ROME (AFP) - Italy will begin a gradual withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2011 at the request of the Afghan government, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Thursday. Next year we should begin a gradual military disengagement because that is what the Afghans want and President (Hamid) Karzai has asked us to do, Frattini said on Italian television, without giving further details. Italy in December announced plans to add 1,000 troops, which would bring its Afghan contingent to 3,800, making it one of NATOs largest. Six Italian soldiers, along with 10 Afghan civilians, were killed in a suicide car bomb attack last September in one of the deadliest attacks on NATO troops in the more than eight years of the war. Italy is among more than 40 NATO nations to deploy soldiers in Afghanistan to fight alongside the Afghan army against the Taliban, who are waging an intensifying insurgency.