BRUSSELS - US envoy Richard Holbrooke outlined to NATO Monday new plans to beat insurgents in Afghanistan, officials said, as President Barack Obama seeks a way to end more than seven years of fighting.

Holbrooke met NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and the 26 ambassadors in Brussels, as the alliance battles the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and their backers, with the focus now on trying to cut their supply lines in Pakistan.

He also met senior EU officials, as Washington urges greater efforts from its partners to boost the police force, fight opium production, and bolster the economy by helping build the farm, health and education sectors.

Little filtered out of the "highly classified discussion". A NATO official said only that: "Ambassador Holbrooke came to give the main lines of thinking in the US review, which I understand has not been 100 percent completed."

"The ambassadors offered their view points and of course had questions about where the US intended to go."

The talks were the last before a "big tent" international meeting on Afghanistan in The Netherlands on March 31, when Washington's strategy for tackling a problem fuelling attacks around the world should be made public.

The Taliban were ousted in 2001, yet NATO has struggled to spread the influence of the central government across a country that has been a haven for Al-Qaeda fighters and is the source of around 90 percent of the world's heroin.

The official said Washington now puts Pakistan and its fragile government at the heart of the solution, and aims to bring in all Afghanistan's neighbours, including Iran and China.

It involves a "stronger civilian effort, more military forces and better coordination between the military and civilian side, the broadening of regional engagement and the counter-narcotics effort," he said.

The ambassadors were reassured that "the US intention is not suddenly to go it alone but to marshall the international community, with NATO very much at the centre of this in some new direction," he said.

However, he said, the end goal remains the same: "To help Afghanistan stand on its own feet and prosper without being a threat to itself and the international community."

As international resolve to confront the insurgency, fuelled from rear-bases across the mountains in Pakistan, falters, the US administration has realised the importance of explaining the nature of the problem.

In a striking change of tone, Obama said an "exit strategy" was needed in Afghanistan, signalling limits to US action there even as he deploys 17,000 more troops, mainly to the volatile south, ahead of Afghan elections in August.

"There's got to be an exit strategy," he said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS television's 60 Minutes show. "There's got to be a sense that this is not a perpetual drift."

The NATO official said this "exit strategy" was not raised Monday.

Over the weekend, Holbrooke said Washington had appealed to its European allies to help train thousands more Afghan police, as it becomes clear that policing rather than fighting is a better long-term solution.

"The Afghan national police are an inadequate organisation riddled with corruption," he said. "We have to figure out a way to increase the size and make them better at the same time."

The European Union agreed last year to double the size of its EUPOL police mission there to some 400 police, law enforcement and justice experts, but the force has been criticised for being too small.

"Police training is a being discussed with lots of interest. Something has to be done, for example developing a gendarmerie force alongside the ordinary Afghan police," a NATO diplomat said.

Holbrooke has suggested that tens of thousands more officers might be needed to bolster the 78,000-strong force.