “at peace”. The colonists had “won” the war, at least per some definition of winning.

Afghanistan was a barely held together mess even before we withdrew.

I’m not arguing one way or the other for Taiwan—I don’t want to go to war with China for all sorts of obvious reasons—but we would have the backing of the Taiwanese people, and that’s a major difference versus Afghanistan.

Withdrawal from Malaysia and Singapore went well.

> Canada, Australia

Ask the natives about it.

That's a non-sequitur. Did the British leave Canada & Australia in a peaceful state? As far as I know, there were no civil wars or disarray in those countries, whether ex British subjects or original stock of native populations.

Australian here.

Firstly, the monarch of England is still our head of state.

Secondly, the genocide was so thorough that there weren't enough indigenous inhabitants left (outside of those enslaved) to hold a war.

So yeah - after the British pulled out (except they didn't), we had peace between the living and the dead.

I think that's an altogether different question. The original question was if left governable? I think the answer is yes.

Did The Romans leave England governable when they pulled out? I think yes. Did the Romans do shit, sure, but that's not the question.

Pullout from Afghanistan regardless of military actions and who was killed was left Ungovernable. Australia it appears to me was left governable when they left.

The British left Jamaica probably with few Tainos, but the question isn't were Tainos treated fairly, was Jamaica governable by the new government when they left?

I agree with you that this looks like it has diverged into two separate questions.

But I think it is the view from the majority compared to the minority.

The majority see things as peaceful, quiet, fine. After the original slaughter, it was a peaceful federation of states (at a time where killing a native was 50/50 to come with any consequences) and no large scale civil wars.

The minority - the original inhabitants of this land - the war never stopped. Just changed in nature. Instead of outright killing, it was disenfranchisement/segregation, then blatant racism, now subtle/systemic racism. There is no peace.

And that can carry through generations. As the recent riots in the US show - which had similar sentiment here in Australia - even the killing on basis of race hasn't really stopped 100%.

Ask the minority, if the withdrawal was peaceful? YeahNah...

I'm not sure, but this longing for British rule and colonialism and the "good old days" sounds more and more like a dog whistle to me...

Maybe mc32 can enlighten us.

Where are you picking that up? That's your own making. nowhere were such things being thrown. The original question was was the place left governable, nothing more. You are giving the question with your own meaning.

Did the Soviet Union leave Cuba governable when they pulled out? Yes. The question isn't did the Soviets allow the Cubans to jail and kill dissenters. That would be a totally different question.

Not sure where this came from. I don't think anyone was even close to that.

> Did The Romans leave England governable when they pulled out? I think yes.

Would knowing that pretty much all trace of Roman rule, down to the material cultures and currency, completely vanished within a generation change your mind? Of all of the the Roman Empire, England saw the most severe, and most abrupt, fall in living conditions. And this is centuries before the Vikings wreaked yet more havoc on the region.

And, for what it's worth, while we don't know that much about what the remnant Breton polities looked like, the Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms that replaced them were a variety of small kingdoms that constantly jostled each other for power, until the Vikings destroyed several of them outright and the Wessex King Albert conquered the rest. That's pretty damn close to the notion of an array of warlords jostling for power that you seem to be categorizing as ungovernable.

> As far as I know, there were no civil wars or disarray in those countries

Sure helps to have wiped out any dissenters during the colonial period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Canada_Rebellion

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-grav...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buil...

That may be so. But was it governable when they left?

Whether or not we wiped out the masterminds of 9/11 or not, when we left Afghanistan, despite all the military activity up and till August 31, we left them in disarray. Most of the blame goes to the utterly corrupt and despised Ghani government but it’s quite clear we left it ungovernable.

The British Empire also left Afghanistan. And the US also left Japan and South Korea.

It depends on which data points you pick.

> And the US also left Japan and South Korea.

You don't leave the country when you have tens of thousands of military troops still on land with major military equipment stationed there. The US never left Japan and certainly never left Germany.

Given what it costs to station troops outside the country (including an aircraft carrier with its air wing), there has to be a strong reason to keep them there for 70+ years. And it's not because we needed to maintain an occupying force [0] - it was to have bases with pre-positioned equipment near likely foes where troops could be quickly sent and move-out.

The REFORGER exercises [1] went on for nearly 30 years, testing the ability to rapidly move troops to Germany in the event of a Soviet attack. Not only was this expensive in monetary terms, it was expensive in human lives - each year people died from various causes associated with being around heavy equipment. Such as sleeping under vehicles that would roll over them in the night. Or crossing rail lines with their antenna still up and getting electrocuted.

The US didn't do this for any imperial reasons. It was to keep commitments made to those governments in the post-war years.

