European foreign ministers will discuss next week widening the EU's role in Afghanistan, as President Hamid Karzai struggles to stamp his authority in the strife-torn country, an EU official said on Friday.
"There will be a general discussion about the situation in Afghanistan" at Monday's meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, the official said, on condition of anonymity.
"There are studies underway on what the EU might be able to do in terms of the rule of law in Afghanistan," he said, without elaborating.
"There is a willingness to do more," he added.
The 25 European countries are considering sending a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, but an EU diplomat said the bloc was not yet sure about what "added value" it could bring to reconstruction efforts.
Germany has come under increasing pressure to accelerate the rebuilding of the country's police force -- plagued by corruption as well as poorly trained and equipped -- but Berlin claims it has nothing to reproach itself about.
Italy meanwhile has been unable to sufficiently boost the judiciary, which analysts say is one of Afghanistan's weakest links because there are no checks and balances on the government.
With NATO battling an insurgency that risks undermining its efforts to stabilise regions outside of the capital Kabul, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer called on the EU to play a greater role in rebuilding.
"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," he told the French daily Le Monde on Tuesday.
He said the EU should take over the training and equipping of the Afghan police.
On Wednesday, a European Commission spokeswoman brushed aside the criticism, from NATO, saying the commission had a record it could be "very proud of" in Afghanistan.
"We made a pledge back in 2002 to spend one billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) over five years. We have overshot that target in the work that we have done in Afghanistan," said Emma Udwin, spokeswoman for external affairs.
"We have spent very substantial amounts of money given our overall budget and we have been very effective in making that money work in the interests of the population," she said.