The presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan met in the Tajik capital Dushanbe on Thursday for an unusual security summit amid growing concerns about Islamic militancy. Afghanistan and Pakistan are both fighting bloody insurgencies led by Islamic militants while Tajikistan is concerned that the instability will spill over its porous border with Afghanistan. Russia, meanwhile, is keen to sharpen its profile in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where it has had only a limited role to play since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Pakistan's Asif Ali Zadari, Russia's Dmitry Medvedev and Emomali Rakhmon met at the Tajik president's residence and urged an intensified fight against drug trafficking in the region. Their joint statement issued after the talks expressed concern about the increase in the narcotics trade as one of the main sources of financing for militancy in the region. It called on the international community to take 'additional steps for a decisive fight against the narco-threat.' At a news conference after the meeting, Medvedev said the four countries had a shared vision of how to make the turbulent region, and the world, safer. 'We want regional and international security to be more comprehensible, more transparent, more controlled, based on international law,' Medvedev said. Moscow is also concerned about Rakhmon's increasingly independent-minded behaviour and Russia is keen for Tajikistan not to follow moves by other ex- Soviet states to dilute Russian influence. There was however virtually no concrete information to emerge from Thursday's gathering, which a Tajik government source said Russia used to push its strategic interests in the region. 'Russia wants to strengthen its economic presence,' said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'Russia wants to position itself as initiator of investment in a region that the Americans have moved into and where the United States has been working actively for several years,' the source said. Russia's Kommersant newspaper reported on Thursday that Tajikistan wanted Moscow to start paying for a military base it maintains in the country and to pull out Russian border guards stationed on Tajik territory. Medvedev's top foreign policy aide Sergei Prikhodko said ahead of the trip that Moscow hoped that Rakhmon's moves to promote the Tajik language, a dialect of Persian, would not come at the expense of the status of Russian. Medvedev also held bilateral talks with his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zadari and boasted that bilateral trade had been growing despite the economic crisis, television pictures showed. Moscow has a history of tricky relations with Islamabad which contrasts with its traditionally warm ties with Pakistan's rival India. Tajikistan, which shares a porous 1,600 kilometre (995-mile) border with Afghanistan, has been battling militants suspected of having fled security operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan in its remote eastern mountains. 