[0] Disclaimers: Dad crossed into Germany at the Remagen bridge before it fell, and I was stationed in Germany during the Cold War.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Reforger

> The US didn't do this for any imperial reasons

I'm not even claiming that. The US has clear strategic reasons to be positioned in many places around the world (like at Okinawa, for example). And Japanese people, despite wanting these troops out, are not going to see them leave anytime soon. So Japan has about no say in it.

> The US never left Japan and certainly never left Germany.

It left the the running of their governments. The US military is/was not needed to keep order and prevent a collapse of civil society in either of those two countries. Contra Afghanistan.

Egypt? The British left in June 1956 and immediately tried to invade their way back in, October 1956. There is a reason that for a generation, "Suez" was a trigger for humiliation.

India/Pakistan? Do you mean the event that caused the death of somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people? And the displacement of another 10-20 million people? That was much, much more catastrophic than what just happened in Afghanistan.

Ghana did have a somewhat smoother path to independence than either of those.

Canada, Australia and New Zealand were always a separate category: settler colonies where the new arrivals almost completely displaced the natives. Ireland shows the difficulty when you try and send settlers but don't genocide the natives first.

Also its a pretty slow process for canada. Depending on your definition, canada became independent in 1867, 1982 or somewhere in between.

A withdrawl over 115 years is a very slow withdrawl.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Russia leaving the former soviet constituent countries in Europe (e.g. Ukraine) and Central Asia (e.g. Kazakistan) turned out OK in the end, tension didn't flare up until this decade.

>>India/Pakistan... The withdrawal itself was peaceful and didn't leave the state in immediate civil war, even if it wasn't stable in the medium term.

The partition of India was a very bloody event in History. The mess left behind by British, doesn't just include partition, it also includes the Kashmir problem over which wars have happened till date.

Not to mention the horrible economic and social conditions that British left behind in the then Indian subcontinent.

* India: the Partition led to massive loss of life, displacement in the tens of millions, traumatized communities, and deadly polarization between peoples to this day.

* Palestine: the end of the Mandate and the 1947-1949 Palestine war saw largescale displacement, loss of life, and (as is obvious to everyone) once again a deadly and unshakeable polarization between peoples that persists to this day.

On the one hand, it is certainly true that the British did not intend for these consequences, but on the other, the British were fully in charge as the sovereign government of India and Mandatory Palestine (unlike the US in Vietnam or even Afghanistan) - in particular having ruled India for over three centuries by the time they left - and so more deserving of blame.

The intention was there - according to Pakenham's "The Scramble for Africa" the idea was that prior to independence you educate a generation of civil servants who will then run the country along essentially British lines. I'd argue this worked well in India, largely though because Indians were already running the country in most important particulars. In Africa less so because independence movements gained unstoppable momentum which preempted such planning, plus many of those countries had been colonies for decades rather than centuries.

> civil servants who will then run the country along essentially British lines

While this may mean structural continuity, I can’t help but feel this is also a bad outcome - it’s just a continuation of imperialist force/cultural projection.

I won't say that a working electoral / parliamentary / judicial system, civil engineering, medicine, etc left intact is a bad outcome. It's a much better outcome than a civil war.

With some exceptions, there were no comparable systems in native cultures; those that existed (some definitely did) often were not capable to keep together a country, even if they worked well on tribal level, or were scalable but belligerent by design.

I also don't think that cultural projection, to a degree, is not a bad thing. It happens constantly, and allows for cultural cross-pollination. It is, of course, best done in peaceful ways.

> the idea was that prior to independence you educate a generation of civil servants who will then run the country along essentially British lines. I'd argue this worked well in India…

I certainly wouldn’t draw that conclusion. Immediately after the British left Nehru adopted 5 year plans based on the soviet model. Nehru and Stalin didn’t get along because he was still too Britain-friendly for Stalin, but India and The USSR developed very close relations within a very short period of time.

Some elements of India’s governance structure were distinctively non-Soviet, like having a multiparty democracy. But if you look at the way the country was run, it was done in the style of soviet central planning, most certainly not along British lines.

I don't want to speak well of the USSR/Russia but it's not hard to make an argument that they left Eastern Europe in an orderly way... well at the end. Honestly between Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and others there were some bad times in the there.

> I don't want to speak well of the USSR/Russia

Why?

The multiple genocides and general suppression of human rights?

Would you add a similar disclaimer before pointing something positive about the U.S. because they’ve done some bad shit too, like, I dunno, being the only nation to actually nuke another?

Gorbachov left the Eastern Block in relative peace I would say. Afghanistan of course was an exception.

Wasn't the Soviet Union pretty much done with Afghanistan when Gorbachov took over in 1985?

