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French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was in the UAE on Monday to oversee a massive airlift from Afghanistan using the Gulf nation as a staging post.
Mr Le Drian said he believes it is necessary to continue Afghan evacuations beyond Washington's August 31 deadline for troop withdrawal after the Taliban's takeover of the capital Kabul on August 15.
France, one of several nations rushing to help vulnerable people, is seeking to evacuate more than 1,000 Afghans who are fleeing the country.
"We are concerned about the deadline set by the United States on August 31. Additional time is needed to complete ongoing operations," Mr Le Drian said at a UAE air base, where France has set up an air bridge for people evacuated from Kabul.
France said it had "sheltered" nearly 1,200 people leaving Afghanistan between August 17 and 22, including about 100 French nationals and 1,000 vulnerable Afghans, as well as dozens of other nationalities.
Mr Le Drian said that access to Kabul airport was the main issue facing evacuation operations.
"We still need to increase our co-ordination locally, with the United States and with our partners present on site," he said.
French Defence Minister Florence Parly said Paris had a approved plan to protect its citizens and French-allied Afghans.
"We started planning airlift operations before the fall of Kabul," she said.
Ms Parly had earlier thanked the UAE for helping French citizens to leave Afghanistan.
Mr Le Drian and Ms Parly are scheduled to meet diplomats, military personnel, police officers and "all the staff working under extremely difficult conditions to enable evacuation operations from Kabul", an official French statement said.
US President Joe Biden set an August 31 deadline for ending his country's mission in Afghanistan, but has left the door open to an extension.
Since August 14, about 25,100 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan aboard aircraft flown by the US and its allies, according to a White House estimate.
On Monday, Britain said it would urge the US at an online G7 summit to extend the end-of-the-month deadline to complete evacuations of Western citizens and Afghan colleagues from Kabul.
But a spokesman for the Taliban, Suhail Shaheen, told Sky News that the hardline group would not agree to any extension of the deadline, calling it a "red line", with any delay viewed as "extending occupation".
