The Afghan government is to ask international donors to fund a $50bn (£25bn) reconstruction plan at a meeting on Thursday, officials say.
The US said on Wednesday it planned to pledge $10bn at the meeting, although funds pledged are expected to fall well short of the Afghan target, reported BBC.
Critics say Afghanistan has not got the capacity to spend the money it already has, let alone bid for more.
Donors from about 80 countries are expected at the one-day conference.
The meeting, to be chaired jointly by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is the fourth major conference on Afghanistan's future since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
It follows a meeting in London two years ago where $10.5bn was pledged.
BBC International Development Correspondent David Loyn says that with little progress on the benchmarks set in London, Afghan requests for new funding are likely to fall on deaf ears.
Thursday's meeting is not just about raising more money but trying to find a better way of improving the flow of aid, and building the capacity of the Afghan government to manage affairs for itself, our correspondent says.
A recent report by the World Bank was critical of the failure of donors to build the capacity of the Afghan government to manage its own affairs.
It found there was little to show for the estimated $1.6bn that has been spent on technical assistance in Afghanistan since 2002.
Almost 70% of development spending goes outside the government, it said, much of it straight back to donor countries in the pockets of consultants, which the report described as "a second civil service".
The UN's special envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, told the BBC it was necessary to reduce reliance on foreign contractors:
"That is difficult, but we have to start somewhere. It's a chicken-and-egg situation in a way: we do not dare to trust the Afghans because they do not have the capacity, but yet we need to develop that capacity."
In 2006-2007, Afghanistan received more than $4bn of aid, which equates to seven times Afghanistan's domestic revenues.
Nationwide, the country faces rising levels of criminal violence and government corruption fuelled by the largest opium harvests in the world, as well as the Taleban insurgency.
Speaking on Wednesday, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice said the US planned to spend $10bn over two years, roughly in line with current US aid levels, although some of it was money already approved by Congress.
She noted the link between security and reconstruction: "They are actually part of the solution together. Without one or the other you're not going to solve the problems of Afghanistan."