Czechoslovakia and Romania made attempts at leaving peacefully and that didn't go so well. Though yes, in the end it was "fine".

Worth noting that there was no Russian presence in Romania at the fall of communism back in '89. Russian military withdrew peacefully starting in '58 through early 60s.

Decisions taken by British still haunt India to this date. Especially their division of states.

Australia and New Zealand would probably be considered successful withdrawals? Canada?

Less so the colonies that became the US, I guess.

I'd argue that the Soviet withdrawls from Eastern Europe went pretty well. Safe, orderly, no real bloodshed.

The Soviets militarily occupied Eastern Europe, but they never really colonized it to a significant extent.

The Baltics would disagree. Think of all the problems for the elderly retired Russian speaking people that stayed behind.

The Baltic states were part of the USSR, unlike Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria etc.

And the US was once part of the UK, which doesn't mean the latter didn't colonise the former.

Pedantically, I don't think the US was ever part of the UK. The UK ultimately had sovereignty, but that's not the same thing. Even now the United Kingdom's former colonies are not part of the UK: it "has sovereignty over 17 territories which do not form part of the United Kingdom itself: 14 British Overseas Territories and three Crown dependencies.¹

But that's kind of the same point that I didn't articulate. A colony is not part of the country that is ruling it. The Baltic states were part of the Russian Empire, independent between the wars, and then reincorporated into the USSR. They weren't "militarily occupied", they were part fully incorporated. When someone says "militarily occupied Eastern Europe", I'd only assume they meant the countries that were "behind the iron curtain" but de jure independent, like Poland or Romania.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#:~:text=The%20U...

In that case, a better example would be Ireland, which was incorporated fully into the UK with the Act of Union, and was colonised. Another example would be Algeria, which was a French department.

Technically the UK (and Spain and France) conquered and colonized several native American nations, almost wiping them out. The US didn't even exist as a separate nation state until 1776.

The Soviet withdrawal was a bit different since the Union was actively falling apart and the occupied territories were pushing for independence. It wasn't all that smooth either - Georgian civil war and the first Nagorno-Karabakh War directly resulted from USSR's dissolution.

Yeah I did intentionally scope it to Eastern Europe. The caucuses and central asia did not go so well.

> What are the examples of successful withdrawals?

Australia or Canada, perhaps.

Those are settler colonies, a completely different kettle of fish. From the point of view of the (majority) settler population, they gradually ceased to consider themselves as British and underwent a multi-step disentanglement of legal and constitutional connections to the UK beginning almost a century ago but still ongoing. From the point of the (minority) indigenous populations, well I'm sure it varies but they may not agree that a withdrawal has occurred...

It still strikes me as a bit weird that Canada did not have its own constitution, as in technically completely independent of the British Parliament, until 1982.

And technically the head of state is…well it’s complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_General_of_Canada

Yeah, similar stories and timeline in other former dominions. I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_v_Hill fascinating, when a court in Australia was forced to consider whether the UK was a foreign power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Divorce

Yeah this statement kinda discredits everything he says. The world is littered with countries that exist only because some existing adjacent kingdoms happened to both be colonized by the British, and they merged them into one colony. Countries fell apart after they left because there was no shared national identity to begin with.

> Ask the British Empire, which mostly ended its colonial occupations in an orderly way.

Oh, like the independence of the US did go like a major peaceful operation. And yes the US used to be a british colony, in case people forgot.

The withdrawl from India was safe (for the British, let's ignore the partition bloodshed) and didn't lead to immediate regime collapse... so I certainly don't think it went as badly as Afghanistan or Vietnam.

No let’s not ignore the loss of over 1 million lives. Borders are still contested, with several wars having been fought, the scale of the disaster dwarfs Vietnam.

I personally don't think those withdrawals are truly orderly. Let's take India - leaving aside the partition of India (which is a huge matter in itself), a big crime is that the country that was left behind by the British did not resemble its historical culture or way of governance. It was instead turned into a secular nation, which just means defaulting to a status quo of colonial Western values. Ironically the partitioned areas (like the Islamic Republic of Pakistan) were not secular, but Hindus no longer had a land to practice a life that was fully dictated by their principles and their principles alone - instead they would live by rules and structures the British left behind. India also retained a lot of colonial structures outside of its government. For example the British education system continued, meaning that Indian children were taught out of Western-controlled/sourced materials that glossed over the horrors of British rule. Those children were also not taught the cultural things they would have learned in a pre-colonial era. This pattern isn't unique to India, but I wanted to call it out as an example of how seemingly peaceful withdrawals still result in long-lasting damage to a people and their culture. Is that peace? Maybe in the most literal sense. But it's not the same as making that place whole.

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