The CRS reported that it now costs the United States about $3.6 billion per month, on average, or more than $43 billion a year. The CRS also reported that it costs about $1 million to send a U.S. soldier to Afghanistan for 1 year. So, if President Obama listens to the advice he is getting from some of those around him and if he sends 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, the war will cost another $40 billion a year, or nearly double.

Yet what have we been getting, I ask you, Madam Speaker, for all of that money? The answer is: Higher casualty rates, a growing insurgency and an Afghan public that increasingly sees America as an occupier, not as a liberator.

This is the result of a fatal flaw in our Afghan policy since the war began. We have relied far too much on the military option alone while, at the same time, putting very few dollars into what would really work in Afghanistan. Instead, what would work is better intelligence and better policing to disrupt terrorist networks; better governance, justice systems, economic development, and humanitarian aid. The Afghan people desperately need all of these to have hope for a better future and to have reasons to reject violent extremism.

The supplemental funding request for Afghanistan, which I opposed in May, was a lost opportunity to take a more successful approach to our relationships in Afghanistan as 90 percent of the funding went to purely military activities while only 10 percent of the supplemental funds was devoted to development activities and to the civilian surge, which are so badly needed. To correct this disastrous imbalance, Madam Speaker, America must have a foreign policy based on SMART security instead of military power alone.

One of the advantages of SMART security is that it works to eliminate the root causes of violent extremism by emphasizing economic development and debt relief to the world's poorest countries. The SMART Security Platform for the 21st century, which I have proposed in House Resolution 363, calls for these policies.

The need to increase aid to the Third World was underscored last week, Madam Speaker, when the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that a record 1 billion people worldwide are now going hungry. The world's poorest and hungriest nations are potential safe havens for violent extremists. The governments are too weak or are too corrupt to keep them out, so the extremists are likely to find new recruits among the discontented populations, and those recruits become terrorists by training, and they are trained to attack the United States and other countries.

Even if the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan were to disappear into thin air today, a new terror threat is likely to pop up somewhere else in the world where people are hungry, where people are desperate. If we do a better job of feeding the hungry, we will do a better job of starving terrorism, and we will take an important step toward restoring our moral leadership in the world.

I know that President Obama understands this. I urge him to incorporate that understanding into his policies and to use the effective tools of SMART security to make our Nation and the world safer.