On the night of December 24–25, 1979, the Soviet Army did something it had not done since 1945. The invasion of Afghanistan was the first military operation that the Soviet Union had conducted since the end of World War II designed to seize territory the Soviets had not controlled at the end of that conflict. While this move seemed in Washington to indicate a new period in Communist aggression, the perspective was significantly different in Moscow. Soviet leaders wanted to bolster a flailing regime in a country that bordered the Soviet Union and looked at this move as nothing more than a short-term, regional action in their backyard of no real importance to any other nation. They had no expectation that it would affect U.S.-Soviet relations or damage their Olympic party.

One of the bigger mysteries in history is who made the decision to invade Afghanistan. In 1989, Georgi Arbatov was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Political Issues and Negotiations of the Supreme Soviet Committee on International Affairs and had the job of preparing a report on the decision to intervene in Afghanistan. Even after conducting an official report, which condemned the invasion, Arbatov admitted that he had learned only “some” of the facts about the decision and remained uncertain about who was involved in committing the Soviet Union to the invasion.