I didn’t say it worked out well for the Romano-Britons, but I think the Romans were satisfied enough, and the Saxons had a field day.
Which is actually a VERY similar parallel to what’s happening in Afghanistan, just on a more compressed time scale. The Taliban offensives started pretty much in parallel with the withdrawal of US troops, and by the point when Kabul was in jeopardy, there were as few as 650 troops in the country.
Since then in order to evacuate the embassy staff and dependents and certain Afghans, we’ve redeployed another 6500-ish troops (likely light infantry like 82nd Airborne, Marines, etc…) to protect the withdrawal. In Vietnam, I’m not sure we even deployed many ground troops to cover the evacuations- most of what we saw in the news footage and photographs are Vietnamese nationals trying to get evacuated, and ARVN helicopters getting pushed over the side, etc… Why? Because the ARVN utterly collapsed in the face of the NVA, and Saigon was falling. Nearly the same situation as in Afghanistan, just 46 years later.
The fundamental problem here is that the Afghan National Army hardly even offered token resistance to the Taliban, and everyone with any connection to the US is clamoring to get out now. The government and military have said that they dramatically overestimated the capabilities of the Afghan Army, and underestimated the Taliban, but I suspect it’s a lot more of the former than the latter; I have an unfounded suspicion that they thought the Afghans would stand and fight, and at least control some of the country when the dust settled- maybe around Kabul and the eastern part of the country.
The expectation was that the people who we’d trained and worked with would stay and run their own country, and that we wouldn’t have to evacuate thousands of them. But the Afghan Army folded like a lawn chair, and basically handed the country to the Taliban. Short of redeploying a whole lot of American troops to directly fight them and maintain control over parts of the country, there wasn’t much to be done when that happens- they sort of have to be on their own at some point.
Would it have been any different had it followed a Vietnam timeline, and we got all the troops out this month, and two years pass, THEN the Taliban crushes the Afghan Army and we end up with the exact same chaos in 2023 while trying to evacuate our embassy staff and dependents?
Perhaps the best example may be found in Month Python and the Holy Grail: “Run away!”
This was my first thought, but I don’t think South Korea was facing an insurgency at the time. However South Korea did learn to stand on their own two feet against a neighboring hostile regime. The US troops there are not going to make or break South Koreas ability to defend itself against the North.
Sadly, I think a good example was the USSR invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They invaded to put down a nationwide rebellion, and when they left the country was able to suppress the insurgency for a couple more decades.
Dunkirk May 27 to June 4, 1940 338,226 men escaped. 861 boats were used. It must have been organized chaos to get that many processed. Organization makes the difference in Dunkirk and what’s happening in Kabul.
There’s George Washington’s retreat from Brooklyn. The Brits didn’t even know he was leaving until he and his troops were gone.
Picking up my kid from college, end of his freshman year.
Palestine in 1948. The Jews and the Arabs were by then, more interested in preparing to fight each other.
From what I understand the French withdrawal from French Indochina (Vietnam) was one of the messiest withdrawals ever. In terms of French military units had to make their way to their own extraction zones since they had no safe passage permit from the VietMinh and there were reported hundreds of French soldiers left behind as a result. Which is why so many American Vietnam Works tend to have former French soldiers just hanging out well into 1970.
Preparing?
The moment the UN voted to end the Mandate in November 1947, a full-scale civil war broke out between the proto-Israelis and proto-Palestinians, with the Brits carefully averting their eyes and whistling to themselves while the two opposing parties were killing each other by the thousand. Sure, the British withdrawal was organized - for the British. It certainly wasn’t organized for the country.
The departure of British troops from the Irish Free State in 1922 was a civilised, orderly and cordial affair, despite the fact that we were in the middle of our civil war at the time.