Italy is to send about 1,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, say reports.

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The moves comes two days after US President Barack Obama announced that America was sending 30,000 more forces to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

Mr. Obama has asked NATO allies to increase their deployments in Afghanistan, but several European nations are reluctant to do so.

NATO's foreign ministers meet in Brussels for two days of talks expected to focus on the US request. In an interview published on Thursday, Italy's Defense Minister, Ignazio La Russa, confirmed reports that Rome would send about 1,000 extra soldiers to the country. Mr. La Russa told the Corriere della Sera newspaper that suggestions in the media that 1,500 soldiers could be sent were "just a hypothesis". He said the figure was "a maximum quota which we would never reach", reported Reuters news agency.

Italy currently has 3,200 soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said the conflict was a test of Nato's "credibility" and that it was "clear that Italy must finish the job started with Nato".

Skeptical

America has asked for 10,000 more forces from NATO allies to help win a war that has in recent months turned increasingly bloody.

NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen has said other NATO countries will provide at least 5,000 extra personnel, and "probably a few thousand on top of that". But the full extent of additional resources coming from NATO allies remains unclear.

As well as Italy, Britain, Georgia, Poland and Slovakia have all pledged more soldiers but other nations such as France, Germany and Denmark are being more cautious.

It is expected that further countries will declare their intentions over the next two days but just how many is still not clear. Many NATO governments face publics even more skeptical about the mission than those of the US and Britain.

A senior US official has said this is a process that is going to take days and weeks.

But NATO officials believe that, at the end of it, some 20 countries will end up pledging extra resources, our correspondent says.

'No guarantees'

The 30,000 additional service personnel will take the US military presence in Afghanistan to over 100,000.

Top White House officials spent much of Wednesday bolstering domestic support for the surge.

Joint Chiefs of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all addressed congressional committees on the issue. "This is a huge commitment. It's the right commitment. And it gives us the forces to turn this thing around," Admiral Mullen said. He said that while there were no guarantees, he expected to "make significant headway in the next 18-24 months". Mr. Gates warned that failure to act "would mean a Taliban takeover of much, if not most, of the country" and the creation of a sanctuary for al-Qaeda militants.

But senior Republican John McCain warned that although the strategy would succeed, US and UK troop casualties would rise in the short term, and he criticized Mr. Obama's target date for withdrawal. "We need to make it clear to the enemy that we're going to succeed and we are going to stay as long as necessary to succeed," he said.

It is also emerging that some of those 5,000 extra non-US troops will not be entirely new - they will be forces that were sent out temporarily to support the Afghan elections that will now be staying on.

Authors Bio:
I have a law degree (Stanford, 66') but have never practiced. Instead, from 1967 through 1977, I tried to contribute to the revolution in America. As unsuccessful as everyone else over that decade, in 1978 I went to work for the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco as a Clerk-Typist, GS-4. I was active in the USFS's union for several years, including a brief stint as editor of The Forest Service Monitor, the nationwide voice of the Forest Service in the National Federation of Federal Employees. Howsoever, I now believe my most important contribution while editor of the F.S.M. was bringing to the attention of F.S. employees the fact that the Black-Footed Ferret was not extinct; one had been found in 1980 on a national forest in the Colorado. In 2001 I retired from the USFS after attaining the age of 60 with 23 years of service. Stanford University was evidently unimpressed with my efforts to make USFS investigative reports of tort claim incidents available to tort claimants (ie, "the public"), alleging the negligence of a F.S. employee acting in the scope of his/her duties caused their damages, under the Freedom of Information Act. Oh well. What'cha gonna do?