U.S. House OKs funding for Afghan troop surge
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The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved the additional war funding bill that President Barack Obama requested for the military buildup in Afghanistan.
The new measure, once approved by both chambers, would raise the total funding for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade to one trillion dollars.
But the bill is believed unlikely to be signed into law by the president before the July 4 recess as it had hoped, because the bill will need to go to the Senate, which has gone into recess for a week and a half.
The House and the Senate must approve the bill with exactly the same language before it can go to the president for signature. And the House has made changes to some provisions by adding billions of non-military spending, so the bill must return to the Senate for another vote.
The changes that House Democratic leaders made to the bill made it harder to gain support from Republicans, who have been advocating for a "clean bill" with no unrelated domestic spending. So it is unclear whether the Senate Democrats can garner enough votes for the bill's passage.
Obama asked Congress in February for 33 billion dollars to pay for his troop surge in Afghanistan. That was on top of about 130 billion dollars that Congress already approved for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars through Sept. 30 of this year.
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