The Dutch parliament is expected to end months of uncertainty today and accept a Nato mission to send 1,400 soldiers to Uruzgan, a troubled province in southern Afghanistan.

The Netherlands is under pressure from Nato allies to commit the troops to fight alongside the 3,300 British soldiers who will be despatched to the neighbouring Helmand region of the country.

Last month Paul Bremer, the former US Administrator in Iraq, said that the US Congress could take decisions against "Dutch economic interests" if the Netherlands continued to drag its feet over the deployment.

The Dutch coalition government has been split over the mission, with the coalition's junior partner, the D66 party, opposed to sending soldiers. But earlier this week the Labour party, the main opposition group, said it was likely to support the deployment, giving the government the votes it needs in today's vote.

Wouter Bos, the Labour leader, said his party would not "automatically vote in favour" of the mission, but acknowledged that the "Cabinet has made movement in the right direction".

"Our definitive position will be taken Thursday after the debate with the government," he said.

This morning, the Dutch Foreign Minister, Bernard Bot, said the Dutch deployment was necessary: "The West has to show that it is serious about stabilising the country," he said. Dutch analysts predict the government will easily win a majority of votes in the 150-seat parliament.

D66, the liberal element of the Netherlands's centre-right government, has argued against the mission, part of the overall Nato effort to take control of the lawless, opium-rich south of Afghanistan, because it believes it will be more dangerous than the government admits.

"It pretends that it is going to be a reconstruction mission but it's going to be in the Uruzgan, which is actually a very violent and unstable province," the deputy leader of D66, Lousewies van der Laan, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"If you look at the fact that no other country wanted to do this mission, and that there is a lot of pressure on the Dutch to come in. Well, let's ask ourselves, why doesn't anybody else want to do this?" She said. "Shouldn't we maybe go back to the drawing board and look at a serious combat mission?"

Despite widespread opposition to the war in Iraq, and a reluctance for Dutch forces to fight alongside US troops, public opinion increasingly supports Dutch participation in the Nato mission, which will be bolstered by 6,000 mostly British and Canadian soldiers this year.

An opinion poll taken on January 30 found 45 per cent of the Dutch favoured sending troops and 47 per cent opposed the mission. In December last year, a similar poll found 68 per cent opposed to the deployment.

The Netherlands has been wary of sending troops abroad since the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, when more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Serbian paramilitaries after a lightly-armed Dutch force of UN peacekeepers was overwhelmed.

In Kabul, the Afghan Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, said today he expected the Dutch to accept the mission: "We expect, and we’re optimistic, that this will be approved by parliament," he said.

The Nato force, known as the International Security Assistance Force, currently consists of around 9,000 soldiers from 36 countries. During 2006, Nato commanders hope it will increase to nearer 16,000.

The army will then move from the centre, north and west of Afghanistan, the relatively peaceable regions that Nato has controlled since 2002, to the southern provinces and borderlands with Pakistan, where the growing insurgency is based. The increased Nato deployment will assume more and more of the combat responsibilities of the US force, which will decrease from 19,000 troops to 16,500 this year.

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