BRUSSELS—European Union countries on Tuesday proposed to step up aid to Afghanistan and its neighbors but could not agree a common policy on accepting asylum seekers fleeing Taliban rule. Western nations involved in the fight against the Taliban have already evacuated 100,000 people who supported them, and should take them in, along with others who failed to get onto the last evacuation flights. Chancellor Angela Merkel said this group included up to 40,000 people with the right to German residency. The issue dividing EU countries is whether asylum should now be extended by the bloc as a whole to other groups considered likely to suffer under the Taliban’s application of strict sharia, or Islamic law. For many, the crisis evokes 2015, when more than a million people from Syria and other countries reached the EU, to be met with indignation from some member state, who rejected appeals to take in …