LONDON (AFP) –- U.S. troops in Kosovo should be reduced with other North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies assuming greater responsibility in the breakaway Serb province, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday.

In an interview with the London Financial Times, the long-serving defense secretary said: "We are all working together in Kosovo and the Balkans. Of course, we all went in together and we have said we will come out together.

"I am personally hoping that we can continue to reduce some of our forces there," he added in the dispatch out of Washington and Vienna.

The United States currently has about 1,700 troops attached to the 16,000-strong NATO mission in Kosovo, which is legally still part of Serbia but run by the United Nations and NATO since mid-1999, the FT said.

But with U.S. forces heavily committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the business daily said the Pentagon's search for an agreement with NATO to pick up some of the military slack had caused disquiet.

An unnamed NATO official was quoted as saying: "Everyone understands the pressure the US is under to draw down its overseas presence. "But considering the political process in Kosovo that has just begun, now is not the time to talk about reducing Kfor (the NATO Kosovo Force) or the U.S. presence."

Talks are continuing about whether Kosovo should become independent or not from Belgrade seven years after the end of the bitter conflict over ethnic division and repression by the Serbian government.

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns said in London earlier this week that Washington would like to see a decision on the matter by the year-end.

Meanwhile Rumsfeld, who was to arrive in Munich, Germany, later yesterday for a conference on security policy, called on some NATO countries to increase defense spending in the face of mounting threats from extremist groups. ------Greater cooperation

He also called for greater cooperation to tackle the major issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the potential that extremist groups could obtain them.

"A number of countries in NATO really ought to think more carefully about the nature of the world we are living in and if they are comfortable with the very modest percentage of GDP that they are committing to defense," Rumsfeld told the FT. "If you think of the value that security provides to the world, and the fact that all of the economic activity that takes place is stunted and frightened by instability and fear, I think countries really do need to ask the question if they are comfortable with that." Elsewhere, Rumsfeld -- set to become the longest-serving defense secretary in U.S. history later this year -- flat-batted claims that he was about to resign, telling the newspaper: "I don't have any plans."