In May 1985, two months after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he sent one of his cleverest generals to Kabul on an urgent, secret mission. The name of General Zaitsev is unlikely to be well known to today’s Nato commanders, but perhaps it should be. Back then he was the Red Army’s most senior military planner and logistics expert, and Gorbachev ordered him to provide an honest answer to the question: can the USSR win the war in Afghanistan? He returned to Moscow swiftly with a simple answer: no.
Zaitsev concluded that the only way the war could end on Soviet terms would be to seal Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and thereby prevent the movement of arms and “terrorists” from the mujahedin – the Army of God – into the country. At this point, the Soviets had already committed 100,000 troops; the leadership in the Kremlin was told that about a quarter of a million more would be required to trap the guerrillas inside the country.
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