Brussels - NATO needs more forces in Afghanistan if it wants to avoid a stalemate in its five-year-old fight against the Taliban insurgency, the alliance's chief said Wednesday.

And while some progress was being made, most notably with voter registration and with the development of an Afghan police force, "huge challenges" remained, Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.

De Hoop Scheffer was speaking to reporters after a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.

Brussels - NATO is willing to discuss how to respond to new security threats with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which Russia and the United States are both members, the trans-Atlantic alliance said Wednesday.

However, Russia should refrain from issuing "confrontational statements" and stop being a source of concern for NATO's allies and its partners, for instance by threatening to deploy short range missiles in Kaliningrad, NATO foreign ministers said in a joint statement issued at a meeting in Brussels.

Brussels - The European Union is ready to defend commercial vessels from Somali pirates once NATO's mission expires later this month, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Wednesday.

"We have a responsibility to escort, deter and protect, and it will be done with very robust rules of engagement," Solana said ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels.

Brussels - The European Union should make it easier for asylum seekers to find work, take better care of the most vulnerable applicants and clear up the question of which member state should handle which request, the EU's executive said Wednesday.

"There is a big difference from member state to member state" in the number of asylum applications they receive and the proportion which they approve, and "this is injustice, because the burden on certain member states is considerably different," EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot told journalists in Brussels.

Brussels - The European Union's executive was set Wednesday to unveil a plan to strengthen ties with former-Soviet neighbours, such as Ukraine and Georgia, which EU leaders pushed up the political agenda in the wake of the summer's Russian-Georgian war.

The so-called "Eastern Partnership," originally proposed by Poland and Sweden in May, is aimed at strengthening the EU's ties with Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova - and possibly Belarus if Minsk shows itself open to democratic reforms.

Brussels - Terrorism poses "a direct threat" to Pakistan's territorial integrity, Britain's David Miliband warned Wednesday as NATO foreign ministers met to discuss the alliance's anti-Taliban operations in neighbouring Afghanistan.

"There is a direct threat to the integrity of the Pakistani state that is posed by terrorism," Miliband said as he arrived at the alliance's headquarter in Brussels.

Miliband was commenting on last week's coordinated terrorist attacks in India's business capital of Mumbai, which have left nearly 200 people dead.