Not Exactly

 I looked this up awhile back and it's in one of my former posts, including the link to Wiki, but I have forgotten which post.  I could look it up again, but Uncle Ken would just refuse to acknowledge it, so I'll try to work from memory.

Afghanistan was a monarchy until about 1973 when the king was ousted by a military coup.  According to Wiki, the coup was soon overthrown by local commies.  Another source, I think it was National Geographic, says that the local commies were the coup, but that's an insignificant detail not worth arguing about.  At any rate, the local commie regime soon became unpopular and there was some kind of uprising against it, at which point the Russians came in allegedly to support their Afghan comrades.  I seem to remember that the local commie regime actually survived for a few years after the Russians left, which would mean that communism went down in Afghanistan about the same time that it went down in Russia, but I'm not sure about that.  At any rate, Afghanistan soon reverted to tribal feudalism until the Taliban knocked the warlords' heads together and made them play nice.  About five yeas later, we had 9-11 and I think we agree what happened after that.  

Back in the 19th Century, Russia and Britain fought with each other over Afghanistan, mostly because neither one wanted the other one to have it.  I believe Afghanistan eventually did lose some territory to the British, which they annexed to India, which was being ruled by them at the time.  After Indian independence, that part of India became Pakistan, and I don't think the lost territory was ever restored to Afghanistan.  Okay, I'm pretty sure that this information came from National Geographic, and I no longer have that issue in my possession, so you'll have to take my word for it, unless you want to check with my daughter in Charlevoix, who might still have it, unless she has passed it on to a local school, which is what she usually does with the National Geographics I give her when they start to pile up on her coffee table.

Speaking of run-on sentences, that one in the first paragraph of the second installment of the waitress story in a doozy.  I couldn't make any sense out of it at first, but I was able to sort it out after I read the rest of the installment.  I used to try avoid run-on sentences until I read one in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon that ran on for several pages.  I figured that, if it was good enough for such an esteemed author, it ought to be good enough for me.

I don't see anything wrong with military spending being the largest chunk of the federal budget, since national defense is the primary reason that governments were invented in the first place.  Like I said, though, I would rather see it being used to defend our own nation instead of everybody else's.