Clinton says Afghan surge cost to be in U.S. budget

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will include the cost of the military surge in Afghanistan as part of its budget request next year, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday.

Rolling the added expense into the regular U.S. government budget instead of an emergency funding request might be an easier way for the administration to get Congress to approve more money for Obama's expansion of the increasingly unpopular war.

But some key lawmakers have said the Obama administration will have to make an emergency funding request in the form of a "supplemental" spending bill to cover the additional cost, thus forcing lawmakers to vote directly on whether to pay for the Afghan troop buildup.

Obama earlier this month announced plans to rush 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year to join the roughly 68,000 already there fighting a war that began in 2001.

"It's going to be in the budget," Clinton told reporters as she left a briefing with members of the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill. "The president is committed to making it fully accounted for."

The administration is not expected to make its next budget request until early next year, probably February, and the money might not be approved until months later. The coming budget request will be for fiscal 2011, which starts on October 1, 2010.

Clinton said she did not know how much the Afghan surge would cost.

Pentagon officials have estimated the Afghan surge would cost $30 billion to $35 billion. Pentagon officials have suggested they would likely need an emergency supplemental to pay for it, on top of $130 billion authorized for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the fiscal year that began on October 1.

Representative John Murtha, chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee with authority over the Pentagon's budget, said earlier this month Congress would have to approve a war funding bill of at least $40 billion in the coming months, to pay for Obama's troop hike in Afghanistan.

In the Senate, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, also said he expected the administration would have to request emergency funding for more troops.

Congress is considered unlikely to block funding for the troop surge, even though many of Obama's fellow Democrats -- Murtha and Levin among them -- are skeptical of the escalation. But lawmakers could try to tie conditions to the money, such as adding specific timetables for withdrawing troops.

Former President George W. Bush was widely criticized for using repeated "emergency" war supplemental requests to fund the years-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama pledged to put an end to the practice.

(Editing by Sue Pleming and Bill Trott)