The European Union expressed willingness on Monday to do more to help Afghanistan, struggling to rebuild in the grip of a tenacious insurgency, notably to bolster the country's police force.
Amid calls from nations combating the Taliban-led rebels in the volatile south, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana proposed sending a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan to see what "added value" the bloc could bring.
"The EU stands ready to do even more to contribute to the collective effort and I think that a (European) police operation could be of great value," he told EU foreign and defence ministers, meeting in Brussels.
"If we want to explore this possibility further, we could send a fact-finding mission to study the conditions under which the operation could take place in the area of police and rule of law," he said.
The mission was expected to be discussed by EU experts on Tuesday.
Germany has come under increasing pressure to accelerate the rebuilding of Afghanistan's police force -- plagued by corruption as well as poorly trained and equipped -- but Berlin claims it has nothing to reproach itself about.
A team of around 40 German experts has been working on the problem.
Based on a proposal from the Netherlands, which has troops deployed in the southern province of Uruzgan, the EU ministers debated how they could supplement the work already being done by their German partners.
Britain said there was plenty the EU could do.
"There is scope for the EU to reinforce and reinvigorate civilian work on the rule of law in Afghanistan," British Defence Minister Des Browne told his EU counterparts.
"I want to see it make more of a contribution in this area by working more closely with international partners and complement efforts already in place," he said.
He also urged the EU to co-operate more closely with NATO and the United Nations.
His Spanish counterpart, Antonio Alonso, said: "Spain supports the idea if it is about training police and not an exercise in doing the work of the police."
He said it could include training new recruits in-country but also in some of Europe's police academies.
"On the police, we need to see things more clearly. To avoid launching something that could lack cohesion, we need to send a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan," tempered French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.
The EU's discussions on the issue follow a call from NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer for the bloc to do more to help reconstruction.
NATO's efforts to stabilise the country and extend the influence of President Hamid Karzai's weak central government outside of the capital Kabul risk being undermined by the Taliban-led insurgency.
If stability does not return and the economy does not begin growing again, Afghans could turn back to the Taliban, which was ousted from power by a US-led coalition in late 2001 for harbouring Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
"NATO's mission is not to 'resolve' the problems of Afghanistan because there are no military solutions. The real problem is that Afghanistan is not sufficiently on the EU's radar screen," de Hoop Scheffer said last week.
But EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner swept aside the criticism, saying that "what we've been doing is really enormous."
She told reporters that the European Commission had pledged one billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) to Afghanistan over five years from 2002, and that "we will go on with substantial aid".
"One problem is there are weak local governments and lots of corruption," she noted.